SJSU Special Collections & Archives acquires, preserves, arranges, describes, and provides access to its rich, diverse holdings of rare and unique books, manuscript collections, institutional records, and other primary sources to support the diverse teaching and research needs of students, faculty, staff, and the larger SJSU community. The Department is the central repository for the history of San José State University and has a large collection of university, faculty, and student publications, administrative records, photographs, and ephemera. Of particular interest are materials of archival value pertaining to California State Politics, Social Activism, Chicano History and Culture, Women’s Studies, LGBTQ Studies, California and U.S. History, and other holdings of local, regional, and national significance.
Great Minds: The Visiting Scholar Experience at SJSU
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library, Special Collections Reading Room, 5th floor.
Visit Monday - Wednesday, 12-5pm until April 30, 2025.
“Great Minds” explores the history of the Visiting and Distinguished Scholar in Residence program at SJSU. Begun in 1962, the program was established as a way to bring scholars from various disciplines to campus for an extended stay. Scholars included the architect, inventor, and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller, comedian and activist Dick Gregory, anthropologist Dr. Margaret Mead, writer and philosopher Alan Watts, Nobel Prize winner Dr. Linus Pauling, and Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, among others.
Exhibit
Politics and Progress in the South Bay, September 12 - December 19, 2024. 5th Floor Foyer, SJSU King Library, SJSU Special Collections & Archives.
“Politics and Progress in the South Bay” highlights over a dozen collections of Political Papers in SJSU Special Collections & Archives. Correspondence, photographs, memorabilia, artifacts, and campaign materials are among the selections of primary sources from the papers of Norman Mineta, Blanca Alvarado, Ken Yeager, Dianne McKenna, Mike Honda, Janet Gray Hayes and other political luminaries who have left an indelible mark on the region and country.
Many firsts among political representatives – the first Japanese-American cabinet member, the first woman elected mayor of San José, the first openly gay elected official in Santa Clara County – began here, and this exhibition is designed to illuminate the cultural progress forged by their accomplishments.
Please join us for the reception!
Thursday, September 19, 2024 | 4:30-6:30 p.m. | King Library Rm. 225 (2nd floor) or via Zoom. Please register here.
2nd Annual SJSU Archival Film Festival: Politics & Progress on Campus
The SJSU King Library's Special Collections & Archives is pleased to present the 2nd Annual SJSU Archival Film Festival on October 16, 2024 from 1:00 - 4:30 p.m. in the fifth floor Schiro Room.
Join us for popcorn and purposeful conversation with politicians, political experts, classmates, and colleagues about films documenting the political alliances and student-led movements that have shaped our campus. This year’s films will complement the Special Collections & Archives’ “Politics and Progress” exhibit.
This event will be livestreamed, but in-person seating is limited.
Black Spartans (1907-1948)
We invite you to explore our new exhibit “Black Spartans (1907-1948).” “Black Spartans” is a first look at an ongoing research project in SJSU Special Collections & Archives to discover documentation of Black experiences in university history. Learn the stories of the earliest Black SJSU students through 19 individual digital portraits created by student artist Yeab Kebede, ‘22 Digital Media Arts.
Black students have been a central part of SJSU’s history – as scholars, athletes, artists, and activists – yet there has not been enough intentional effort to document these experiences and accomplishments and make them available to researchers. “Black Spartans” will serve to highlight some of these obscured stories, and identify the people, organizations, and events we hope to seek more information and records about.
The physical exhibit is now closed, but you can still visit virtually.
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).
Our new exhibit, San José State University’s Legacy of Poetry, is located on the fifth floor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Library. Curated by Student Assistant Alona Hazen in honor of National Poetry Month, the exhibit features the works and lives of poets who have walked SJSU’s campus since its beginnings. Whether student or faculty (or both!), these poets have contributed to a legacy over a century strong and thriving.
Student Jean Holloway (above, 1938) and Professor Esther Shephard (below, 1941) pictured as members of the Pegasus Literary Society in the university's La Torre yearbooks.
I was especially excited to be able to highlight two women who were part of SJSU’s community in the 1930s and 40s: student Jean Holloway and professor Esther Shephard. Their materials can be seen in the cases near the elevators. Both women pursued poetry primarily as a hobby, led professional lives centered on writing as an art, and were active members of our university via various clubs and organizations.
Jean Holloway, born Gratia Jean Casey, attended San José State in the late 1930s. She was an active member of several university clubs, including the Pegasus Literary Society, the Radio Speaking Society, and the San José Players. Poetry was just one of Holloway’s creative outlets, though she excelled at it and won many awards in her time as a student. Her poems range in subject from the everyday to the fantastical and in tone from the anxious to the whimsical.
A talented writer, Holloway’s radio scripts aired on San José’s local station, KQW, and on San Francisco’s local station, KYA, while she was a student. Her writing pursuits led her to become a scriptwriter for radio, film, and television in Hollywood from the 1940s through the 1970s. Holloway made her professional break into radio when she was hired to work on The Kate Smith Show by Ted Collins, leaving San José State as a sophomore. She later contracted with the studio MGM, for which she wrote three musical films. Holloway primarily wrote for television from the 1950s on, writing over 500 episodes of television’s first long-running daytime soap opera, The First Hundred Years.
Esther Shephard, born Esther Maria Lofstrand, was a professor in San José State’s English Department from 1939 until 1959. During her time at the university, Shephard participated in numerous poetry readings and talks, judged student literary competitions, and often worked with clubs such as the English Club and the Free-lance Writing Club. As El Portal had been discontinued during World War II, Shephard was a founding advisor of its successor, The Reed, in 1948. Shephard continued to advise the Pegasus Literary Society, which sponsored Reed, after her retirement.
Shephard began her career as a high school teacher in Montana before deciding to attend the University of Washington after the death of her first husband. She earned her Ph.D. there in 1938. Shephard’s dissertation, Walt Whitman’s Pose, was published that same year. She would continue to focus on the renowned poet throughout her career. Another of her achievements was the retelling of the ancient Chinese legend The Cowherd and the Sky Maiden, published in 1950 and later staged as an opera at Shephard’s alma mater. Shephard’s work also included one-act plays and Paul Bunyan, a collection of logging camp stories.
Dr. Henry Meade Bland teaching class outside San José State Teachers College, 1929.
In the upper cases of our foyer, I created a timeline of university poets, accompanying University Archivist Carli Lowe’s exhibit on Faricita Hall Wyatt, an amazing SJSU alum who also published her own poetry. Far from definitive, the timeline cases offer just a sample of the poetry written by SJSU students and faculty over the last century. Love, loss, and contemplation find their expression here, perhaps offering connection and even hope to readers.
More than a legacy of individual poets, this is a legacy of community.
Dr. Henry Meade Bland, poet laureate and professor of English, had a role in the establishment of The Quill, a student publication which continues today as the award-winning Reed Magazine. His impact as a founding member of our university’s legacy of poetry cannot be understated and was certainly appreciated by his students, who continued to honor him after his death.
A more recent thread of connection on display highlights the continuing influence poetic friendships and mentorship have on our community. Sandra McPherson was featured during SJSU’s Contemporary Poetry Festival in 1977, as was poet Robert Bly. Bly was influential for poet Nils Peterson, featured a few cases down. Inspiringly, these connections went far beyond our campus, as Peterson and Naomi Clark showed in founding Poetry Center San José, an organization which seeks to “nurture…diverse literary expression” to this day.
Exhibit case near the fifth floor elevators, 2024.
Given the limitations of the space available for the exhibit, it was difficult to choose materials that would not only display well, but that would truly reflect the rich history of poetry we have in the archive. I chose to focus on poets who either attended or worked at SJSU, though this left out many materials we have relating to poets from across the country and even around the world. Notable poets whose works I did not feature include Charles Bukowski, Robert Frost, Aldous Huxley, Czesław Miłosz, and Ezra Pound, among others. Admittedly, SJSU itself has been home to more poets than could be featured in this exhibit. The English Department’s extensive efforts to preserve our university’s Legacy of Poets can be found here.
To view materials from our collections, please make an appointment by contacting us at special.collections@sjsu.edu. Collections featured in this exhibit include the Student Publications Collection, the Jean Holloway Papers, the Esther Shephard Papers, the Carolyn Grassi Papers (in process), and the Virginia de Araujo Papers (yet to be processed). We welcome you to search for other poetry materials via our Online Archive of California finding aids, notably that of the Poetry Journals and Chapbooks Collection.
Additionally, a number of poetry books are held in our Rare Books Collection and can be searched via the university library’s OneSearch. To narrow your search to items held by the Special Collections & Archives, please filter “location” to the various “Special Collections” options on the left hand side of the page.
Post written by Alona Hazen, Special Collections & Archives Student Assistant.
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.
We are happy to announce a new addition to our collections: the Sisterspirit Records!
Sisterspirit Bookstore was founded in 1984 by four women who originally met at San Jose State – Mary Jeffrey, Marilyn Cook, Karen Hester, and Amy Caffrey with the goal of creating a feminist bookstore and coffeehouse where women could socialize and enjoy live music. The group’s mission statement was: “To promote women’s culture and community in the South Bay Area, to help unify and strengthen the South Bay women’s community and provide a multicultural information center to enable networking with other women’s groups and communities. To develop and promote educational projects responsive to human, civil, and women’s rights. To teach and promote women’s culture by providing a meeting place for all women, by providing space and support for local women’s artistic works, by providing information on women’s history, women’s music, women’s literature, etc. by providing a women’s bookstore and coffeehouse. To work in solidarity with other women’s organizations on projects and events which support women’s issues and culture.” By 1985, Sisterspirit became a fully-fledged non-profit organization, selling books and records by mail.
In 1986, Sisterspirit joined with the Billy DeFrank Center and opened a physical bookstore, in which they held regular coffeehouses with live music or author book-signings. Sisterspirit also sold books for students at San Jose State University. Most importantly, Sisterspirit became a space for women and LGBTQ+ people in San Jose, one of the very few feminist bookstores in the South Bay. At Sisterspirit's height, the bookstore was open seven days a week, with over 5,000 titles, along with 40 regular volunteers.
However, by the early 2000s, Sisterspirit had lost much of their support. With an on-going recession and the South Bay rapidly becoming more expensive, it became harder to get volunteers and to keep their space at the Billy DeFrank Center. Moreover, many of the books that were once exclusive to Sisterspirit could be bought online or at chain bookstores. By August 2010, Sisterspirit closed, selling off the last of their materials and donating the money to Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. Sisterspirit was the only bookstore in the United States to be run for over two decades by an all volunteer staff.
This collection consists of 11 boxes of administrative/business records, photographs, book-signing and performance material, book-selling information, meeting minutes, financial records, and framed materials. Also includes posters, broadsides,stickers, buttons, and other realia.
Post written by Special Collections & Archives Student Assistant Elena Castaneda, who was also responsible for processing the Sisterspirit Records.
Sources:
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 15th-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 15th-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 14th and 15th-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 19th or 20th-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
