Because of a Yale University Library catalog software upgrade, Manuscripts and Archives will not be able to request materials from the offsite shelving facility on Friday, May 25th. Patrons wishing to have Manuscripts and Archives collection materials available for use on Tuesday morning, May 29th, following the Memorial Day holiday, must request those materials by 9:30 AM on Thursday, May 24th.

Art Trager starts in mid-March as an Archives Assistant, working on the Henry Kissenger papers. Art comes to Manuscripts and Archives with several years of experience working for the Yale Library and recently worked as an Archives Assistant for Historical Sound Recordings.

Suzanne Noruschat started in Manuscripts and Archives in March as the Architecture Records Archivist. Suzanne comes to us from the Getty Institute and prior to that was a Senior Lecturer, at the Department of Art & Art History and College of Architecture, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Suzanne holds B.B.A. from Loyola Marymount University; a Ph.D. in Art History from Emory; and an M.L.I.S. from the University of California Los Angeles.

On display in the Sterling Memorial Library Memorabilia Room until May 15, 2012, the exhibit, Yale’s Shakespeareans celebrates a romance that shows no signs of withering. Yale—its students, faculty, staff – has long been smitten by Shakespeare. His works have inspired great teaching, important research and writing, provocative adaptations, and theatre of every kind. The exhibition in the Memorabilia Room points to the extravagant results of Yale’s long-term engagement with the Bard: shelves of books and articles written by Yale Shakespeareans; a distinguished line of theatrical productions that have entertained and provoked; and generations of scholars sent into the world to share their learning and their passion. Books, manuscripts, ephemera, and other items from the Department of Manuscripts and Archives, the general collection, the Lewis Walpole Library, and the private collections of faculty members—all have been gathered to suggest the depth and breadth of Yale’s contribution to Shakespearean study, scholarship, and performance.

Tuesday, 4 October 2011 - Friday, 3 February 2012, in the Sterling Memorial Library Memorabilia Room

Religious images, objects, spaces, and performances are often constituted by and reflective of a dynamic human sensorium of taste, touch, sound, scent, and sight. Indeed, the sensational human body is the medium through which religious practitioners encounter pleasure and pain, ecstasy and sacrifice. Individuals and groups also often work-through and with sensory perceptions-to discipline their own and other bodies in religious ritual, performance, and play.

This exhibit invites the public to consider how religion makes sense and how we make sense of religion. Engaging the rich diversity of meanings the word "sense" evokes, how might we understand and examine the relations among religious sensibilities, sensing and sensual bodies, and sensationalized religious spectacle? Featuring a selection of materials drawn from the Yale Manuscripts and Archives collection, the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, the Yale Divinity School archives, the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, and private collections, this exhibit provokes questions about how we can understand and interrogate the sensory cultures of religion and how histories of religion, religious actors and events form and are informed by the sensational.

Sterling Memorial Library will close at 3:00 PM on Friday, September 16, allowing President Levin and the University Officers to host an event. Manuscripts and Archives will also close at 3:00 PM, and will reopen at 8:45 on Monday, September 19.

Manuscripts and Archives has revised its hours beginning September 1. The department will remain open for extended hours on selected Wednesday and Thursday nights and on Sunday afternoons. The department will open at 10:30 AM on Wednesday mornings. Please refer to the hours section of the Manuscripts and Archives website, for specific, week by week details.

Manuscripts and Archives offers two student prizes each year. One is awarded for an outstanding senior essay on Yale. The second is awarded for an outstanding senior essay based on research done in Manuscripts and Archives. Each student will receive a $500 cash prize, which will be presented at commencement.

Manuscripts and Archives will open to the public at 10:30 AM each Wednesday this summer from June 1 to August 31. The department will still close to the public at 4:45 PM. Staff can be reached on Wednesday mornings via email or phone.

Due to Commencement events in the library, Manuscripts and Archives will be closed until 3 PM on Monday, May 23. Boxes needed after 3 PM on Monday, May 23 or before noon on Tuesday, May 24 should be requested by 4:30 PM on Thursday, May 19.

At Commencement ceremonies Manuscripts and Archives once again honored undergraduate achievement by awarding two prizes to graduating seniors.

One award recognizes an outstanding essay on Yale. This prize went to Danielle Kehl of Timothy Dwight College for her history essay, "The Buckley-Coffin Crusade: Preaching the Gospel of Political Ideology to Yale and America in the 1960s."

The second award honors an outstanding essay based on research done in Manuscripts and Archives. This prize went to Sean Fraga of Silliman College for his American studies essay, "Distance is doomed: America's first transcontinental passenger airline and the selling of the skies."

Each student received a $500 cash award, underwritten by a generous gift from Attorney Donald F. Melhorn, Jr. of Toledo, OH, a Yale alumnus (BA) of the class of 1957.

The records of the Bloodroot Collective, an important feminist work collective formed in Connecticut in 1977, have been donated to the Yale University Library's Department of Manuscripts and Archives by collective members Selma Miriam and Noel Furie. Miriam and Furie have also donated their personal papers to the Library.

The Bloodroot Collective grew out of a women's cooperative exchange hosted by Miriam in her Westport, Connecticut, home in the mid-1970s. The collective opened Bloodroot, a vegetarian restaurant and feminist bookstore, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in March 1977. In the 1970s and 1980s the restaurant was a hub for feminists and lesbians and hosted many performers and writers including Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Mary Daly, Kay Gardner, Chrystos, and Dorothy Allison. In 1980 the Collective organized a feminist press, Sanguinaria, to publish The Political Palate, one of the first cookbooks to advocate seasonal recipes and cuisine. Today, Bloodroot is an iconic bookstore, vegetarian restaurant, and feminist space.

The records include correspondence, writings, and creative works by collective members and other feminist thinkers; oral histories of Selma and Noel; photographs by Noel documenting Bloodroot activities; and legal, financial, and promotional records and ephemera of the bookstore and restaurant.

In 1910, Yale graduate Owen Johnson introduced the world to John Humperdink Stover in the April 9 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. "Dink," as Stover was known, was a student at Lawrenceville School and his prep school misadventures were chronicled in ten weekly installments through June 1910. Stover went on to become the hero of Stover at Yale, Johnson's novel of student life in New Haven at the turn of the twentieth century. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who graduated from Princeton in 1917, called Stover at Yale the "textbook" for his generation. With contemporary letters, publications, photographs, maps, and memorabilia, drawn mainly from Manuscripts and Archives, and manuscript drafts from Johnson's papers in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, a new exhibition in Sterling Memorial Library's Memorabilia Room looks at student life at Yale one hundred years ago through the lens of Johnson and Dink Stover.

Stover at Yale was first published serially in McClure's Magazine beginning in October 1911, with illustrations by Frederick R. Gruger. The novel follows Stover and several of his classmates through the first three years of self-discovery. While there is much about football and college high jinks, Johnson's writing indicts the American university and the social system that encouraged conformity over individuality, an opinion he made clear in his writing as a student for the Yale Literary Magazine.

The exhibition is free and open to the public Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. The Memorabilia Room is closed weekends and after 4:45 p.m. during the week. Sterling Memorial Library is located at 120 High Street.

Manuscripts and Archives offers two student prizes each year. One is awarded for an outstanding senior essay on Yale. The second is awarded for an outstanding senior essay based on research done in Manuscripts and Archives. Each student will receive a $500 cash prize, which will be presented at commencement. As in years past, prizes in 2009-2010 are funded through a generous gift from Donald F. Melhorn, Jr., Yale Class of 1957. Mr. Melhorn is counsel at Marshall & Melhorn, LLC in Toledo, Ohio, and an adjunct professor at the University of Toledo College of Law.

Essays from any department are eligible for consideration and students are invited nominate themselves for these prizes. Entry forms are available in Manuscripts and Archives or by contacting Diane E. Kaplan, Head of Public Services, Manuscripts and Archives. The entry form indicates a student's intention to submit an essay for consideration. These should be returned by March 31. Students must deliver a copy of their completed essay to Manuscripts and Archives no later than two days after the actual departmental submission date.

The Islamic Fundamentalist Audiocassette Collection was donated to Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, in 2005 and received in 2006 from Professor David Edwards, head of the Williams College Afghan Media Resource Center. The tapes were found in Kandahar, Afghanistan. They were acquired by CNN and eventually sold to Edwards.

Most of the 1500 tapes are in Arabic and are from the late twentieth century. They largely consist of commercially produced releases; home-made copies of commercially produced releases; and various amateur recordings, including sermons, conversations, and other live events that are unique. The collection includes speeches by clerics (Saudi and Yemeni), including Osama Bin Laden (eighteen tapes) and Abdulla Azam, bin Laden's predecessor as head of the Arab volunteers in Afghanistan, and various other influential persons.

In late 2007, a project to clean, rehouse, and digitize the originals commenced. This project will take several years to complete.

At present, students are listening to the digitized tapes and creating brief descriptions of their contents. This information will be made available through an online inventory for the collection. There are no plans to provide English language transcripts. The collection is closed until processed.

For more information about access, please contact william.massa@yale.edu.

During the spring term, Manuscripts and Archives will remain open for research until 6:45 PM on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. The hours of operation are also extended to Sunday afternoons from 1:30 until 4:30 PM. Patrons may use previously paged collection material, but there is no additional reference or paging service available during these times.

An exhibit honoring the 250th birthday of lexicographer Noah Webster has opened in the Memorabilia Room, Sterling Memorial Library. The exhibit, entitled "Noah Webster: American Patriot and Yale Loyalist," shows that Webster, Yale Class of 1778, M.A. 1781, and Honorary Doctor of Laws 1823, was far more than just a brilliant maker of dictionaries. His astoundingly various contributions to his country and his proud identity as a Yale man are vividly displayed in this collection of manuscripts, books, and artifacts, reflecting a lifetime of accomplishment, innovation and unflagging patriotism.

Webster played a major role in the drafting of the Constitution and in the thirteen colonies' subsequent ratification of it. He had a crucial impact on the development of the American educational system, and he was the father of copyright legislation in the United States. Webster served in elective offices both in Connecticut and Massachusetts and was a leading figure in the founding of Amherst College.

These and many other achievements are represented in the sections of this display, such as Webster the Yale Man, Webster the Patriot, and Webster the Historian. But even the wide array of achievements reflected is not fully representative of his lifetime attainments. Noah Webster was also a lawyer, a teacher, an ecologist, a geographer, a moralist, and above all a founding uncle, if not a founding father, of his country. His triumphant achievement as a landmark lexicographer of the English language has hitherto overshadowed his many and important accomplishments in other areas of patriotic endeavor.

The exhibit will be on display through the end of November.

For the sixth year, Manuscripts and Archives honored undergraduate achievement by awarding two prizes to graduating seniors.

At commencement, Scott Chaloff of Morse College received the prize for his outstanding essay on Yale, "Dynamite Tonight: Vietnam On and Off-Stage at the Yale School of Drama, 1966-1969."

The second award honors an outstanding essay based on research done in Manuscripts and Archives. Aaron Wiener of Berkeley College received this prize for "Hiram Bingham's Expedition and the Peruvian Response: A Connecticut Yanqui in the Land of the Incas."

Each student received a $500 cash award, underwritten this year by a generous gift from Attorney Donald F. Melhorn, Jr. of Toledo, OH, a Yale alumnus (BA) of the class of 1957.

Christine Weideman has been appointed Carrie S. Beinecke Director of Manuscripts and Archives in the University Library.

Weideman has been Interim Director of the department for the past sixteen months. She came to Yale in 1993 as Assistant Head of Manuscripts and Archives and was promoted to Deputy Director in 2005. Prior to joining the University Library, Weideman worked at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan where she trained as an archivist following doctoral-level graduate studies in history.

Weideman has chaired the Manuscripts Repository Section of the Society of American Archivists (SAA), authored a highly disseminated brochure on deeds of gifts, co-developed a series of basic information technology courses for practicing archivists, and published and presented numerous articles and papers. Most recently, she was named a Distinguished Fellow of the SAA, the highest professional honor for an archivist. Weideman has also been an active member of the Yale community, providing leadership on numerous committees while mentoring staff.

The Manuscripts and Archives department is pleased to announce that Interim Director Christine Weideman was recently elected a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists (SAA). Founded in 1936, the SAA is North America's oldest and largest national archival professional association and election as a fellow is the organization's highest honor.

Those nominated as fellows must demonstrate appropriate academic education, and professional and technical training in any fields of SAA's interest; professional experience in any of the fields of SAA's objectives for a minimum of seven years, which include evidence of professional responsibility; contributions to the profession demonstrating initiative, resourcefulness, and commitment; writings of superior quality and usefulness; contributions to the archival profession through active participation in SAA and innovative or outstanding work on behalf of SAA. In making this award, the society noted that, as her nomination letter and supporting letters richly testify, Chris exemplifies the highest contributions to the profession, to SAA, and to her colleagues.

In her two decades as a professional archivist, Chris Weideman has written seminal articles and presented innovative and pragmatic papers that have contributed heavily to archival discourse; she has led several successful SAA committees and sections; and she has served as a superlative mentor to multiple early-career archivists who have gone on to make their own mark on the field. Her deepest influence can be seen in the areas of appraisal and collection development.