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The Labor History Resources in the University of Iowa Libraries (UIL), the State Historical Society of Iowa/Iowa City (SHSI), and the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library (HHPL), all located within 12 miles of one another in east central Iowa, have long been known as a major repository of source materials concerning the politics of American agriculture, Iowa history, and the Hoover Presidency and Commerce Secretariat. UIL sources mentioned here. Pertinent oral history collections at UIL are the Communications Workers of America-University of Iowa Oral History Project, and the Quad Cities Oral History Project, along with a 1936 typescript history of the area's labor and radical movements by R.F. McNabney. The SHSI holds a magnificent and in some ways unparalleled collection which, due to staff shortages in recent years, remains largely unprocessed and therefore somewhat difficult to access. The HHPL, opened to scholars in 1966, holds the Hoover papers, totaling some 2450 linear feet, and the papers of more than 100 of Hoover's associates and contemporaries, totaling over 2200 linear feet.

The American labor movement has been heavily Catholic for more than a century, both in its rank and file composition and top leadership. From its inception in 1948 the Department of Archives and Manuscripts at the Catholic University of America, Washington D.C., has therefore devoted a substantial portion of its holdings to collections in the field of American labor history. Many of these collections were acquired with the help of clerical faculty who had themselves been important figures in early 20th century social reform. The records of the National Conference of Catholic Charities, the Catholic Interracial Council of New York, and the National Council of Catholic Women/National Council of Catholic Men contain much material on Church welfare work, Catholic social programs, and efforts to influence government social and economic policy. The National Catholic War Council undertook extensive social surveys among the Catholic urban population with particular emphasis on the conditions of women and child laborers, extent of immigrant citizenship and health conditions at home and in the armed service camps. The John Brophy papers is the most consistently useful of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) holdings. The Philip Murray Collection covers the period 1943 to 1952 when Murray was simultaneously president of the CIO and United Steelworkers of America.

In June, 2001 the CITY2000 Foundation donated 500,000 photographic negatives, over 500 audio- and videotapes, and office archives to the University of Illinois at Chicago. The collection represents an image time capsule of a major American city during the year of the millennium. Every class of individual, event of the year, and neighborhood was explored by 200 professional photographers and brought together in this unique archive. As part of its agreement in accepting the archive, the UIC Library committed to making the collection available at least until the year 3000. This paper discusses the steps UIC is taking to make this possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The labor history resources at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin are, in part, the result of the first systematic attempt to document the rise of working-class movements and trade unionism in the U.S. In the early 1890s, when Richard T. Ely joined the University of Wisconsin faculty in Madison, Wisconsin, the Society began assisting him in gathering source material for the study of the labor movement. When, in 1904, Ely formed the American Bureau of Industrial Research and brought John R. Commons to Madison, the Society began collecting labor material on a systematic basis. From the 1890s to the present, those collecting for the Society have had a very broad definition of the labor movement, including not only trade unions but also anarchism, communism, cooperation, socialism, utopianism, and other working-class movements. Society research collections are divided functionally into three major areas, Library, including newspapers, pamphlets, books; Archives, including organizational records, personal papers, and Wisconsin governmental records; and Visual and Sound Archives, including photographs, posters and other graphics.

Professor James F. Willard, head of the Dept. of History from 1907 to 1935 and history professor Frederick L. Paxson at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, devoted much of their time to collecting manuscripts throughout the state which led the foundation of the Western Historical Collections (WHC) at the University. During World War I, Willard received the first financial support specifically for historical records development. This period was the official beginning of WHC. With the decline during the 1920s of the West's hardrock mining industry, collecting of materials from the fading bonanza towns resulted in major groups of records being found. The University Library accepted complete responsibility for the development of the Western Historical Collections in 1959, and with this change, a full-time, permanent, and qualified staff was hired. In 1964, the curator, John A. Brennan, a history professor, began to change the direction of acquisition from frontier and pioneer era material to 20th century manuscripts concerning political, social, and economical history emphasizing labor, politics, women, and non-profit organizations.

Labor history sources at the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research in Los Angeles are part of a larger collection on 20th century social and political history developed by Library founder Emil Freed. When Freed opened the Library in 1963, he brought into being an institution that would house much of the material he had collected during a lifetime on the Left and in the labor movement. The idea of a Library to preserve the history of labor and the Left took firm hold in Freed's mind in the 1950s, when Freed rescued the personal libraries of friends who, vulnerable to the repression of the Cold War era, were on the verge of destroying their political books and pamphlets. To these collections Freed added his own accumulation of documents from various struggles in which he had been closely involved: the Unemployed Councils of the 1930s, the Hollywood studio strikes of the 1940s, and the Civil Rights Congress of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Beyond the 25,000 volume book collection, of which U.S. labor history is a particular emphasis, the Library's 20,000 item pamphlet collection is a rich source for labor research.

Describing Archives: A Content Standard breaks important ground for American archivists in its distinction between creator descriptions and archival material descriptions. Implementations of creator descriptions, many using Encoded Archival Context (EAC), are found internationally. DACS's optional approach of describing creators in authority records separate from, but linked to, descriptions of holdings has the potential for the "rediscovery" of provenance in U.S. repository collections. Multiple provenance (e.g., the Australian series system), postmodern theory of archives, and an increased emphasis on provenance as function are some of the reconceptualizations of archival context that compliance with DACS may inspire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]