Author: Annie Tummino

Queens College Library is proud to launch a new digital platform for its Special Collections and Archives in partnership with the JSTOR Open Community Collections initiative. The site launches with close to 700 digital objects from our civil right collections, institutional archives, and rare books and manuscripts. The content is openly accessible on the web through JSTOR, a scholarly database used by more than 81 million scholars and students across 170 countries and territories every year. 

Working remotely this fall, Special Collections and Archives staff will catalog and upload hundreds of additional items to the site. Intern Kuba Pieczarski (funded by the Félix V. Matos Rodríguez Internship Fund) is expanding the new COVID-19 Collection documenting the experience of the Queens College community during the pandemic; Graduate Fellow Victoria Fernandez (funded by the Freda S. and J. Chester Johnson Endowment) is working with civil rights movement materials; and Archives Assistant and recent GSLIS graduate Caitlin Waldron is posting images of the campus through the decades. 

The collections benefit from JSTOR’s features and interface, including full-text search; citation management tools; filtering and faceting; content download; and sharing. Make sure to check out the site at https://www.jstor.org/site/queenscollegearchives/, including the Silhouette yearbook form 1941-2011; original photographs documenting the involvement of Queens College students in the Civil Rights Movement of the early to mid 1960s; rare manuscripts from our “Pages from the Past” collection; and the scrapbooks of Dr. Andrew Greller, Professor Emeritus of Biology.

You can learn more about the JSTOR Open Community Collections initiative at https://about.jstor.org/whats-in-jstor/open-community-collections/.

Queens College Library is proud to announce that Jeanie Pai, who served as a Graduate Fellow in Special Collections and Archives over the 2019-2020 academic year, is the 2020 recipient of the Donald Peterson Student Travel Award given by the Society of American Archivists (SAA). As announced by SAA: 

Established in 2005, the Donald Peterson Student Travel Award supports students and recent graduates from graduate archival programs within North America to attend SAA’s Annual Meeting. The goal of the scholarship is to stimulate greater participation in the activities of SAA, such as presenting research or actively participating in an SAA-sponsored committee or section. 

Pai is a recent graduate of the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies. Her SAA poster presentation is entitled, Paper Sons of the Chinese Exclusion Era. It describes her research into the history and experiences of paper sons, and how they contributed to the shaping of Chinese American communities. Her interests lie in emerging issues of inclusion and access, particularly toward resources for disadvantaged groups that are historically misrepresented. She is committed to recognizing the gaps in collections, and exploring honest ways to preserve the history of marginalized groups, including what archival materials to collect, how it is described, and who has access to the records. Pai’s belief is that active inclusion allows archivists to create democratic spaces where people of all backgrounds have agency and representation.

A supporter of Pai states, “She is genuinely motivated by the core values of social justice, ethics, inclusion, and access and will continue to be guided by them in her career.”

Pai is pictured (right) with Archives Fellow Tom Gubernat at the Memory Lab Bootcamp in Washington DC in January 2020. Pai and Gubernat’s Archives Fellowships in the Queens College LIbrary were funded by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.