Special Collections News

I met Tom Crawford on the third-floor landing of the Hull Street Parking Deck early one morning late last August. We had arrived almost simultaneously for our scheduled interview, and Tom had paused at the landing to knot his burgundy, patterned necktie. We walked together up the slope to Russell Special Collections Libraries building where we spent the remainder of the morning and early afternoon discussing history, politics, and the business of covering politics.

The Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) is pleased to announce the availability of Georgia town films and home movies digitized by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection (BMA). The Georgia Town Films Collection is available at https://dlg.usg.edu/collection/ugabma_bmatf and the Georgia Home and Amateur Movies collection is available at https://dlg.usg.edu/collection/ugabma_bmahm.

DLG staff provided enhanced description of these moving image resources that enables users to locate segments of the moving image footage without having to view the footage in its entirety.

Some 4,000 hours of programming produced by public radio and television stations between 1941 and 1999 will be digitized and made available to the public, thanks to a federal grant for the Brown Media Archives at the University of Georgia Libraries. The programming was originally submitted for consideration for Peabody Awards.

World War I (1914-1918) was different than any previous war. It was a total war that required all members of the nation to be involved in the war effort. All of the resources of the state were mobilized for war. Ultimately, 65,000,000 soldiers from 30 countries fought in World War I and tens of millions citizens across the world would be involved in the conflict one way or another.

James Forman, Yale law professor, and Nancy MacLean, history professor at Duke University, are the 2018 recipients of the Lillian Smith Book Awards.

The Southern Regional Council established the Lillian Smith award after Smith's 1966 death. Internationally acclaimed as author of the controversial novel, Strange Fruit (1944), Lillian Smith was the most outspoken of white, mid-20th century Southern writers on issues of social and racial injustice. Today the University of Georgia, the Georgia Center for the Book and Piedmont College join the SRC in presenting the awards. http://www.libs.uga.edu/hargrett/lilliansmith/index.html

“Poppies: Women, War, Peace” will open at the Hargrett Gallery of the University of Georgia Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries June 18.

Part of the observance to mark the centennial end of the First World War, the exhibit also pays homage to Moïna Belle Michael, originally from Monroe, who was instrumental in ensuring the red poppy flower became a symbol to remember the victims and veterans of war. Michael was inspired in her quest by the war poem ‘In Flanders Field’ written by Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander McCrae in 1915.

Wayne Flynt, professor emeritus in the department of history at Auburn University, is the author of eleven books, and one of the most recognized and honored scholars of Southern history, politics, and religion. His latest, published in 2017, is Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee. He has also published his memoir Keeping the Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives, in which he writes about his experiences in the Civil Rights movement.

Tyler Ortel, a student audiovisual technician in the Walter J. Brown Media Archives, was awarded first place in the UGA Student Employee of the Year Awards, sponsored by the Career Center and Office of Student Affairs. 

Ortel, an entertainment and media studies major in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications, has been employed by the Brown Media Archives for almost two years, and he has completed digitization of hundreds of hours of film, audio, and videotape in that time. This work includes inspecting archival materials to assess the condition, performing minor conservation treatments when necessary, and playing the materials on analog playback machines connected to specialized converters and adapters to capture preservation-quality digital signals. 

Friday evening, Irish poet Paul Muldoon will give a free public reading and musical performance at the 40 Watt Club to close the year-long 30th anniversary celebration of the UGA Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.



Earlier in the day, the Hargrett Library will host a display of books of poetry from its private press collection including Encheiresin Naturae, an edition of Paul Muldoon’s crown of sonnets written to accompany the wood engravings by Barry Moser.