Meet our New Project Archivist

Hi, everybody. My name is Joseph Alley, and I am the new Project Archivist for “The Road from Hell is Paved with Little Rocks.” As you know from reading this blog, this project is the result of a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) as part of their Digitizing Hidden Collections Initiative.

I obtained my Master of Arts in Public History from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in May of 2016. While in the program, I held a graduate assistantship at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and took part in a seminar class where I helped publish a history of the Little Rock Zoo. I also hold a Bachelor of Science in History from Bethel University in McKenzie, Tennessee.

During my time in the public history program, I followed the “museum track” of classes. It was not until I completed my thesis using a collection at UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture (CAHC) that I discovered my interest in working in archives. After I defended my thesis at the end of 2015, CAHC asked me to work on some of their other collections. I have been with them ever since.

Currently my focus is creating metadata for the Butler Center of Arkansas Studies’ Office of Desegregation Monitoring papers. Using our recently-acquired planetary scanner, two scanning technicians create over 1,000 scans per day. I then am also preparing all of these scanned images to be uploaded to the online catalog for access by researchers around the world.

Another aspect of my position is working with multiple institutions. Though I am an employee of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, I also work with the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies and the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site. This is a very large project that will digitize thousands of individual documents, and it requires multiple hands working on it to make sure it will see completion.

Look for future posts in the coming months about materials from the collection, our experiences with the overhead scanner, and our final push to the end this coming August!