By Nikolai Wise '21
It’s a past and a place familiar to many, yet still new with history to uncover, and that’s the goal of two initiatives at UNC Asheville—a revived publication brought into the digital era and a model of lifelong learning at its best.
The first is a collaboration between UNC Asheville Special Collections and other Appalachian schools through the Special Collections Committee of the Appalachian Studies Association, and its publication, The Appalachian Curator. Director of UNC Asheville Special Collections Gene Hyde serves as editor of the publication and is leading its digital publication.
“We brought this out again, because we thought there was a need for it, because there’s a whole lot more to being an informed user of Appalachian resources than doing a Google search,” Hyde said. “And we wanted to find out ways where we could communicate more. It’s intentionally geared towards anybody who has any interest in Appalachian studies. We have heard that there are folks up at the Smithsonian who are reading it and who are reaching out to Appalachian collections because of that. So, we’re happy about that.”
Hyde and other committee members find the Curator to be an extremely useful tool in informing archivists and others about ongoing research and history of Appalachia, and it has been widely read. It’s also rooted in its own history as a 1990s print newsletter. The methods and content has changed a little since its heyday.
“The Curator [was] fascinating. It ran for most of the ’90s, started in the ’80s. It was a way for Appalachian Collections to communicate with each other and to share information with smaller collections,” Hyde said. “And they would have columns about how to do this kind of processing or a column saying there’s workshops coming up here, or they would have profiles and specific collections. This collection here in Asheville Special Collections was one of the collections profiled by the original Curator.”
“What’s different now in the internet age is, as opposed to us holding workshops, there are so many very good sources that are available online and what we may do is more of an annotated selected list of those places and steer people in those directions,” Hyde said. “In terms of the internet, more things are available, that doesn’t necessarily mean that people know where they are. We’re not sure if everybody knows everything that’s out there, and we want to make sure that those sorts of resources are available.”
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