George Meany Memorial Archives, Vertical File collection
Collection
0051-LBR-RG98-002
The Vertical Files collection contains information about labor history and labor unions collected and organized by the AFL-CIO Library. Materials cover many topics, events, and people and consist of clippings, reports, press releases, pamphlets, and other miscellaneous sources of information that librarians selected for short term, easy reference in providing information services to the officers and staff of the AFL and the AFL-CIO.
This collection is open to the public and must be used in the Special Collections reading room. Researchers must register and agree to copyright and privacy laws before using this collection.
Photocopies or digital surrogates may be provided in accordance with Special Collections and University Archives duplication policy.
Copyright resides with the creators of the documents or their heirs unless otherwise specified. It is the researcher's responsibility to secure permission to publish materials from the appropriate copyright holder.
Archival materials may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal and/or state right to privacy laws or other regulations. While we make a good faith effort to identify and remove such materials, some may be missed during our processing. If a researcher finds sensitive personal information in a collection, please bring it to the attention of the reading room staff.
144.00 Linear Feet
English
The Vertical Files collection contains information about labor history and labor unions collected and organized by the AFL-CIO Library. Materials consists of clippings, reports, press releases, pamphlets, and other miscellaneous sources of information on a wide variety of topics that librarians selected for short term, easy reference in providing information services to the officers and staff of the AFL and the AFL-CIO.
This collection is organized into three series:
Each series is arranged alphabetically by subject or organization name, and then chronologically. Most folders are in loose reverse chronological order.
The records comprising this collection were transferred to the George Meany Memorial Archives by the AFL-CIO Library in 1994. The exact provenance of Series 3 is unknown; it was added to this collection in 2006. The George Meany Memorial Archives transferred these records as part of a major transfer of their archive and library holdings to the University of Maryland Libraries in 2013.
Archives staff at the George Meany Memorial Archives initially processed these records in 1998. The University of Maryland Libraries received the records and the finding aid in 2013. In 2017, Bria Parker exported and cleaned the finding aid contents from the Eloquent Systems database using OpenRefine, and finally transformed the finding aids into Encoded Archival Description (EAD) using a series of programmatic scripts. The finding aid was ingested into ArchivesSpace in 2018, at which point Jennifer Eidson updated the descriptive content for accuracy. Revisions include changes to biographical/historical notes, scope and content notes, and the creation of new collection numbers. Jennifer Eidson also enhanced custodial histories and re-wrote collection titles to better conform to archival standards.
Processing has been minimal, mostly consisting of some weeding and refiling. Researchers should be aware, however, that this is not a methodical collection and the file labels do not follow any formal classification system.
Part of the Special Collections and University Archives