Shunzo Sakamaki Extraordinary Lecture
Documenting Personal and Community History: The Case of the Linen Hall Library, Belfast
Event ID: EV009620T
Info: Jul 1 • Tue • 7:00pm • Architecture Auditorium • Free • For more information, call 956-8246
With: Yvonne Murphy
In 1968, in a bar in Belfast, a librarian named Jimmy Vitty was handed a civil rights leaflet. At the time, tensions between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland were on the verge of erupting into a thirty-year period of violent conflict with the UK. Mr. Vitty took the leaflet back to his office at the Linen Hall Library. Today, forty years later, that leaflet is now part of the Northern Ireland Political Collection, a vast accumulation of over 250,000 items documenting all aspects of the Northern Ireland conflict, genteelly known as The Troubles.
Yvonne Murphy, Librarian of the Northern Ireland Political Collection, will discuss and present images from this rare and fascinating political archive, comprised of pamphlets, stickers, posters, manifestos, books, dissertations, newspapers, magazines, journals, photographs, film, video and sound recordings, and even Christmas cards and smuggled hand-written notes.
Her dynamic presentation will inspire anyone-from librarians and archivists to the general public-concerned with preserving such historically valuable, often-overlooked materials for future generations. It will change the way we look at the ephemera that surrounds us.
Yvonne Murphy has been Librarian of the Northern Ireland Political Collection at the Linen Hall Library since 1995. As curator of this collection Ms. Murphy created and was Project Manager for Troubled Images: Posters and Images of the Northern Ireland Conflict, a traveling, international exhibition that drew upon the Linen Hall holdings which toured throughout North America and South Africa. As coeditor of the Troubled Images CD-ROM and book, she was awarded the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial prize for 2003 and was runner up in the 2002 CILIP Awards for outstanding electronic works of reference in the United Kingdom. She has served as a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, California and participated as a fellow in a Salzburg Seminar on Managing Change: Libraries in the 21st Century. In addition to her work with the Political Collection, Ms Murphy is also responsible for initiating a major development campaign for the Linen Hall.
An Outreach College presentation co-sponsored by the University of Hawai`i at Manoa Library and Center for Biographical Research with funding provided by the University of Hawai`i Endowment for the Humanities and the Shunzo Sakamaki Extraordinary Lecture Endowment.