On the final morning of the Fulbright Commissioners conference, I gave a presentation to the attendees about the University’s Fulbright related collections. Our intention at the University and in the Special Collections Department is to preserve Senator Fulbright’s legacy, and that of the Fulbright Program. We do that through actively collecting and making available Fulbright related collections. It’s our desire to become the research hub for Fulbright and international educational and cultural exchange scholarship.
Expanding our collections to include records from these global commissions would enable researchers to study exchanges from a global rather than solely a location perspective. My presentation included four main topics:
- Examples of how we preserve the legacy of Senator Fulbright and the program.
- An explanation of archives and archiving.
- How to donate records.
- Why the commissions may want to donate their records to the University of Arkansas.
When sharing the reasons why the commissioners may want to donate their records, I emphasized the staff expertise we have in the department to organize and provide researchers access to those records. I also explained the environmental conditions and storage facilities in our department that best preserve the collections. Donating collections to an archive also helps to protect the records against political turmoil or uncertainty. In some cases, the existing records we have for countries like Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan may be the only records that still exist that document the history of those exchanges with the USA. Finally, it’s our desire to offer researchers a holistic approach for analyzing the Fulbright Program, which can be done if the records are held by one archive, instead of dispersed throughout the world.
I had many productive conversations with commissioners during my week in Budapest. There’s a strong interest in linking our collections through our online finding aids, and the possibility of hosting visits from not only the Fulbright Commissioners, but possibly the archivists who steward their records.
It’s been a pleasure to participate in this conference, and exciting to consider the possibilities of how we, at the University of Arkansas can best support the stewardship of the Fulbright Program legacy.