February 2023 Update

We have been very busy and this update includes many things.

Join us?

The Archival Collaboration is looking for partners for the Summer of 2023. The 2022 summer program with students from Yale and Puerto Rico was a great success. The students organized and cataloged a massive collection of Fomento Economico documents plus worked on guides to other collections. Please write to Prof. Aldo Lauria Santiago with questions about participation or read the call.

 At the AGPR…

The Archival Collaboration and the AGPR received a grant from the Fundacion Puertorriquena para las Humanidades to organize and digitize select small collections held at the AGPR.  Students and recent graduates from Puerto Rico will be hired to help with the work of cleaning, organizing and cataloguing these collections through early 2024.  The collections include:

• Diverse news clippings (Administración de Fomento Económico, Departamento de Agricultura y Comercio, Departamento del Trabajo, Periódico La Democracia
• Oficina de Estabilización Económica
• Colección Cerro Maravilla
  • Gobernador Carlos Romero Barceló
  • Colección Particular de Manny Suarez
• Publicaciones oficiales de Gobierno (BNPR)
• Police records on labor conflicts from the 1930s

The project will also contribute four discussions by historians about the value and importance of these collections, presented in a public event.

With the support of AGPR Director Hilda Ayala, Prof. Lauria Santiago has begun a full inventory of the uncatalogued holdings of the AGPR. This will likely take through 2024. The goal is to both guide priorities for cataloging but also produce a public-use inventory for historians and potential funders. This will include all miscellaneous card indices and internal guides, including items but rarely used held in the Reading Room.

Our assistants Monica de Jesus and Sofia Feliciano have been very busy. The archival guides produced by the summer internship students and continued by Monica, Sofia and Archivist Pedro Roig are now available in our new section for AGPR Guides and Catalogs. They will also be posted soon to the AGPR website.

Sofia Feliciano has also started work with the massive Junta de Planificacion collection with the support of Prof. Dinzey Flores of Rutgers University. Dinzey Flores is a urbanist and sociologist and chairs the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers, New Brunswick.  Dinzey Flores maintains a research agenda that includes urbanism and housing in Puerto Rico.

Miscellaneous finds: Fomento Economico Office in the Dominican Republic:

 

 

 

Miscellaneous finds: Tarjetero documentos en Espana (mostly searchable now through PARES)

Monica de Jesus and Archivist Juan Roman have also completed the work for the catalog of the Banco de Fomento Economico internal library (located in the AGPR Reference Room). The guide is now in our new AGPR Guides and Catalogs section and will soon be on the AGPR website.  Monica catalogued every item in the collection composed mostly of internal publications and studies related to Puerto Rico’s 20th Century economic, urban and human development.  She is nearly done with the other major reference room collection, the Sugar Industry collection of specialized books and pamphlets, many of them from the Sugar Producer’s Association.

Juan Roman has also organized a vertical archive of miscellaneous materials drawn from Fomento /PRIDCO.Sofia and Monica will continue creating guides with the supervision of Pedro Roig. New collections will include:

 

 

 

• More from Departamento del Trabajo
• Junta de Relaciones del Trabajoo
• More from Departamento de Comercio y Agricultura
• More from Comisión de Servicio Públic
• Autoridad de Tierras
• Fomento Industrial y Economico
• Administracion de Fomento Cooperativo
• Procurador General
• Servicio Sociales
• Fortaleza

The Digitized Books and Publications section has many new titles posted in February and March, many of them scanned by student workers at Rutgers, coordinated by CLAS program assistants Daria Turner and Cheyenne Menezes and work study students Hely Dodia and Nida Arshad. Daria is coordinating the scanning of a long list of out-of-print and historical volumes.  New items will be posted every week. Sign up for our email list for updates to the digital library.

We have also posted major updates for two of our featured historians in the Archive of Historians of Puerto Rico (Francisco Moscoso and Astrid Cubano Iguina). More soon.  You can also sign up for an email list for updates to this page.

Meanwhile at the UPR…

Jean Gabriel and Paola Rivera continue the work microfilming and digitizing special collections items for our digital libraries.  These have been posted to our digital library page as they arrive.

Initial results from the Revista del Cafe are now posted in the Digital Library. The work involves microfilming the journal while digitizing the color pages and covers.  Their work flow involves the support of Harrison, the Director of the Archivo Digital de Puerto Rico who scans the resulting microfilm for joint publishing of the journal.

 

 

The Jean, Paola and others are also developing their own funding proposal for a multimedia public humanities website based on the history of coffee and the Revsita del Cafe!

 

 

All our work continues to be supported by the work of our administrators at Rutgers, Maria Ealey and Christina Pasley.

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