Rehousing the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries Archives

FAIN: PG-51850-13

University of Wisconsin, Madison (Madison, WI 53715-1218)
Michael Doylen (Project Director: May 2012 to July 2013)

The purchase of archival shelving for the safe storage of 7,850 cubic feet of university archives and local and regional manuscripts including scrapbooks, cartographic records, architectural drawings, business ledgers, original artwork, and musical scores, as well as photographs and audiovisual materials. Notable elements of the collection include the film archive of the Milwaukee television station, WTMJ (1950-1980); photographs of the city's Polish-American population in the 1920s and 1930s; and corporate records of two of Milwaukee's largest breweries.

The Archives of the UW-Milwaukee Libraries holds significant and unique collections on many topics of local and regional importance, such as the Milwaukee Socialist Party, immigrant populations, the civil rights movement, and the brewing industry. Collections are used by students, faculty, journalists, historians, and documentary film-makers. Many collections include oversize paper materials for which we lack appropriate shelving. These materials include architectural drawings, cartographic materials, cartoons, ledgers, posters, and scrapbooks. Due to storage constraints, we store these materials wherever we have found space, including on top of stationary shelving units and other locations which make retrieval difficult. In some cases, materials are at risk of being damaged due to their hard-to-access storage locations. This grant would allow us to purchase extra-deep shelving to consolidate in a single location the storage of most oversize boxes measuring more than 25" on a side.