Friday, October 4, 2019

The Eldon Murray Papers


Hello everyone! It has certainly been a while since we posted. Seventeen months to be more precise and we are sorry for the radio silence. However, it’s not without good reason - we have been busy at work on some new collections! In the past year we have launched several new digital collections. In the next few weeks we’ll be taking some time to highlight a few of these new collections.

Eldon Murray in Korea, 1950-1953
The first collection we want to highlight is the Eldon Murray Papers. Eldon Murray was a prominent activist in the Milwaukee LGBT community. In addition to his work with the Gay Peoples Union (GPU) and the Milwaukee AIDS Project (MAP), Murray was the founder of SAGE/Milwaukee, the first organization in Wisconsin dedicated to serving the needs of older gay, lesbian, and bisexual people through community building and counseling services. Eldon also served in the United States Army in Korea. The collection contains photographs, organizational records, a few publications, and a collection of scrapbooks containing newspaper clipping dating from the 1940s-1970s.

Eldon Murray scrapbook page (redacted version)
The scrapbooks presented us with a unique challenge in terms of providing access to the collection. The pages contained many newspaper articles in their entirety, which made publishing them online a conundrum. Copyright laws and the sheer amount of material represented made it unfeasible for us to post them unaltered. In the end our solution was to run the scrapbooks through an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program to generate a transcript. We hid this field from the public but still made it searchable, this way we can provide the information to our researchers without infringing upon copyright laws. This is a great example of one way in which we try to work through issues to provide as much access as we can to our researchers.

For those who would like to access the unedited versions of these articles and scrapbook pages - come to the UWM Archives reading room where you can page through the physical scrapbooks. In addition to that you will also have access to the correspondence which has not been digitized for privacy reasons.

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