“135th Street Branch. Interior.” Source: The New York Public Library Digital Collections.
The Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division’s collection of books, periodicals, serials, microform, and maps equate to over half a million items. However, when researchers come to visit us in Harlem, one of the most popular resources is a collection that has been built personally by the hands of librarians for almost 100 years, the Schomburg Center Clipping Files.
The origins of the clipping files date back to 1924, when Catherine Latimer, the first Black librarian hired at the New York Public Library, realized that there was a need by the community not being fulfilled by the Library’s collections. As described in a review of The Kaiser Index to Black Resources 1948-1986, “reference material on black people was so thin that the resourceful librarians at the Schomburg Library were forced, out of sheer necessity, to create a file of clippings from newspapers and magazines to answer reference questions.” This began as a simple card file but grew to hundreds of thousands of items.
The clippings became an invaluable resource for the community and garnered recognition with scholars and other librarians across the country.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
