The Mississippi State University Libraries Special Collections Department is proud to announce the inclusion of over 300 manuscript collection finding aids to the Library’s online catalog and OCLC Worldcat. These collection finding aids, which were previously accessible only in-house, have been linked to the library’s website and corresponding bibliographic records added to the Libraries’ online catalog and OCLC Worldcat.
 
The digital finding aids, most of which were developed using Archivist Toolkit, cover a wide variety of subjects from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that will be of interest to both scholars and the general public alike. Subjects include: agriculture, slavery, the Civil War in Mississippi, the lumber industry, African-American history, clubs and organizations, the Civil Rights movement, journalism in Mississippi, church histories, and numerous other subjects.

Frances Coleman, Dean of Libraries, said, “The release of these digital finding aids represents many hours of work on behalf of a variety of people in the Library’s Special Collections department. The addition of these finding aids will ensure that these exceptional and unique collections are discoverable by researchers worldwide.”
 
Types of materials found in the manuscripts collections include: correspondence, diaries, journals, plantation records, slave schedules, ledgers, newspaper articles, photographs, audio and video recordings, microfilm, and a variety of articles of clothing and artifacts.

Examples include the Eugene Butler papers (Progressive Farmer editor-in-chief Eugene Butler); the Charles Johnson Faulk papers (Pulitzer prize-winning reporter and later editor of the Vicksburg (MS) Evening Post); the Turner Catledge papers (journalist, and editor of The New York Times); the Douglas Conner papers (prominent African-American physician and civil rights activist in Mississippi); and the Lenoir Plantation papers featuring the Lenoir family who migrated to Mississippi from South Carolina in the 1830s, eventually building a plantation home in the late 1840s on 3500 acres at Prairie, Mississippi.
 
For assistance with finding resources in Special Collections, please visit our website at http://library.msstate.edu/specialcollections or call the Special Collections at 662-325-7679.
 
About the MSU Libraries:
Mississippi State University Libraries is a premier research library providing its communities of users an ongoing, creative, technologically advanced library program that provides new and emerging technologies; enhances and inspires teaching, research, and service of the highest caliber in an environment of free and open inquiry and with a commitment to excellence. For more information about MSU Libraries, please visit http://library.msstate.edu/

Submitted by
Ben Nagel
Library Associate / Public Relations Committee
MSU Libraries