On April 24th, the University Archives was pleased to welcome back to the farm Jim McRae ('68), coordinator of the KZSU-sponsored Project South, which interviewed civil rights workers during the summer of 1965. Jim (seen here examining interview transcripts) sat down with us to talk about the project and even provided some personal photographs (below) and documents.
During the summer of 1965, eight students from Stanford University spent ten weeks in the southern states tape-recording information on student participation in the Civil Rights Movement. The eight interviewers -- Mary Kay Becker, Mark Dalrymple, Roger Dankert, Richard Gillam, James McRae, Penny Niland, Jon Roise, and Julie Wells -- were sponsored by KZSU, Stanford's student radio station, and their original intent was to gather material suitable for rebroadcasting in the form of radio programs. Northern college students who were working in the South for the first time were the major focus, although many other topics were also investigated. To find out why these students decided to go to the South to work for the movement, what they expected to find there, what they did find, the pressures they experienced, their reaction to these pressures, what they accomplished, and what they planned to do in the future (both near and distant), they interviewed as many students as possible. What is planned is a series of programs expressing in the volunteers' and workers' own words, their motivations and their feelings towards the many aspects of the South and of the Civil Rights Movement experienced that summer.
The Archives is pleased to announce that it is one of three campus recipients of this year's Stanford Associates Grant, awarded by the Stanford Alumni Association.
The University Archives and DLSS are pleased to announce that the Project South transcripts are now online. The transcripts document meetings and interviews with civil rights workers in the South recorded by several Stanford students affiliated with the campus radio station KZSU during the summer of 1965. The project was sponsored by the Institute of American History at Stanford.
After more than 37 years of service to Stanford, Sara Timby will retire from Special Collections at the end of this month. Trained in anthropology and ethnobotany at UC-Berkeley, Sara joined the Stanford Libraries staff in 1976 as a Special Collections assistant, where her duties were various, including public service, technical processing, acquisition management, and paging. In 1979, she took a position in the Department of Manuscripts and Archives working initially for Maggie Kimball, former University Archivist. In those days, the department typically acquired less than 100 feet of manuscript materials. One of the first collections she processed was the Yvor Winters and Janet Lewis papers, 1920–1970.
We've set up trial access for a new database called VoxGov (http://voxgov.com). Please take a moment to put the database through its paces and send any feedback you have to me at jrjacobs AT stanford DOT edu by April 8, 2014.
VoxGov has a powerful search and pulls together a large swath of US federal public domain government information with social media data and displays it in a visually understandable way. VoxGov also allows for bulk data access to faculty and graduate students who may need to do deeper data analysis. Bulk data access is via separate individual license and has some restrictions on use and reproduction.
Voxgov collects, organizes and archives primary sourced U.S. Federal Government information from government sites like fdsys.gov, federalregister.gov, congress.gov, and some executive agencies as well as major NGO sites like openCRS and FAS Project on Government Secrecy and combines that public domain information with 4,000 official federal government social media accounts from twitter and facebook, as well as speeches, press releases and content from over 10,000 Federal government web locations.
Many resources are available to help you follow current events in Ukraine and Russia. You can also learn more about Russian and Ukrainian leaders, history and geography of the region, and more.
The Archive of Recorded Sound is pleased to announce the launch of a substantially updated finding aid for the Issei Oral History Project in Watsonville Collection. In addition to many other notable improvements, which include English summaries of each interview from the collection and additional subject headings to aid discovery, the new finding aid now includes streaming audio of each recorded interview. The finding aid is available on the Online Archive of California.
This footage -- preserved through the state-wide California Audiovisual Preservation Project -- is special because it demonstrates Ampex's first portable video recorder, the VR-3000. It depicts scenes recorded on a San Francisco cable car going steeply down (probably) California Street in 1967!