Volume 45, Issue 2 - Special issue: Protecting Cultural Heritage Today: Challenges and New Opportunities

In a war-ravaged suburb of Damascus, rebel fighters nurture a library of 15,000 books to keep the hopes of revolution alive.

In March of 2016, the Student Archivists at Maryland (SAM) brought together archives professionals as part of Americana, their annual symposium at the University of Maryland. Americana 2016 “Archival Activism and Social Justice” focused on the intersection of archives and social justice, a topic of increasing importance and debate both in the archival field and in current events. Three speakers related their experiences documenting the experiences of displaced communities and social justice movements. Katharina Hering, Project Archivist for the National Equal Justice Library at the Georgetown Law Library related her work documenting the history of legal aid, indigene defense and the history of poverty. Diane Travis, a doctoral student at the iSchool explained her project at the University of Maryland’s Digital Curation and Innovation Center reuniting the records of Japanese Americans who were interred at the Tule Lake Segregation Center during World War II. The final speaker, Denise D. Meringolo, is Director of Public History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the creator of the Preserve the Baltimore Uprising Project.