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/.