Looky Here It's My Field Practicum Blog

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Yesterday I attended a really good online event sponsored by CSU for Library Week (organized by my site supervisor Kheir) with journalist and writer Arionne Nettles talked about podcasting. I loved her book We Are the Culture: Black Chicago's Influence on Everything , and it was fun to hear her talk about audio journalism and the crafting of news stories and podcasts. I took a screenshot of a slide she put up of some of her takeaways from advice she gave. For me the main takeaway was to write how you talk. I tend to do this anyway, but then again I don't tend to do that anyway. Ha! What I mean by that is that when I am writing something that I know will be a spoken piece, I write in a casual way, but more along the lines of the casual way that I wish I talked . There's a difference. Sometimes that works to my advantage and sometimes it does not. It's all about context I guess. It’s a bit like how a really good stand up comedian is themself, but a layered and more articu...

Notes and Plans!

Today is one of my last days in the archive, because the semester is ending soon! Today Kheir and I talked about the evaluation letter he has to write, as well as what the next couple weeks will look like for me. Next week I'll be doing the zine workshop as part of Library Week at the archive (info about that here) , and then the week after that Kheir will be out of town. So for all practical purposes, this is my last day to actually actively work on things in the archive, and specifically with the Lerone Bennett Jr. collection I was working on. So what I did was organize all my notes to pass them along to Kheir to help with fleshing out descriptions with the finding aid. He mentioned that it would be helpful to have more description about what the archive holds, so I rewrote the pre-existing bio and added some of the highlights of the things I found. That way there's some good selling points to entice people to come look at the archive. I guess I'm kind of proud of what I ...

Tour of a Legendary Publisher

Hanging in the Third World Press Archive Today we had a tour of the famed Third World Press on Chicago's South Side that publishes books about the black American experience. It was founded by Haki R. Madhubuti in his basement in 1967. He is one of the architects of the Black Arts Movement, former CSU professor (also named CSU's first University Distinguished Professor), and founder of CSU's Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing, among many other things. He's also written a ton of books, won a ton of awards and is a Chicago legend. The staff gave us a great tour. We got to see a selection of the books they published (both front and backlist) as displayed up front, the editing room where decisions are made about which submitted manuscripts to publish as books, Madhubuti's office and more. We spent some time in the archive looking at the items the staff archivist pulled, like first editions of early books/chap books and issues of Black Books...

Making Editorial Decisions

Today I mostly helped out a photographer that was there to take pictures of the Freeman collection. He was hired by Justice Freeman's son to take pictures of the items we pulled for the exhibit, in case he wanted to do a book or some such. But also, there was some agreement that the photos would be shared with the school archive, which is nice, because if they ever want to do a digital archive of any of that stuff they'll have some high quality photos. Though it is occurring to me now that actually, the photographer took photos of stuff that was relevent to Freeman but from another collection entirely, and down the line that could be a copyright issue. But those items are really just the stuff about Freeman participating in the Brown vs Board of Ed reenactment that happened on campus to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the court decision. That's probably mostly of interest to the university more than anybody else so it's probably not something that would come up. But...

Seeking Fortunes

Today was a weird one. Like last week, in my journey looking for that piece of paper that Bennett wrote working titles for Forced Into Glory , I kept getting derailed by trying to make sense of what was in each folder, because somehow now I'm both looking for that piece of paper and doing a more specific itemization of what I'm encountering in the folders. It's difficult to know what a lot of the manuscripts were because they were in bits and pieces. Bennett would use a lot of material for multiple projects, reworking speeches into magazine articles and then into books. And of course, he kept each draft of everything he wrote along with all the notes. Very few things are labelled, and a pile of papers in any given folder will start at some random page, end at another page, then next to it in the same folder there will be another pack of papers organized the same way. I was having to do a lot of scanning texts with my phone and then converting it to readable text, then copy/...

Archivist as Detective

Today I continued going through the Lerone Bennett Jr. boxes, mostly with the idea that I might be able to find the note that Kheir said he saw that had the working (or maybe alternate?) titles for Bennett's Forced Into Glory . I didn't find that, but in the boxes I was spending energy on (specifically ones with personal notes and manuscripts that I thought maybe I might have luck with), I did find a whole lot of manuscripts. But the manuscripts weren't labelled, so I had to do some detective work to figure out what they were. And because I know that many of Bennett's books started out as articles for Ebony , it was hard to know if those were magazine articles or book drafts. And it doesn't help that Bennett also recycled concepts sometimes. Thankfully I had copies of 2 of his most known books in front of me, so I could cross-reference them. But that was only helpful up to a point; later editions of those books were updated so the wording for certain sections was d...