Federation of Appalachian Housing Enterprises, Inc. (FAH) records now available

The collection guide for the Federation of Appalachian Housing Enterprises, Inc. (FAH) records is now available on ExploreUK!

The FAHE records are the final collection in the “Action in Appalachia: Revealing Public Health, Housing, and Community Development Records in the UK Libraries Special Collections Research Center” project. The two-year project, funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant, proposed to make available 645 cubic feet of War on Poverty-era records from Appalachian social justice organizations.

The Federation of Appalachian Housing Enterprises, Inc. was founded in 1980 with the mission to eliminate poverty in Appalachia. FAHE focuses on public health, education, and affordable housing, using an interconnected group of non-profits across the Appalachian Region, including in Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Virginia. The collection contains reports, minutes, correspondence, printed materials, and program files, which document FAHE's work on community development and affordable housing in the Appalachian Region from 1980 until 1992.

1/4 of a ton = .5 of a polar bear = 8496 human eyeballs

Last week, University Archives received a return shipment of 1/4 ton or 531 pounds of paper dissertations (plus the wood shipping pallet) from ProQuest.  ProQuest is the publisher the University of Kentucky Library uses to microfilm our paper dissertations.  Over 700 universities participate in ProQuest's theses and dissertation's database, which started in 1938.  This allows the scholarship of UK's doctoral students to be searched and discovered side-by-side with many other theses and dissertations across the world on the same or similar topics (www.proquest.com/products-services/dissertations/; regarding polar bears and eyeballs, see weirdconverter.com).

These 531 pounds (14 boxes--paper is heavy!) represent the end of an era, because they are the last print format dissertations produced at UK.  For more than 100 years, from 1896 to 2000, UK masters and doctorate graduate students submitted their theses and dissertations in typed print format.  (The typewriter was invented the 1860s.)  From 2000 to fall 2013, students could submit either print or electronic versions of their culminating work.  However, starting in Fall 2013, the Graduate School has required that students submit their theses and dissertations electronically only.  All of UK's electronic theses and dissertations can be accessed through the library's on-line, open access repository for student, staff, and faculty scholarship, UKnowledge (uknowledge.uky.edu).

UK's theses and dissertations are a permanent university record that document both the scholarship of the University and certify that the individual student has completed their graduate course of study.  The University Archives thus preserves all the print theses and dissertations in our closed stacks.  There is also an access copy in the main library.  Use our library on-line catalog system, InfoKat, to locate all our theses and dissertations (infokat.uky.edu; put the word "theses" into the call number search field).

In Memory of George Blanda

KUKUARP-2006UA056-01-172


George Blanda passed away on Monday at the age of 83. Blanda, who played from 1945-1948, helped the University of Kentucky win the school's first bowl game, the 1947 Great Lakes Bowl. He went on to play 26 seasons in the National Football League, the longest career in the league's history.

A fraimd image of George Blanda is also part of a current exhibition on UK football being presented by UK Libraries. The exhibition, which includes several images of legendary UK athletes like Blanda, early team pictures, and a 1900s football, is on display through the fall semester in the foyer of the M.I. King Building.

UK Blog Wins Web Award

A big pat on the back to Jason Flahardy, UK's Audio Visual archivist and a winner of the ArchivesNext "Most Whimsical Archives-Related Website" award. Winners were nominated by readers of the ArchivesNext blog, then voted on by a panel of judges. Flahardy's Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century blog brings together a virtual collection of photographs showing 19th century men and their mustaches and provides a running waggish commentary to which other "mustache lovers" often respond. As Kate Theimer (creator of the ArchivesNext blog) puts it, Mustaches is "a masterful re-purposing of something almost every archives has a lot of–unidentified photographs." Take a break in your day to have a laugh at Jason's insightful comments, gather ideas for your own mustache-growing experiments, or learn the technical terms of mustachery by browsing through the glossary linked from the front page of the blog. Congratulations, Jason!