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The exhibition, "And The Struggle Continues: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Fight For Social Change," which was curated by Carol Anderson, Michael Ra-Shon Hall and Sarah Quigley, is on display now through December 1 in the Schatten Gallery which is located on Level 3 of the Robert W. Woodruff Library. Below is the curator's statement included in the exhibition.

AND THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES highlights the efforts of one of the most important human rights organizations to challenge the oppressive political and economic systems of the 20th century.

Based on the extensive Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) records housed in Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, the exhibition reveals how SCLC exposed and transformed a status quo that allowed millions to suffer from poverty, environmental degradation, health care disasters, hunger, homelessness, disfranchisement, and a brutal criminal justice system. It waged these battles on a political terrain that had been fundamentally altered since the organization was created in 1957. 

The exhibition picks up the story of SCLC eleven years after it was founded to "redeem the soul of America." By 1968 Congress had finally passed landmark legislation on civil rights, voting, and housing. The visible markers of "white only" and "colored" were coming down. But the reality of poverty, inadequate schools, a Jim Crow justice system, and discrimination in housing and employment continued to dominate the lives of millions. With the assassination of its iconic leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., the question soon became how SCLC could mount an even more complex campaign for justice and equality, especially with the Nobel Peace Prize winner no longer at the helm.

The decision to take on the larger human rights agenda of jobs, housing, and health care — while shoring up the still-precarious civil rights victories of the 1950s and '60s — is the essence of this exhibition. During the movement, SCLC's nonviolent tactics had required the discipline of the protesters — often ministers, teachers, students, and other well-dressed icons of respectability — and a readily identifiable enemy — racist sheriffs unleashing German shepherds or bullwhips on unarmed citizens. Yet by the late 1960s, both of those pillars had crumbled. Overt racism had been discredited; still, the forces that maintained inequality were as powerful as Jim Crow but more elusive and harder to define and identify. In addition, those who felt the brunt of continued inequality did so without the shield of respectability to garner public sympathy and outrage. Poor, incarcerated, or afflicted with HIV/AIDS, they found themselves instead consigned to the "unworthy."

Another factor that hampered SCLC's ongoing quest for equality was a nation intent on "moving on." Unequal schools, impoverished neighborhoods, and scarce job opportunities were now no longer considered to be the result of years of discrimination and public policy but the culmination of a "culture of poverty" and an individual's bad decisions. In the process, the United States' responsibility for nearly 400 years of slavery and Jim Crow faded from the public consciousness. In addition, as apartheid in South Africa demonstrated, the pursuit of international human rights required organizational nimbleness to deal with the complications inherent in global economics and politics.

SCLC's answer, as AND THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES suggests, was not to shy away, collapse, or rest on its laurels. Instead, it faced these challenges with an unshakable belief in the power of God and the church — and the courage to be on the right side of justice.

New Orleans Lexicon, Jill Timm

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To commemorate Fat Tuesday, I want to highlight an artist's book in MARBL, Jill Timm's New Orleans Lexicon. Timm, who got her start making miniature books, created New Orleans Lexicon after visiting the city to attend a Conclave of the Miniature Book Society. The book is 2.25 inches tall and about 3 inches wide. It does not resemble a book so much as a case with twelve folders in the Mardi Gras colors. Ten of these folders contain cards with definitions of words and phrases commonly used in the Crescent City. Each card also has a photograph or illustration made from plastic, cutouts, feathers, and beads. MARBL has one of only 25 copies of this book. New Orleans Lexicon was published under Mystical Places Press, which Timm established in 1998. MARBL possesses over thirty of Timm's books, many of them exquisite and beautiful miniatures.

New Orleans Lexicon will be a part of The Artists' Books Showcase, a digital exhibition highlighting pieces in MARBL's vast collection of artists' books. The exhibition is expected to go live in the spring of 2013.

Emory President Sanford S. Atwood, right, helps commemorate the
groundbreaking for the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing building,
the proceedings of which are recorded in Series 210

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In the spring of 2012, the Emory University Archives began an audiovisual materials survey and re-processing project. After months of wrangling cassette tapes, VHS tapes, 16mm film, and more, the vast majority of archival audiovisual resources in the University Archives have been added to our finding aids in MARBL's EmoryFindingAids database. One new collection consisting exclusively of these audiovisual resources is a significant resource for documenting University history through sound and video: the Teaching Aids Department audiovisual materials (Series 210). 

The Teaching Aids Department was responsible for purchasing and circulating film and audio resources for teaching and instruction, loaning recording and projector equipment, and creating reproductions and photographic slides. What really makes this collection important to Emory is that it contains recordings of campus events from the early 1940s through 1979. This group of recordings documents developments at Emory, changes in academia and higher education as a whole, and specific subjects like desegregation and civil rights, the Cold War, public health, and theology.

Below are just a sample of some of the kinds of subjects and events documented in this collection:

• 
  Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt
  speaks at the World Affairs Conference
  held at Emory University in 1960

  Recordings of public programs or lectures with figures such as Margaret Mead, President (then-Governor) Jimmy Carter, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Strom Thurmond, as well as many more intellectuals, scientists, journalists, politicians, doctors, theologians, and Emory presidents, deans, professors, and administrators.

• Two series of recordings entitled "Health Education for Emory College students" from 1969 and 1973, offering a glimpse into how public health issues were addressed at that time.
• "Crisis in the Schools:" a series of recordings of public programs hosted by Emory's Community Educational Services from 1957-1959 about desegregation in schools featuring politicians, journalists, and others.
• Eleven recordings of an Emory News Bureau radio program called "Let's Talk" consisting of 3 to 5 minute talks by Emory professors on a wide range of academic subjects.
• A series of recordings from a conference on theology education celebrating Emory University's fiftieth anniversary
• Local memorial ceremonies for President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Emory Charter Day (December 12) ceremonies from 1951 to 1962
• Emory Birthday Party celebrations (analogous to Founders Day) from various years from 1963 to 1973
• Baccalaureate sermons and graduation exercises for many years between 1942 and 1977
• Musical performances from Emory groups like the Glee Club, Women's Chorale, Emory Chamber Singers, and Atlanta Chamber Orchestra

All of these materials can be requested for listening or viewing in the MARBL reading room, but you must contact MARBL a few weeks in advance to have them digitized. Don't be shy, once they are digitized, they will remain available for the next researcher who wants to listen or watch!

(I would like to add a BIG hearty thanks to Ben Nobbs-Thiessen, PhD candidate in History, for trudging through these materials with me and helping make these resources available. Thanks, Ben!)

Computers from the Salman Rushdie Collection in MARBL

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Here on the Digital Archives team in MARBL, we know that keeping track of your digital assets can be overwhelming. You may have files stored on multiple computers, not to mention in the cloud. Over the last fifteen years, you've probably accumulated a number of email accounts and even more profile pages: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, the list could (and almost certainly does) go on. Chances are that you have digital photographs scattered all over the shop: on your laptop, your smartphone, and uploaded to Flickr, Picasa and Instagram. Perhaps you Blog, share videos on YouTube, or write content for Wikipedia. Whatever your interests, it's a safe bet that you are responsible for your fair share of digital content.

MARBL's donors are no exception. Our collections include computers, hard drives, and a variety of disks and removable media. Alice Walker has been blogging since 2008; Salman Rushdie currently has over 500,000 followers on Twitter; and Pearl Cleage maintains an active presence on Facebook. In order to make sure that this material is preserved and eventually made accessible as part of our holdings, it's important that we start conversations with potential and existing donors early and get them thinking about where they have digital content and what they might like to happen to it when their digital estate passes to us. To this end, Digital Archives has developed a questionnaire, designed so that curators and archivists can work with donors to assess the digital component of their collection.

To really improve the longevity of digital content, however, requires a pro-active approach to its preservation throughout its lifecycle. And improving the longevity of digital content is important because, whether or not you anticipate entrusting your personal digital archive to a repository, there are almost certainly multiple documents and files amongst its contents that you would hate to lose: family photographs, personal email, the dissertation chapter that you just finished drafting.
This is something that we've been thinking a lot about lately as we prepare a poster presentation for the 2013 Personal Digital Archiving Conference outlining our recommendations for do-it-yourself digital preservation. Our aim is to develop a resource for potential donors, providing effective guidelines that are easy to implement. Our advice in a nutshell?

• Know what digital assets you have and where they are stored, whether locally, in the Cloud, or on removable media.
• Keep your files organized: Create concise, meaningful file names and use a well-labeled folder structure to group related items and separate personal content from professional.
• Don't share accounts: Use your own accounts for services like email or Dropbox and create distinct user accounts on personal computers.
• Choose email and social media services that allow you to easily export your data and try to perform regular downloads of your content. Don't use social media sites as storage.
• Aim for redundancy and make multiple copies: Store copies in different locations and, if possible, in different formats. Keep track of your copies and check up on them periodically to make sure that they are still readable.

The final set of guidelines will be published online, at MARBL's Digital Archives page, so be sure to stay tuned for more information about do-it-yourself digital preservation.