Animal Rights and Animal Welfare Collections Processing Underway at SCRC

The Special Collections Research Center was the recipient of a 2012 Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) . This two-year grant will enable comprehensive collections documenting the animal welfare and animal rights movements to be arranged, described, and made available for research.

Work on this grant began in June 2012 with the hiring of a Project Librarian, Jodi Berkowitz. Throughout the summer Jodi familiarized herself with the collections, assessed them, determined processing plans, prepared an initial inventory, and hired graduate students to serve as Project Archivists. In addition to cataloging these materials, we will also be tracking time expended on various processing activities as well as conducting user studies to determine how much processing is needed for the different parts of large collections such as these.

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Processing of the Animal Rights Network Records is currently underway. This large collection contains over 250 boxes, or nearly 400 linear feet. It includes correspondence, subject files, printed materials of all sorts (newsletters, brochures, pamphlets, reports,and more), editorial files for The Animals’ Agenda, the publication of ARN, as well as photographs and audiovisual materials. As processing continues we’ll be sharing updates about what we’re finding and how we’re making this all work.