SUNY Albany archives to add new digital exhibit

A UUP member and the union’s former archivist have developed a digital exhibit to highlight the labor records held by the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives at SUNY Albany, including documents and artifacts from UUP.

UUPer Brian Keough, curator of manuscripts and Webmaster, and Cindy Sauer, UUP’s archivist/records manager from January 1998 to March 2001, created the exhibit to showcase the many types of records kept by labor organizations. Among the records in the exhibit — “Documenting Labor Inside and Out” — are publications, meeting minutes and financial records.

The exhibit should be up and running before the end of the month. It will be accessible from the department’s Web site at http://library.albany.edu/speccoll. Link from exhibits and click on documenting labor.

The exhibit also provides some information about the history of labor in the Capital District and includes an extensive timeline of labor-related events in this area. In addition to UUP records, the digital exhibit contains documents from other statewide unions, including the Civil Service Employees Association, the Public Employees Federation and Council 82 of AFSCME.

Sauer anticipates that there will be two Web pages devoted to UUP records: one on the 1978 representation challenge to UUP by the New York State Education Assoc-iation/NEA, as well as a page discussing public relations activities by unions. Photos, documents and artifacts from UUP’s archival collection will also be found throughout the digital exhibit, she added.

The bottom line: “The exhibit highlights the department’s labor holdings, describes the variety of records unions keep, the information they contain and how that information can be used to learn more about a labor union or the labor movement in general,” Sauer said. Meanwhile, Sauer — a December 2000 graduate of SUNY Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy with a double master’s in library science and history — has earned a first-place award for the records management program she compiled for UUP.

Sauer received the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference 2001 Finding Aids Award. She won first place in the individual collection finding aid category.

As UUP archivist, Sauer implemented a records management program and organized the union’s archival records. She developed the finding guide to the records — which include an administrative history of UUP — that is now held by the Grenander Department.

Sauer and Keough also worked together to encode the document for mounting on the Grenander Department site at http://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/apap039.htm.

UUP’s oral-history records, also organized by Sauer, can be found on the Web at http://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/apap099.htm.

— Karen L. Mattison