Project Guide: "Print Culture of the Southern Freedom Movement": Home

This guide serves as an introduction to the project, “Print Culture of the Southern Freedom Movement,” a new curatorial initiative from the Southern Historical Collection (SHC) in the Wilson Special Collections Library. The goal of the project is to surface print and published materials related to social change in the late-20th-century U.S. South, which have been largely hidden within the SHC’s manuscript collections. This guide provides more information about the scope of the project, its methodology, and links by topic and by source collection of print items that have been made more accessible by this initiative.

“Print culture” is defined as the production of and the social and cultural impact of printed materials such as books, newspapers, pamphlets, and other ephemera.

Throughout human history the use and consumption of the printed word has followed social, cultural and political movements. In the 1960s, there was a global printing renaissance as technologies advanced rapidly and as people tried to stay informed and connected during times of significant change. Many activists and organizations in this era produced newsletters, posters, flyers, and other materials for education, community building, and creative expression. This trend continued through the late-20th-century until the rise of digital media in the 1990s and 2000s caused another sea change in the way people communicate in print.

However, most studies of “print culture” in this period focus on the efforts of major organizations of the New Left based in urban centers in the northeast and western part of the United States (e.g., Students for a Democratic Society or the Black Panthers), leaving out lesser-known print creators and trends in the U.S. South. The “Print Culture of the Southern Freedom Movement” project looks to correct that regional imbalance.

Format Shift

Since its founding in 1930, the Southern Historical Collection (SHC) has operated exclusively as a repository for archival records and manuscripts, which includes first-person narratives, original correspondence, vernacular photography, and other unique primary source materials. This new initiative expands the work of the SHC to include these categories of bibliographic format types:

• Monographic - a detailed work on a single subject, often by a single author (ex., a bound report) 

• Serial - publications that are released in multiple parts over time indefinitely (ex., an organizational newsletter)

• Ephemeral - print materials that were typically created for a limited use (ex., an event poster)

Workflow

This expansion requires a shift from archival practices of handling large runs of "papers" in the aggregate to more bibliographic methods of handling items individually. Here is a short summary of the steps in our workflow:

1. Identification - We focus our efforts on high-use collections whose topical coverage falls within the project's scope. Within these collections we look for groupings of under-described published or print items. Often these items are found in folders and boxes labeled simply, "Print Materials" or even "Miscellaneous."

2. Review Holdings - We conduct a physical review of groupings of print materials that are embedded within our archival collections. Then we compare materials against existing holdings in the UNC Chapel Hill Library and other Triangle Research Library Network (TRLN) institutions (Duke, NC State and NC Central University Libraries). Finally we conduct searches in WorldCat to understand how widely materials are held by libraries across the world. Sometimes we discover that the materials we have surfaced are the only known extant copies.  

3. Extraction - For each item we fill out a separation sheet that will stay in the physical place of the item. These forms serve as "breadcrumbs" to instruct researchers on how to locate the extracted item in the library catalog. We also maintain a full set of duplicate separation sheets so that we can track progress of the entire project.

4. Description/Cataloging - Working with colleagues in Wilson Library Technical Services, each item is cataloged individually. Then we update descriptions in collection finding aids to indicate that print items have been removed. We also add links in the finding aids to canned library catalog searches that provide lists of the extracted items. This maintains the linkage between the extracted items and the source collection, which is important to keep the materials in context.