Online Resources: “New Online Archive Offers a Glimpse into More than a Century of American History”

From Cooper Union:

The Cooper Union introduces Voices from the Great Hall, an extraordinary new public resource that tells the history of New York and the nation through the words of the people who helped to shape it from the stage of the storied Great Hall. Voices from the Great Hall is a digital archive, free and accessible to anyone, and generously supported by The Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation. This growing collection presents all known sound and video recordings made in Cooper Union’s historic Great Hall dating back to 1941 and continuing to the present, as well as 8,900 objects, such as photographs, tickets, and fliers, related to more than 3,000 Great Hall programs dating to 1859.

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Voices from the Great Hall is home to recordings of some of the most renowned American thinkers and leaders from across disciplines, including Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton; Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall; feminist, journalist, and activist Gloria Steinem; nearly every New York City mayor from the 1950s to the present; Congressional leaders like John Lewis and Adam Schiff; cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead; architect Louis I. Kahn; psychologist and writer Timothy Leary; and poet and author Carl Sandburg. The digital archive is searchable by date, speaker, and 20 different themes such as Anthropology and Sociology; Architecture and City Planning; Environment; Labor and Economics; New York; Politics and Activism; Racial Justice and Human Rights; and Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

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It took a team of archivists and designers nearly four years to create the archive which consists of the new digital platform and a collection compiled from multiple sources. Many of the historic recordings had been languishing in storage in Cooper Union’s audio-visual department for decades. With the onset of this project, they were rehoused, preserved, and cataloged. Additional recordings were transferred from The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, The Cooper Union School of Art, and New York City Municipal Archives WNYC New York Public Radio collection. Many of the recordings made in partnership with WNYC from 1968 to 1970 were syndicated nationally by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. Ultimately, the archive project grew into a larger cause to consolidate every available piece of Great Hall information at The Cooper Union into this formalized resource. The physical and born digital materials represented on the site are archived and available in  The Cooper Union Library Archives and Special Collections.

Direct to Voices from the Great Hall Online Archive

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Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Digital Collections, Digital Preservation, Libraries, News, Video Recordings