Guy-Clement details collections and community engagement
Guy-Clement describes collections including Revolutionary War artifacts, Brooklyn CORE civil rights materials, and the Greenpoint Environmental History Project. She also discusses digital collections and community-donated yearbooks.
Our collections reflect Brooklyn's past and present in many ways.
They include items such as artifacts from the Revolutionary War that highlight the fraught and harrowing fight for America's freedom.
Documents related to the emancipation of enslaved people in America and the actions that led to the Civil War.
It reflects Brooklyn's fight for civil rights in collections like Brooklyn Core,
which looks at activism in Brooklyn and includes images of sit-ins, boycotts, as well as
an interesting notebook that documented protester arrests and how the organization assisted those arrested with legal support.
It also covers more contemporary issues as well, such as gentrification and changing communities, and collections like the Greenpoint Environmental History Project that documents years of pollution and community action towards cleaner air and water.
In addition to our physical collections, we are continuously building on our digital collection.
That ranges from born digital to digitized materials, and our web archive that allows us to save Brooklyn websites.
My personal favorite collections are ones that document the lives of regular Brooklynites, like our Brooklyn Schools collection, which holds hundreds of yearbooks, school newspapers, and other memorabilia.
And a recently processed collection, the Butcher and Johnson family papers about a Brooklyn family and the Great Migration,
as they wove their lives through Barbados, Panama, Cuba, and New Orleans to finally settle down in Brooklyn.
Collections like these allow us to signal to everyone that their stories belong in the archives.