Archives Month Celebrates the Digitization of Extension Circulars

4-H Carroll County, 1933.

Canning display from 1936.

Canning display form 1933.

Arkansas Home Demonstration Agents.

Photo Submitted

Wilhelmena Brown of Lee County, winner in the tenth-acre tomato growing and canning contest in 1934. All pictures are from the Arkansas Extension Circulars Collection, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections Department will celebrate American Archives Month with an event highlighting the opening of the Arkansas Extension Circulars Digital Collection. The event will be at 1:30 pm. Thursday, Oct. 13, in the Special Collections Reading Room in Mullins Library.

The Arkansas Extension Circulars were published by the Cooperative Extension Service of the Division of Agriculture to provide Arkansas working farmers and families education and support for raising crops, livestock, and farm buildings, making a living, planning for the future, and creating a better life for themselves, through clothing and decorative arts, gardening and canning, farm management and financial education.

The original print circulars are housed in Special Collections as part of the Arkansas Collection, which encompasses over 40,000 volumes documenting the history of the state. The Digital Collection contains issues 1-438 spanning the years from 1914 to 1945. The remaining circulars, issues 439-561, spanning the years 1946 to 1991, will be digitized and added to the collection in the upcoming year.

Jeannie Whayne, University Professor of history, will make opening remarks, followed by a presentation from Cherisse Jones Branch, professor of history and director of the ASTATE Digital Press at Arkansas State University. She will discuss "'Find a Way to Maintain the Home Demonstration and 4-H Work in this County': African American Home Demonstration Agents in Arkansas, 1914-1965." Denna Clymer a history and geography instructor at Crowder College will talk on the subject "'They Fought to Produce': Rural Women and Farm Labor in World War II."

The event will conclude with an overview of the digital collection by Necia Parker-Gibson, U of A agricultural librarian and the principal investigator of an monetary award from Project Ceres, a program established jointly by the Center for Research Libraries, the United States Agricultural Information Network and the Agricultural Information Center. Following the presentations, attendees will be encouraged to explore the digital collection at computer workstations.

Jeannie Whayne is author of two books including Delta Empire: Lee Wilson and the Transformation of Agriculture in the New South (2011), winner of the John G. Ragsdale Prize. She is the editor or a coauthor of nine other books, and has won numerous awards for her teaching and publications, including the Arkansas Historical Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. In addition to her promotion to university professor in 2015, she was awarded the Alumni Distinguished Service Award by the university.

Cherisse Jones-Branch wrote Crossing the Line: Women and Interracial Activism in South Carolina during and after World War II, with the University Press of Florida and is the co-editor of the forthcoming Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times which will be published by the University of Georgia Press. She is also working on a second monograph, Better Living By Their Own Bootstraps: Rural Black Women’s Activism in Arkansas, with the University of Arkansas Press.

Denna Clymer taught at the University of Arkansas as a graduate assistant, where she received the J. Hillman Yowell Award for Excellence in Teaching. She joined the Crowder College faculty in 2014. In addition to teaching history and world geography courses, Clymer served as an assistant editor of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly.

American Archives Month, celebrated annually each October, is an opportunity to highlight the importance of records of enduring value. Archivists are professionals who assess, collect, organize, preserve, maintain control of, and provide access to information that has lasting value, and they help people find and understand the information they need in those records.

The event begins at 1:30 p.m. with a reception and is free and open to the public. Parking in the Stadium Drive Parking Facility is recommended. Please call 479-575-5577, or email specoll@uark.ed, for additional information.

About the University of Arkansas: The University of Arkansas provides an internationally competitive education for undergraduate and graduate students in more than 200 academic programs. The university contributes new knowledge, economic development, basic and applied research, and creative activity while also providing service to academic and professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the University of Arkansas among only 2 percent of universities in America that have the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the University of Arkansas among its top American public research universities. Founded in 1871, the University of Arkansas comprises 10 colleges and schools and maintains a low student-to-faculty ratio that promotes personal attention and close mentoring.