By Kevin Grace, Project Director
In 2010, the University of Cincinnati Libraries received a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to fully process the Theodore M. Berry papers housed in the Archives & Rare Books Library. If you have followed ARB’s blogs over the past several months, you’ve read a number of very interesting insights into the life of this civic activist, civil rights pioneer, and Cincinnati politician. Ted Berry was a key figure in the American civil rights movement from the 1940s until his death in 2000, and his papers help illuminate this era in American history. Laura Laugle was hired in October 2010 as the project archivist to inventory and describe the Berry materials, create finding aids, and establish a web presence for the collection. Ms. Laugle has contributed these weekly blogs based upon her discoveries while processing the documents.
To date, all the Berry boxes have been recalled from our repository and our stacks, and the completion of the inventory is near. Now that we are headed into the final half of the project, we invite you to visit the website, http://www.libraries.uc.edu/libraries/arb/exhibits/berry/index.html, and see what has been accomplished so far. Additionally, the NHPRC has created a Facebook page for the Berry project: http://www.facebook.com/kevin.grace5#!/notes/national-historical-publications-and-records-commission/theodore-m-berry-of-the-university-of-cincinnati/10150093683242546.
Ms. Laugle will continue working with the collection until this autumn, and the project will be finalized by February 2012. At that time, the Berry collection will be available for research and study. It is our hope that with the original materials and the website, these primary research sources will be implemented for community study, and, high school and college assignments. As Dean Victoria Montavon stated when the grant was awarded, “The grant-funded project will provide students and scholars with access to an excellent collection that will inform their understanding of local, state, and national civil rights and the evolution of the role of African Americans in politics in the 20th century.”
In 2010, the University of Cincinnati Libraries received a $61,287 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the Archives and Records Administration to fully process the Theodore M. Berry Collection in the Archives & Rare Books Library. All information and opinions published on the Berry project website and in the blog entries are those of the individuals involved in the grant project and do not reflect those of the National Archives and Records Administration. We gratefully acknowledge the support of NARA.
