Archival shelves in Tamiment, photo courtesy NYU.
The ALBA collection was about 300 linear feet when it arrived from Brandeis. More than 200 linear feet have been added since then.
Kate Donovan and Tim Johnson
2000, ALBA was instrumental in moving it to New York University. This was a major undertaking. “The collection had outgrown Brandeis’s meager resources,” recalls ALBA chairman emeritus Peter N. Carroll, “and NYU was willing to devote the energy to fully organize and index a great multitude of archival material.” This summer, I spoke with Tim Johnson and NYU’s Kate Donovan, who since 2013 has served as Assistant Curator and Public Services and Instruction Librarian. Why is NYU, and Tamiment in particular, a good place for an archive like the ALBA collection? Johnson: Tamiment has a world-wide identification with labor, peace, progressive, and left-wing movements. Since the history of the Lincoln Brigade cuts through all of those movements, Tamiment is a logical place for this archive. We have on our faculty at NYU several scholars who study the Lincoln Brigade and/or the Spanish Civil War. And since ALBA is also in New York, there’s a substantial local base of support for, and use of, the collections. Donovan: The collections have grown substantially since they first arrived at Tamiment. There are approximately 300 6 THE VOLUNTEER September 2015
Labor and the left have been at the center of my scholarly, journalistic, and political activity for nearly 50 years. separate collections that make up the “ALBA Collection.” According to the records we have, the collection was about 300 linear feet when it arrived from Brandeis. More than 200 linear feet have been added since then. A rough estimate suggests that there are approximately 514 linear feet of materials, along with posters. Our usage statistics, which we started recording in 2008, show that the ALBA collections have been requested approximately 2,600 times. They're regularly used for classroom instruction and student projects as well.
What have the milestones been for the collection since it arrived at NYU? Donovan: In addition to the collection’s growth and usage, there are a few other things that are worth highlighting. In 2006, for example, Tamiment completed an NEH grant that resulted in the preservation, arrangement, description, and cataloging of approximately 320 linear feet of collection materials, including oral histories, photographs, film, and posters. Another milestone was the large-scale digitization of a number of the photograph collections, including the Harry Randall Fifteenth International Brigade Films and Photographs and selected images from the International Brigades Archive in Moscow. We also did a largescale digitization of many of the posters in the collection. What are the main challenges for Tamiment in the years ahead? Johnson: I think the main challenge is the one that faces most archives: How do we bring our collections out of the archive so they are more accessible to the public? The central avenue through which this can be accomplished is by the digitization of the collection and making it accessible through the web. Unfortunately, digitiza-