Folks in the Boston area: save the date for the week of November 3rd through 8th to take in some great events and exhibits highlighting archival labor and autumnal themes in area archives! Register for updates here: bit.ly/ArchivesCrawl2025 📜

I absolutely love that in today's intro to archives class, where students look at records of neighborhood activism in Boston, a student responded to the reflective question: "who do you not see represented in these records?" with the answer: "rich people!"

🎈 Happy birthday Elma Lewis! 🎈 Today marks what would have been Ms. Elma Lewis’s 104th birthday! Take a moment to celebrate the legacy of Ms. Lewis by learning more about her work that impacted arts and artists throughout Boston and beyond. subjectguides.lib.neu.edu/elmalewis

Were hard hats in your back to school supplies list? For students in the 1988 “Kids Building Boston” program they were! 50 students from the McKay School in East Boston participated in an educational program following the three year process of building 125 High Street in Boston’s Financial District.

“A nation-wide digital archive will both inform today’s racial redress agenda and significantly expand our knowledge about these atrocities beyond lynching.” - Margaret Burnham, founder of CRRJ. Read more about CRRJ's ambitious project with @nu-archives.bsky.social crrj.org/efforts/gath...

More discussion on the exciting news from my place of work! I can't wait for these records to be digitized and widely available!

Restorative justice is one of the most meaningful applications of archival work; the CRRJ project at Northeastern is an excellent example of that. I am honored to work alongside colleagues who help shape and grow the CRRJ’s Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive.

NEA is thrilled to welcome session proposals for our 2026 Spring Meeting, Resilience and Action in the Archives, on March 19-21, 2026 in Portland, ME! Submit your proposal before July 30, 2025: newenglandarchivists.org/news/13511144

Work with me and I will make collection prep for high volume digitization fun

Elma Lewis and the institutions she founded left a profound impact on Black arts in Boston & worldwide. Now, we at @nu-archives.bsky.social received a grant to digitize her records for our project "Black Art and Joy in Boston (and Beyond): Elma Lewis and the National Center of Afro-American Artists"

Did you know that the MBTA's Orange Line is a Gemini?! On this day (June 10th) in 1901 the Orange Line began service. How I learned this? Jim Vrabel's newly launched Boston history database "When and Where in Boston"! whenandwhereinboston.org

Such a fun peek into the Boston Globe Library Collection at @nu-archives.bsky.social by NU Journalism Prof. Meg Heckman. The Globe's clippings files reveal so much in what is filed and what isn't. I'm grateful for Meg's labor lifting up these women journalists' legacies! www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/...

Happy Melnea Cass Day! On May 22, 1966, over 650 community leaders gathered to pay tribute to the “First Lady of Roxbury” Melnea Cass. 52 years later, in 2018, then-Mayor Marty Walsh declared May 22, 2018 "Melnea Cass Day" See more records of Melnea Cass's legacy here: bit.ly/melneacass

Love to email a collaborator explaining a delay in some scans being sent their way and receiving "No worries it is garden push days" the perfect sort of spring understanding 💐

A more honest boiler plate language special for those with a busy inbox: "Apologies for the delayed response, but you see, I emailed you a most thorough response in my dreams, and have only now awoken to my belated reality"

On this day in 1965 thousands were led by Martin Luther King Jr. from Carter Playground to the Boston Common for a Freedom Rally. A poster distributed explaining reasons for the march stated: “In short we march to protest the lie that New Boston can be built without social justice”

This photograph of Theater Offensive founder Abe Rybeck accurately portrays how we're feeling on this sunny spring day watching the flowers begin to bloom in Boston. Good luck to everyone preparing for finals this week!

As I tried to wrap up a workshop on using archival records for a day long educator's professional development program and transition to the next session an educator cried out "but how can we leave Molly!!!" and I will now be floating off the ground thanks to that compliment

Happy National Library Workers Day to all my fellow information laborers! It is always a great day to support those who enable equitable access to information and and to demand just systems that adequately fund and support that work as loud as we can!

Happy National Library Week! Here are some photos from July 1986 taken by Janet Knott at the old Dudley Street Library (now the Roxbury Branch of the Boston Public Library). Knott photographed folks browsing the stacks, reading aloud and reading independently.

Congress has the power to restore funding to the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Join me in calling your reps!

Our copies of THE HOME-MAKER are here! @mollybrrown.bsky.social and I had so much fun unboxing them and seeing our foreword and afterward in the new handsome QLB edition. Out on April 7th!

There are so many ways to collect anecdotal feedback on archives class sessions for youth: connections made, trust built, etc. A new tier of feedback for me is a student drawing you and at the end showing you along with their full page of notes 🥹 📜

There is so much bad news on micro and macro levels lately, I will share a little personal win. Here is a sneak peek at a very early dummy of the interior layout for my book "The House Archives Built, and Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibility," upcoming from @wehere.bsky.social press.

My library's communications staff member does such a stellar job on these profile trading cards. I am so grateful to announce to the greater public that I love Severance and I urgently need to hear your Severance theories as well as your favorite weaver

a century later, one of the great working girl narratives with a relevant as ever screwball premise will be reprinted with a new foreword and afterword by @mollybrrown.bsky.social and me. The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher is out from QLB books April 7! quiteliterallybooks.com/product/the-...

The Full Moon this month is known as the Worm Moon. The Spring soil is warmer & earthworms start to appear. (Astronomical diagram of the Worm Moon in orbit, by Richard Scarry, 1970s)

Some exciting news! A new edition of Dorothy Canfield Fisher's The Home-Maker will be published April 7 by Quite Literally Books featuring a foreword and afterword by @cejacobson.bsky.social and myself! You can preorder it here: quiteliterallybooks.com/product/the-...

Please enjoy my visualization of the work my employee and I have done to provide access to our collections while the majority of our collections remain off-site. Trying to goofily but urgently illustrate how clutch a functional HVAC in our new storage space would be.

“No one has any right to use the public schools to carry on segregation in America.” “One of the purposes of education is to teach children how to perpetuate society. There is no place for racism in the classrooms.” - Albert Raby Sept. 16, 1965, to Operation Exodus parents, photo by Frank O'Brien.

"Archives, sites of memory, and commemorations are being threatened. When the custodians of our collective memory are undermined, the risk of erasure, distortion, and historical amnesia becomes even more acute, threatening the public’s access to an accurate and inclusive understanding of the past."

It’s hard to imagine posing for photos in Boston’s icy winter, but in Charles H. Bruce's images, you can see subjects in warmer weather through the lens of a Black photographer in the early 1900’s. Bruce photographed people and buildings in Boston throughout his life and is pictured himself below.

Happy Valentine’s Day from The Onyx, Northeastern's Black student newspaper! Shown here are clippings of Valentine’s inclusions by Onyx staff published in their February 1975 issue alongside articles about WRBB’s A Soul’s Place radio program and Project Ujima.

No pressure - but did you ever imagine the valentines you send could end up in an archive? Take a look at archival valentines found in the Elma Lewis papers which include a note from artist Tom Feelings that reads: “to Elma who loves—and knows and then passes it on —like it was passed on to her”

A sneak preview of social media prep for Valentine's Day, but I really love this message to Elma Lewis from friend and fellow artist Tom Feelings, in her personal correspondence papers: "to Elma who loves—and knows and then passes it on —like it was passed on to her"

On heavy teaching months where I am pulling and reshelving 40-50 boxes every day or so I fantasize about planning an archives field day of box paging, curating, and reshelving for those who doubt the labor behind archival instruction complete with the mantra: "in archives, every day is arm day"

The @nu-archives.bsky.social has recently processed a pair of collections that highlight advocacy work in Boston. Learn more about the Roxbury Tenants of Harvard (Jeane Neville) records and the Ken Kruckemeyer papers in this blog post by archivist Irene Gates: librarynews.northeastern.edu

“Been to your local library lately?” In the 1980s Gay Community News asked their readers to engage with local libraries and encourage them to include the Gay Community News among the periodicals on their shelves and in their microfilm. Read some GCN for yourself here: hdl.handle.net/2047/D20370611

If anyone has started making zines in the last few years and would like to talk about why they started making them, please message me here. I really want to get a perspective on why people have started recently. If you could signal boost this too, this would be great.

A class had the last of their four visits in the archives with me and one student’s parting words to me were: “your work inspires me as does your fashion” 🫡🫡🫡🫡🫡

Spend a Saturday morning with me chatting about local history!

Happy Lunar New Year! In 1990 the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) held a Lunar New Year celebration at the Golden Palace in Boston attendees included CPA leader, Suzanne Lee seated with Nelson Merced and Rep. Byron Rushing with Frieda Garcia. Learn more about CPA here: bit.ly/CPAHistory

Today marks the completion of the inventorying of Fred Salvucci’s papers. Processing assistants Aleks Renerts and Julia Lee inventoried 157 boxes of this large and incredible collection which documents the story of the planning and design of Boston's built environment and beyond.

There a lot of great fellowships available this year that will be collaborating with Northeastern's Archives and Special Collections (and me)! I especially encourage folks to look at the Boston Public Library's new "Telling Boston Stories" fellowship! librarynews.northeastern.edu?p=276526 📜

Severance Season 2 Episode 1:

Yesterday's instruction sessions surfaced a "Gay Community News" final exam for their 10th anniversary. Favorite questions included: "Who could be counted upon to bring the most glamorous dishes to pot-lucks" "At which chic nightspot could many GCNers be found after Thursday Night layout" 📜

Boosting because the deadline is coming up! 2/2/2025. Make your own Groundhog's Day miracle!

Reckonings at Northeastern has shared a call for Artist(s)-in-residence for 2025, seeking those who uplift community histories in Boston. NU's Archives & Special Collections will work with whomever's selected & support their history seeking & storytelling work! reckoningsproject.org/call-for-art...

Digital History Klaxon: Looking for collaborators to submit a session to @historians.org on digital history projects for broad audiences. My team is looking to present on Searchablemuseum.com and are looking for other projects, theme/region/period agnostic!