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We are happy to announce a new addition to our collections: the San José State University Asian American Studies Records!

As a result of the Third World Liberation Front movement of 1968, a proposal for the creation of an Asian American Studies Program at San José State University was spearheaded by student participants of the Progressive Asian American Coalition (PAAC), members of Associated Students, and faculty members in 1969. In Fall 1970, the program was formally established, residing under the School of Social Sciences. During the mid to late 1970s, the Asian American Studies Program faced a number of "cutback struggles" in regards to budget allocations and diminished faculty and staff, and this has remained a pattern throughout later years as well. The Asian American Studies Program frequently collaborated with related organizations, namely the student-led Asian Students In Action Now (A.S.I.A.N., also known as Asian Club), to organize events and activities such as the Asian Spring Festival. Throughout the years, there were many who acted as Program Coordinator: PJ Hirabayashi, Gregory Mark, and most notably, Raymond Lou. From Spring 1979 until around 1990, Raymond Lou, previously a lecturer of Asian American Studies, was selected as the next Program Coordinator. As Program Coordinator, Raymond Lou participated in university-wide efforts such as the Interminority Coalition (also known as the Interminority Council) and Student Affirmative Action. Around 1982, there was discussion of reorganizing the School of Social Sciences, as the ethnic programs were not under their own department, but rather as individual programs under the school. In 1987, the Department of Social Sciences was formally established with the purpose of functioning as a consortium made up of the component programs: Afro-American Studies, Asian-American Studies, Mexican-American Studies, Social Science, and Women's Studies. Today, Asian American Studies resides in the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences under the College of Social Sciences.

Come check out this collection and its importance to SJSU’s ethnic studies initiatives!

Post authored by Christine Thuy Minh Nguyen (MSLIS ‘26). 

A Scholar, An Activist: Selections from the Harry Edwards Papers is located in the SJSU Special Collections & Archives Reading Room on the fifth floor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Library. This exhibition features documents, journals, artifacts, and more donated from Dr. Harry Edwards. His career as a sociologist and professional sports consultant has deeply impacted the culture of inclusion and representation of Black Athletes.

A distinguished professor and dedicated proponent of civil rights, Dr. Harry Edwards’ first came to San Jose State College. Here he excelled as an honor student on the basketball and track and field teams until his graduation in 1964. Afterwards he received his Master’s in Sociology from Cornell University before returning to SJSC as an instructor.

Along with then Sociology graduate student, Kenneth Noel, they founded the United Black Students for Action, an organization to fight against the discrimination of Black students, especially those in the Athletics Department. After gaining traction and hosting the Black Youth Conference in Los Angeles, the movement gained national renown after voting to boycott the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. The Olympics Committee for Human Rights was formed, culminating in the famous black power salute on the podium by Tommie Smith and John Carlos.

Dr. Edwards continued his work as a professor and activist at UC Berkeley after he received his PhD in Sociology. Over the years, he guest lectured at numerous campuses and wrote several books, including The Revolt of the Black Athlete in the immediate aftermath of the Olympic Games.

In the 1980s, Dr. Edwards also began working as a consultant to many professional sports organizations. He developed programs to create better conditions and promote minoritized groups for the Golden State Warriors and Major League Baseball. His longest partnership was as a staff consultant to the San Francisco 49ers, where he worked closely with former coach, Bill Walsh.

The events of his life reflect the changes towards progress for Black Athletes throughout the nation. It can inform our understanding of where we have been and what actions are needed to continue seeking a better, more equitable culture.

To view the other materials in the Harry Edwards Papers, please make an appointment by contacting us at special.collections@sjsu.edu. 

For more information about the Civil Rights Movement at San Jose State College in the 1960s, please refer to our other collections, San José State University Civil Rights and Campus Protest Collection and the San Jose State College "Speed City" Collection. 

Post written by Eilene Lueck, Special Collections & Archives Student Assistant.

For the past two weeks, I have been participating in La Sfera Challenge II, an international competition between teams of scholars to transcribe manuscripts of La Sfera, Goro Dati’s 15^th-century Italian schoolbook on cosmography and geography. For the contest, each of the five teams raced to transcribe their unique manuscript of the text, which are all held at different repositories. The goal of the project is to transcribe various copies of the same text so that scholars can eventually create an English translation and modern scholarly bilingual edition. This crowd-sourced and open-access project has been made possible through the support of the IIIF Consortium, FromThePage and Stanford Libraries. It has been organized by historian Laura Morreale, who is an independent scholar who works in medieval Italian and digital humanities, and does so much to keep people participating in these fields. 

My team, Team Spencer, transcribed a (ahem) well-worn version held at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas (Pryce MS P4). Our intrepid captains—Laura Ingallinella (Mellon Post-doctoral fellow at Wellesley), Karen Severud Cook (Special Collections Librarian at Spencer Research Library), N. Kıvılcım Yavuz (Ann Hyde Postdoctoral Researcher at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library)—used Twitter to recruit our team of Italianists, paleographers and medievalists from around the world to participate in the challenge.

I have already seen brilliant comments from other participants about technical details of the individual manuscripts, especially the scripts and the fabulous maps that decorate the pages (see resources at end of the post). However, for me, this contest really reflects the potential to use social media (in this case, Twitter) to create and facilitate scholarly communities. I joined the contest because one of our team captains, Laura Ingallinella, tagged me as a potential participant in a tweet. To be honest, I was initially a bit apprehensive: while my academic background is in medieval Italian literature and I now work in SJSU archives, my research did not involve transcribing manuscripts and my paleographical skills are self-taught. With just the teensiest little nudge, though, I was on board. 

Screenshot of my transcription-in-progress of a page from La Sfera Challenge II.

What I really loved about this project (besides it dovetailing with so many of my interests: early Italian! manuscripts! archives!) was the way that it brought people together during what has often been a rather isolated time of working from home. During the contest, we tweeted about our manuscript (#TeamSpencer and #LaSferaChallenge2), and had a great deal of fun collaborating on the transcription itself. In the team log, members wrote color-coded notes about their folios, asked questions, and encouraged each other. Publicly, on the team page and on Twitter, members shared their progress and their discoveries from working closely with the document. Laura Ingallinella paid close attention to variations in the script, and found evidence that the scribe may have been using more than one manuscript to prepare our copy. Kıvılcım Yavuz discovered that the scribe had missed a few whole stanzas of the treatise—which had not been previously noted! Karen Severud Cook has been compiling and identifying the geographical places in the text and maps. Moreover, because there were teams working at the same time on different manuscripts of this same text, we were able to see and compare highlights. The manuscripts all have different physical qualities and conditions, were written in different types of 15^th-century Italian scripts, and have differing degrees of illumination (decorated initials, maps, diagrams, etc.).

As I was telling a friend about the project the other night, she remarked that this is exactly the kind of thing that everyone hoped the internet would let us do. Personally, it has been so much fun for me to contribute to the La Sfera Project as an Italianist and to practice paleography, but much of the value is also in making new connections, learning from experts, and feeling like part of a community. 

Lastly, I’d like to share resources about this project as a model for creating academic engagement while we are ‘working from home,’ but also more general resources that the SJSU community can use for research and teaching on related subjects. 

General Resources

FromThePage: Software for crowdsourced transcription projects. Individual researchers and organizations can upload scanned documents to be transcribed. Images can be moved and magnified, while being transcribed. I can attest that it is easy to use! You can create a free account to help institutions transcribe archival materials from medieval manuscripts to contemporary letters. 

Italian Paleography. This resource is a collaboration created by the Newberry Library in Chicago, the University of Toronto and St. Louis University. It offers a wealth of information about the study of early Italian vernacular scripts, giving background information, digitized images of manuscripts, and pages where you can practice transcription. 

La Sfera Challenge II & the Spencer manuscript

La Sfera Challenge Website: The project website has information and updates from the project organizers for both challenges, including a bibliography and resources. The site also has pages for the individual teams with blogposts about their manuscripts, like this one for Team Spencer. 

On Twitter: To follow the findings of the project, search #LaSferaChallenge and #LaSferaChallenge2. You can also follow individual teams, like #TeamSpencer

Team Member Research:  New findings about the manuscript are already being shared publicly on institutional websites. Karen Severud Cook, the Special Collections Librarian at the Spencer Library, has been working on this particular manuscript for several years and published on it in the past. 

Karen Severud Cook. Blog Post: “La Sfera, A 15th Century Schoolbook” (Oct. 19, 2015)

Karen Severud Cook. “Dati’s Sfera: The Manuscript Copy in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas.” Mediterranean Studies 11 (2002): 45-70. 

N. Kıvılcım Yavuz. Blog Post: “To Transcribe or not to Transcribe, That is Not the Question” (July 28, 2020). 

Manuscripts and Early Italian at SJSU Special Collections

Illuminated Manuscript Collection (MSS 2015.01.20): The Illuminated Manuscript Collection consists of six color illuminated manuscripts and an informational guide. The 14^th and 15^th-century fragments from European manuscripts include pages from a book of hours, a musical score and missals. There is also a page from an illuminated 19^th or 20^th-century Persian manuscript. See: Illuminated Manuscript Collection Finding Aid

Manuscript Facsimiles: There are several high-quality copies of medieval manuscripts that are available for research in the reading room, including the Vernon Manuscript and Marie de Medici’s Book of Hours. See: Facsimiles LibGuide

Early Italian Texts: There are several early Italian printed books in our collections, including several on architecture and a 16th-century copy of Achille Marozzo’s Opera nova chiamata duello, an Italian treatise on fencing. They may be found using faceted searches of the library catalog, but there is also a resource guide that has a chronological list of our rare books and a partial annotated bibliography. See: Rare Books and Manuscripts LibGuide  

Here at SJSU Archives and Special Collections, we are excited to connect you with resources about manuscripts, paleography and medieval or early modern studies. If you would like to learn more or access materials for your research and/or teaching, please don’t be a stranger. Contact us at special.collections@sjsu.edu

Did you know that SJSU Archives and Special Collections has a historic collection of hundreds of fine art prints that can be accessed in the Reading Room (by appointment, once we are open again) and used in your classes? No?! That might be because it has only been available again since January…but it is true!

History of the Collection. The prints in the Humanities Art Collection (MSS 2019.07.08) were bought by the library for art and humanities instruction and reference from the early twentieth century until the 1980s, but have only recently been made accessible again. The majority were acquired and used by the campus community for decades, but the old card catalog records were never transferred to the library’s electronic databases. Those acquired before the early-1980s could be viewed in the Art Reading Room in the old North Library building, and were stored in what was essentially a broom closet known colloquially as the ‘Treasure Room.’ When the Clark Library opened in 1982, the old North Library became part of the Walquist Library Complex, and the Special Collections Department moved into a larger space on the 3^rd floor. In the 1980s, library and arts faculty continued to purchase and donate new prints to the collection. While it is likely that the majority of the prints were transferred or acquired by the Special Collections Department by that time, it is possible that a small number of prints may have been still circulating as part of the ‘Media Department’ collection, a set of filing cabinets on the 2^nd floor of the Clark Library, and then transferred when the libraries moved into the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in 2003.  

When the library moved into the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, the prints were put into oversized filing cabinets in the vaults of Special Collections & Archives, where they remained virtually untouched until last year. Since there were so many unhoused oversized materials, the reading room staff decided to inventory the drawers to begin working through the backlog. When I started going through the first drawers and came across a signed Matisse print, it became clear that processing this collection needed to be a priority! 

From July 2019 to January 2020, I rehoused the prints in large-format archival folders, identified the artist and title, and organized them as an archival collection. While many had information written on their paper frames, some were identifiable from acquisition slips, and others required more research using the image and signature. Those that were library-mounted on paper frames and cardstock were protected by either interleaving them with acid free paper or removing them from the frames, and then housing them in archival folders. Making this collection cataloged and accessible has been painstaking work, but it is enormously satisfying to know that our students and faculty have access to this extraordinary art collection again. 

Collection Highlights. Since this collection of prints was purposefully purchased for studying the arts and humanities, it is wide-ranging in its scope and content. It has a representative sampling of different genres of prints such as fine art prints, botanical illustrations, and satirical cartoons. The fine art prints reflect major artistic styles with examples of abstract art, expressionism, pop art, realism, and surrealism. 

Pierre Joseph Redouté, Rosa Damascena aurora. Rosier Aurore Loniatowska

Wayne Thiebaud, Street Religion, 1951

While the bulk of the materials are from circa 1750-1980, there are several early European prints, including Old Masters such as Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), Hans Leonhard Schäufelein (1480-1540), Hermans zoon van Rijn Rembrandt (1606-1669), Salvador Rosa (1615-1673) and Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). 

Albrecht Dürer, John the Baptist and the Saint Onuphrius in the Wilderness. Circa 1503-1504.

A major strength of the collection lies in its large number of satirical 18^th and 19^th-century English prints. There are full sets of William Hogarth’s print series and illustrations, ‘Industry and Idleness,’ ‘A Harlot’s Progress,’ ‘Don Quixote,’ and ‘Hudibras,’ as well as many other individual engravings. 

William Hogarth, Industry and Idleness: Apprentices at their Looms. Plate I. 1747

Lastly, the collection was intended to represent major types of printmaking, including relief (wood cut and wood engraving), intaglio (engraving and etching), lithography and screen printing. Many of these are especially interesting for learning and teaching about technical aspects of print making and art history. For example, this Edgar Degas print is from a cancelled plate, meaning that it has fine lines drawn through the original etching to indicate it was not part of the original edition: 

Edgar Degas, Manet Seated, Turned to the Right.

This historic print collection offers so many avenues for enriching humanities and arts teaching and research at SJSU. We are thrilled to make these prints publicly accessible again and are looking forward to seeing how our campus community will use them.

Access. This collection has not yet been digitized, but there is a detailed Finding Aid available online with an item-level catalog of the prints with artist, title, year and any notes (such as technique or condition). The finding aid is arranged in series by geographical origin (Asia, Europe, North and South America, Unknown), and then by the nationality of the artist. While the reading room is still closed due to Covid-19 and staff only has limited access to the vaults, we can answer research questions about the collection and individual prints. Once in-person access has recommenced, the physical collection can be studied in the Reading Room and/or reserved for class showings. Please contact us at special.collections@sjsu.edu for more information.

Post written by Monica Keane.

As the COVID-19 epidemic has us sheltering at home, we all miss the familiar places on campus where we could connect with one another. What better way to reminisce with our shared history at SJSU than searching through old images of campus life with SJSU King Library Digital Collections? Our digital portal lets you search for archival images of our campus and library, including art from student publications. 

Since we are all looking for ways to connect with one another, I have made a free coloring book from a student publication from the early 20^th century, The Old Familiar Places. It consists of a series of woodcut prints that students made of their favorite landmarks on campus, including the iconic SJSU Tower Hall. Built in 1910, this Spanish Revival building is the oldest building on campus. Some of the others are no longer in existence—and your own list of favorite places might include several that would not be built for decades! 

Please share your own versions with us! If you would like to color the images, right click them to save to your computer and then print. Or use them as inspiration to create your own artwork of your favorite places on campus. Tag us on Instagram #sjsuspecialcollections or on Twitter @SJSUSpeccoll

Link to Familiar Places Digital Collection Images

Citation: San José State University Archives Photograph Collection, MSS-2006-05-01. San José State University Library Special Collections and Archives.

Finding Aid: https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt967nd18r/

Post authored by recent SJSU MLIS graduate Monica Keane.

Our team of archivists, librarians, and researchers is hard at work (from home) during the Covid-19 crisis, helping you with all your research needs. As the current pandemic continues to affect the world, we have been working to document our institutional response, as well as the ways that current events reflect our collections and past history. If you have a research query, please contact us at special.collections@sjsu.edu.