W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, finding aid

The archival description of MS 312, Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst.

Source

EAD 2002 at http://findingaids.library.umass.edu/ead/mums312.xml. One request, 4.5 MB.

This host matters. credo.library.umass.edu and scua.library.umass.edu both serve a bot check to scripted requests, so the digitised documents and the SCUA site cannot be harvested. findingaids.library.umass.edu does not, and it publishes the EAD directly. HTTP only, no HTTPS.

What this holds, and what it does not

The description, not the documents. The papers are digitised in Credo and the finding aid links out. Description is the part that makes an archive navigable, and the part that can be held as records and built on.

Record types

Type	Count	Notes
Series	20	The arrangement, with the archivist's scope note for each
Grouping	96	Subseries and dated runs between series and file
Unit	9,215	File-level entries. 5,103 carry a scope note.
Correspondent	3,293	Derived by grouping correspondence file titles

The correspondence series

Series 1 is filed by correspondent, so its 7,300 file entries are people rather than boxes. Each carries a date range, a box and folder, and often a sentence describing the exchange. Grouping them turns the series into a browsable list of who Du Bois wrote to and when: the N.A.A.C.P. (74 folders), Georgia Douglas Johnson (44), Fisk University (36), his wife Nina (33), his daughter Yolande (29).

Correspondent records are derived, not authoritative. They come from grouping filing names as written. The same person spelled two ways is two records, and a name is not reconciled against VIAF or LCNAF. Treat the count as the number of folders filed under a string.

Run

pnpm scrape umass/dubois-papers   # one request, a few seconds
pnpm push umass/dubois-papers --env dev