Primary Sourcery

Posters and programs demonstrate the growth of Pride celebrations in the Twin Cities over the years. These materials and more about Pride from the Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies can be found in the Libraries' UMedia collection.

Terrestrial and celestial globes created in 1696 arrived at the University Libraries the day after the shutdown for COVID-19 last year, destined for the James Ford Bell Library. Curator Marguerite Ragnow wanted to figure out how to put them on the web but initially she was stymied. Then a breakthrough appeared in January 2021, when she learned of the 3D scanning capabilities in the Health Sciences Library.

Working remotely during the pandemic has had its benefits — including time for Tretter Collection staff to improve access to its GAZE-TV collection by writing meaningful descriptions of episodes, making them easier to find in search. GAZE-TV was a Twin Cities public access program that ran from 1986 until the early 2000s and was hosted by Brad Theissen.

In 1984, what was then the Minnesota Jewish Historical Society was founded by local community leaders concerned that, with the passage of time, stories and materials were being lost. They began to collect both items and oral histories. By the late 1990s, however, they were running out of space. Then in 2000, former Gov. Elmer L. Andersen invited the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest to place a portion of their collection in the Archives and Special Collections at the University Libraries.

The Social Welfare History Archives received a $10,000 Legacy Amendment grant from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund through the Minnesota Historical Society for the digital preservation and access project Public Health in Minnesota: Digitizing Recordings of “A Public Health Journal” TV program.

Library student John Cole is scanning artifacts from the Wangensteen Historical Library in 3D, offering an advantage for very fragile items — as well as for virtual instruction.

An impactful Libraries exhibit, "A Woman's Place: Women and Work," is now online. Curators Kate Dietrick, Linnea Anderson, and Caitlin Marineau decided at the start of this labor-intensive project that they wanted it to have a second life as an online exhibit. After it was taken down, they didn’t return all the materials immediately but instead had a student worker scan them all.

Children’s literature connects with readers, and Lisa Von Drasek has never lost her love for it. The Curator of the Kerlan and Children's Literature collections remembers fondly from her childhood “Little Plum” by Rumer Godden. “I loved that book so much because the children in that book were bad — they behaved badly, they had bad thoughts,” Von Drasek says. “They were not the Bobbsey Twins.”

To get started in his career, Robert “Bob” Jansen first had to be fired. After the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth fired him from teaching in their theater program, he sued the college. Jansen won and he used the settlement money to establish the Main Club for gay people in 1983. The bar became not only a watering hole but also a center for the gay community. Now Jansen is honoring that history by remembering the Jean Nickolaus Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies in his will.

By Allison Campbell-Jensen On March 19, Reference and Outreach Archivist Ryan Bean will introduce the idea of global racism to the World Alliance of the...

Chinese is a tough language for an English speaker to learn, with thousands of ideographic characters to learn, and four tones in spoken Mandarin. But as a college student, Ann Waltner didn’t yet know enough to be daunted by it. She found the language and the nation fascinating, and eventually became a historian of China and professor of history at the U of M. She's also a member of the Friends of the University Libraries.

After a successful crowdfunding campaign, the American Jewish World newspaper is being digitized by the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives at the Libraries — making it “available online for people across the Midwest, indeed across the world..."

Email, PowerPoint presentations, Google documents, and spreadsheets — these are just some examples of born-digital materials that make up the digital stream coming to the Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections (ASC). “ASC has wanted/needed a position to help us deal with born-digital materials for several years,” says Kris Kiesling, Elmer L. Andersen Director of Archives and Special Collections. Managing these born-digital materials is now the role of Lara Friedman-Shedlov.

What began in the early part of the 20th century as a week dedicated to studying the history of Black people in America by the 1960s was expanding to a month. Starting in the mid-1970s, U.S. Presidents have annually proclaimed February to be Black History Month. Yet people can explore Black history any month, taking online avenues through primary source materials and special collections available through the Libraries.

In trying times, we all want someone to lean on — someone reliable, professional, and caring. Someone like Mary Blissenbach, Student Supervisor for Archives and Special Collections. “[Mary] is our front line as we open up Archives and Special Collections to researchers. She has done a fantastic job in coordinating a difficult changing world for them.”

Gideon Gartner died Dec. 12 at his home in Manhattan. He and his wife Sarah have been generous supporters of the Charles Babbage Institute’s research and archives. The Gartner Group Records that he donated to CBI Archives have already been used by many researchers, reports CBI Director Jeffrey Yost.