AFL, CIO, and AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education, Research Division records
Collection
0080-LBR-RG22-001
The AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education (COPE) was founded in 1955 to encourage workers to participate in political life. While COPE may have compiled voting statistics and published some of the printed material, this collection contains mostly secondary material issued by others and collected by office staff. The materials consists of correspondence, voting statistics, printed materials, and clippings pertaining to election campaigns, politicians, and political issues.
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.
51.00 Linear Feet
English
The AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education (COPE) Research Division Files contain correspondence, voting statistics, printed material, and clippings pertaining to election campaigns, politicians, and political issues for the period 1944-1979. While COPE may have compiled voting statistics and published some of the printed material, this collection contains mostly secondary material issued by others and collected by office staff. Materials prior to 1955 were collected by either CIO-PAC or AFL-LLPE. These sub-group records are arranged into series according to topic and reflects the original organization of the records.
Additional historical information about the Committee on Political Education is available in the external document below.
This collection is organized into three series:
The AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education transferred these records to the George Meany Memorial Archives in four accessions in 1982, 1985, and 1990. 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.
Marcy Halbleib, Jake Wilson, Jennifer Winter, and Lee Sayrs at the George Meany Memorial Archives initially processed these records in 1984. 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 Rebecca Thayer updated the descriptive content for accuracy. Revisions include changes to biographical/historical notes, scope and content notes, and the creation of new collection numbers. Rebecca Thayer also enhanced custodial histories and re-wrote collection titles to better conform to archival standards.
Part of the Special Collections and University Archives