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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