Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-7qhmt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T22:52:08.230Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Entering Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, one still passes through the “catalog room,” an antechamber filled with rows of card drawers. Inaugurated in 1930 by the librarian Dorothy Porter, this catalog of the “Negro Collection” served for much of the twentieth century as one of the only portals to African American print culture. This article reconstructs the creation of that catalog in order to chart the relation between infrastructure and racial imaginaries of reading. Porter contravened the routine misfiling of blackness in prevailing information systems by rewriting Dewey decimals, creating new taxonomies for black print, and fielding research inquiries from across the African diaspora. She built public access to books “by and about the Negro” at a moment when most black readers were barred from libraries. In so doing, she fueled a broader sense of what a black archive—or what Porter called a “literary museum”—might afford.

Type
Special Topic: Cultures of Reading
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2019

References

Works Cited

Adler, Melissa. Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge. Fordham UP, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aguilera, Jasmine. “Another Word for ‘Illegal Alien’ at the Library of Congress: Contentious”. The New York Times, 22 July 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/us/another-word-for-illegal-alien-at-the-library-of-congress-contentious.html.Google Scholar
Alexander, Elizabeth. The Black Interior Graywolf Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Association, American Library. A.L.A. Booklist, vol. 3, 1907.Google Scholar
Association, American Library. A.L.A. Catalog, 1904–1911. Edited by Bascom, Elva L., American Library Association Publishing Board, 1912.Google Scholar
American Library Association. “Questionnaire for Study of Regional Union Catalogs.” 1941. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U. Augst, Thomas. “Faith in Reading: Public Libraries, Liberalism, and the Civil Religion.” Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States,” Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, edited by Augst and Kenneth Carpenter, U of Massachusetts P, 2007, pp. 148–83.Google Scholar
Barnes, Bart. “Librarian Dorothy Porter Wesley Dies: Black History Curator at Howard”. The Washington Post, 19 Dec. 1995, p. E5.Google Scholar
Battle, Thomas C.“Dorothy Porter Wesley”. Dictionary of American Library Biography, 2nd supplement, edited by Davis, Donald G., Libraries Unlimited, 2003, pp. 219–21.Google Scholar
Battles, Matthew. Library: An Unquiet History. W.W. Norton, 2003.Google Scholar
Bay, Mia E., et al., editors. Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women. U of North Carolina P, 2015.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library”. Illuminations, edited by Arendt, Hannah, translated by Zohn, Harry, Schocken Books, 1978, pp. 5968.Google Scholar
Berman, Sanford. Prejudices and Antipathies: A Tract on the LC Subject Heads concerning People. Scarecrow Press, 1971.Google Scholar
Black Panther Directed by Coogler, Ryan, Marvel Studios, 2018.Google Scholar
Blair, Ann. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna. “Special Collections of Negroana”. Library Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 3, 1944, pp. 187206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. MIT P, 1999.Google Scholar
Bowker, Geoffrey C., et al. “Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Network Environment”. International Handbook of Internet Research, edited by Hunsinger, Jeremy et al., Springer Nature, 2010, pp. 97117. ResearchGate, www.researchgate.net/publication/225970964_Toward_Information_Infrastructure_Studies_Ways_of_Knowing_in_a_Networked_Environment.Google Scholar
Braddock, Jeremy. Collecting as Modernist Practice. Johns Hopkins UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Brawley, Benjamin. Letter to Kelly Miller. 14 Dec. 1938. Kelly Miller Papers, Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U, box 1, folder 17.Google Scholar
Burrington, Ingrid. “How to See Invisible Infrastructure”. The Atlantic, 14 Aug. 2015, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/how-to-see-invisible-infrastructure/401204/.Google Scholar
“Card, Discard.” Columbia Magazine, Spring 2013, p. 64, magazine.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/2018–10/2013_1_Spring.pdf.Google Scholar
Caton, Louise G. Letter to Dorothy Porter. 14 Nov. 1938. Dorothy Porter Wesley Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U, box 5.Google Scholar
Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Stanford UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Chestnut, J. Le Count. “School System Rids Itself of Thorn in Side.” The Chicago Defender, 8 Apr. 1922. ProQuest, search.proquest.com.Google Scholar
Christian, Barbara. New Black Feminist Criticism, 19852000. U of Illinois P, 2007.Google Scholar
Clack, Doris H. Black Literature Resources: Analysis and Organization. Marcel Dekker, 1975.Google Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed., Routledge, 1999.Google Scholar
Cooper, Brittney C. Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. U of Illinois P, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“A Cooperative System of Branch Libraries in Schools”. School and Society, vol. 15, no. 373, 1922, pp. 195–96.Google Scholar
Custer, Benjamin A. Letter to Joseph H. Reason, forwarded to Dorothy Porter. 7 Dec. 1959. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
Dagbovie, Pero Gaglo. “Black Women Historians from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Dawning of the Civil Rights Movement”. Journal of African American History, vol. 89, no. 3, 2004, pp. 241–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dain, Phyllis. “he Great Libraries”. Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, edited by Kaestle, Carl F. and Radway, Janice A., U of North Carolina P, 2014, pp. 452–70. Vol. 4 of A History of the Book in America.Google Scholar
Darnton, Robert. “What Is the History of Books?Daedalus, vol. 111, no. 3, 1982, pp. 6583.Google Scholar
Davis, Beulah. Letter to Dorothy Porter. 17 Feb. 1940. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
Davis, Castine A. Letter to Library of Congress, forwarded to Dorothy Porter. 18 June 1951. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
Des Jardins, Julie. Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and Politics of Memory, 1880–1945. U of North Carolina P, 2003.Google Scholar
Dewey, Melvil. Decimal Clasification and Relativ Index. 12th ed., Forest Press, 1927.Google Scholar
Dewey, Melvil. Decimal Classification. Standard 15th ed., Forest Press, 1951.Google Scholar
Downs, Robert B. Union Catalogs in the United States. American Library Association, 1942.Google Scholar
Drabinski, Emily. “Queering the Catalog: Queer heory and the Politics of Correction”. Library Quarterly, vol. 82, no. 3, Apr. 2013, pp. 94111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Drucker, Johanna. “Reading Interface”. PMLA, vol. 128, no. 1, Jan. 2013, pp. 213–20.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. 4th ed., A.C. McClurg, 1904.Google Scholar
Enwezor, Okwui. Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. International Center for Photography, 2008.Google Scholar
Fellows, Dorkas. Letter to Dorothy Porter. 6 Dec. 1934. Dorothy Porter Wesley Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U, box 5.Google Scholar
Foster, Frances Smith. “Genealogies of Our Concerns, Early (African) American Print Culture, and Transcending Tough Times”. American Literary History, vol. 22, no. 2, 2010, pp. 368–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Tings: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1970. Vintage, 1994.Google Scholar
Gardner, Eric. Black Print Unbound: he Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture. Oxford UP, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gikandi, Simon. “The Fantasy of the Library”. PMLA, vol. 128, no. 1, Jan. 2013, pp. 920.Google Scholar
Gitelman, Lisa. “Searching and Thinking about Searching JSTOR. Representations, vol. 127, no. 1, 2014, pp. 7382.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guy-Sheftall, Beverly, editor. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Tought. W.W. Norton, 1995.Google Scholar
Hamilton, Carolyn, et al., editors. Refiguring the Archive. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardy, Molly O'Hagan. “‘Black Printers’ on White Cards: Information Architecture in the Data Structures of the Early American Book Trades”. Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2016, U of Minnesota P, 2017, pp. 377–82.Google Scholar
Hardy, Molly O'Hagan. “The Practice of Everyday Cataloging: ‘Blacks as Authors’ and the Early American Bibliographic Record.” PastlsPresent, American Antiquarian Association, 19 June 2017, pastispresent.org/2017/good-sources/the-practice-of-everyday-cataloging-black- bibliography-and-the-early-american-bibliographic-record/.Google Scholar
Harley, Sharon. “For the Good of Family and Race: Gender, Work, and Domestic Roles in the Black Community, 1880–1930”. Signs, vol. 15, no. 2, Winter 1990, pp. 336–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. U of Chicago P, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hicks, Marie. Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing. MIT P, 2017.Google Scholar
Hidden Figures. Directed by Melfi, Theodore, Fox 2000 Pictures, 2017.Google Scholar
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. “African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race”. Signs, vol. 17, no. 2, Winter 1992, pp. 251–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hill, David Spence. Te Libraries of Washington. American Library Association, 1936.Google Scholar
Hochman, Barbara. “The History of Reading and the Death of the Text”. American Literary History, vol. 21, no. 4, 2009, pp. 845–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hughes, Langston. “My Early Days in Harlem”. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, vol. 9, edited by Christopher C. De Santis, U of Missouri P, 2002, pp. 395–98.Google Scholar
Hutchinson, George, and Young, John Kevin. Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race since 1850. U of Michigan P, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Ickes Deplores Lack of Library Facilities: Tells Concern at Howard U. Dedication.” The Chicago Defender, 3 June 1939, p. 11.Google Scholar
Associates, International Research. Access to Public Libraries: A Research Project. American Library Association, 1963.Google Scholar
“The J.E. Moorland Foundation of the University Library.” Howard University Record, vol. 10, no. 1, 1916, pp. 512.Google Scholar
Johnson-Cooper, Glendora. “African-American Historical Continuity: Jean Blackwell Hutson and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture”. Reclaiming the American Library Past: Writing the Women In, edited by Hildenbrand, Suzanna, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996, pp. 2751.Google Scholar
Knott, Cheryl. Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow. U of Massachusetts P, 2015.Google ScholarPubMed
Krajewski, Markus. Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548–1929. MIT P, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latimer, Catherine. Letter to Dorothy Porter. 19 June 1933. Dorothy Porter Wesley Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U, box 5.Google Scholar
Library Company of Philadelphia. Afro-Americana, 1553–1906: A Catalog of the Holdings of the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. G.K. Hall, 1973.Google Scholar
Library of Congress. Classification: Class E-F America. 2nd ed., Government Printing Office, 1913.Google Scholar
Library of Congress. Classification: Class H: Social Sciences. 2nd ed., Government Printing Office, 1920.Google Scholar
Library of Congress. Handbook of Card Distribution. 6th ed., Government Printing Office, 1925.Google Scholar
Library of Congress. The National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints: A Cumulative Author List Representing Library of Congress Printed Cards and Titles Reported by Other American Libraries. Mansell, 1968.Google Scholar
Light, Jennifer S. “When Computers Were Women”. Technology and Culture, vol. 40, no. 3, July 1999, pp. 455–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lindsay, Arnett G. “Materials Bearing on the Negro in America”. Journal of Negro History, vol. 27, no. 1, 1942, pp. 94101.Google Scholar
Luedtke, Joanne. Letter to Dorothy Porter. 27 Aug. 1958. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
MacNair, Mary Wilson, editor. Subject Headings Used in the Dictionary Catalogues of the Library of Congress. 3rd ed., Government Printing Oice, 1928.Google Scholar
Madison, Avril Johnson, and Wesley, Dorothy Porter. “Dorothy Burnett Porter Wesley: Enterprising Steward of Black Culture”. The Public Historian, vol. 17, no. 1, 1995, pp. 1540.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. Penguin Books, 2014.Google Scholar
Manguel, Alberto. The Library at Night. Yale UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Marshall, Joan. On Equal Terms: A Thesaurus for Non-sexist Indexing and Cataloging. Neal-Schuman, 1977.Google Scholar
Mattern, Shannon. “Library as Infrastructure.” Places, 2014, placesjournal.org/article/library-as-infrastructure/.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matthews, Geraldine O., and the African-American Materials Project staff, compositors. Black American Writers, 1773–1949: A Bibliography and Union List. G.K. Hall, 1975.Google Scholar
McCombs, Phil. “Touching History at Howard”. The Washington Post, 16 Dec. 1989, p. D1.Google Scholar
McGann, Jerome. “Database, Interface, and Archival Fever”. PMLA, vol. 122, no. 5, Oct. 2007, pp. 1588–92.Google Scholar
McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Duke UP, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miksa, Francis L. The DDC, the Universe of Knowledge, and the Post-modern Library. Forest Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Miller, Emily V.D. Letter to Dorothy Porter. 12 July 1934. Dorothy Porter Wesley Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U, box 5.Google Scholar
Miller, Kelly. Letter to Board of Trustees. 20 Sept. 1922. Jesse E. Moorland Papers, Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U, box 32, folder 678.Google Scholar
Miller, Kelly. Letter to Guy B. Johnson. 4 June 1938. Kelly Miller Papers, Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U, box 1, folder 25.Google Scholar
Miller, Kelly. Letter to S.M. Newman. 15 June 1914. Kelly Miller Papers, Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U, box 1, folder 29.Google Scholar
Miller, Kelly. “Pleads for Establishment of National Negro Museum”. Pittsburgh Courier, 28 May 1938, p. 14. Pro-Quest, search.proquest.com/.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Barbara A.“Boston Library Catalogues, 1850–1875: Female Labor and Technological Change”. Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, edited by Augst, Thomas and Carpenter, Kenneth, U of Massachusetts P, 2007, pp. 120–47.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Michele. Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction. U of North Carolina P, 2004.Google Scholar
Moorland, Jesse E. Letter to S.M. Newman. 18 Dec. 1914. Kelly Miller Papers, Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U, box 1, folder 28.Google Scholar
Moorland, Jesse E. Letter to Dorothy Porter. 5 Mar. 1930. Dorothy Porter Wesley Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U, box 4.Google Scholar
Moorland, Jesse E. Letter to Dorothy Porter. 10 Sept. 1931. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
Foundation, Moorland. Annual reports. Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
Foundation, Moorland. Dictionary Catalog of the Jesse E. Moorland Collection of Negro Life and History, Howard University, Washington, DC. G.K. Hall, 1970.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. Verso, 2013.Google Scholar
Morris, Rosalind. Reflection on Library Walk. “Editor's Column: The Library Walk,” by Patricia Yaeger, PMLA, vol. 126, no. 1, Jan. 2011, pp. 3437.Google Scholar
Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. Liberian Dreams: Back-to-Africa Narratives from the 1850s. Pennsylvania State UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Murphy, George. Letter to Dorothy Porter. 7 Apr. 1938. Dorothy Porter Wesley Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U, box 10.Google Scholar
“Negro Materials Catalogued by WPA Project Workers”. Hilltop, 13 Apr. 1939, p. 2.Google Scholar
Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York UP, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olson, Hope A. “he Power to Name: Representation in Library Catalogs”. Signs, vol. 26, no. 3, 2001, pp. 639–68. Literature Resource Center, link.galegroup.com/apps/.Google Scholar
Painter, Nell Irvin. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. W.W. Norton, 1992.Google Scholar
Palumbo-Liu, David. “Universalisms and Minority Culture”. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, Spring 1995. Literature Resource Center, link.galegroup.com/apps/.Google Scholar
Pettee, Julia. Subject Headings: The History and Theory of the Alphabetical Subject Approach to Books. H.W. Wilson, 1946.Google Scholar
Phelps, Edith M. Letter to Dorothy Porter. 11 July 1934. Dorothy Porter Wesley Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U, box 5.Google Scholar
Phelps, Edith M. Letter to Dorothy Porter. 11 Dec. 1934. Dorothy Porter Wesley Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U, box 5.Google Scholar
Phelps, Edith M. Letter to Dorothy Porter. 20 Dec. 1937. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
Pisciotta, Henry. “he Library in Art's Crosshairs”. Art Documentation, vol. 35, 2016, pp. 226.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B. Afro-Braziliana: A Working Bibliography. G.K. Hall, 1978.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B, compiler. A Catalogue of Books in the Moorland Foundation, Compiled by Workers on Projects 271 and 328 of the Works Progress Administration. Howard U, 1939.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B.Classification AME Church.” Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U. Typescript.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B.Description of Project.” Circa 1938. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U. Typescript.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B.“Fifty Years of Collecting”. Black Access: A Bibliography of Afro-American Bibliographies, edited by Newman, Richard, Greenwood Press, 1984, pp. xvii-xxviii.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B.Free Masons.” Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U. Typescript.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B. Letter to Rufus Clement. 16 Jan. 1945. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B. Letter to Dorcas Fellows. 5 Dec. 1934. Dorothy Porter Wesley Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U, box 5.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B. Letter to John Hope Franklin. 25 Nov. 1959. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B. Letter to Elizabeth Gardner. 19 Aug. 1953. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B. Letter to Jesse E. Moorland. 11 July 1932. Dorothy Porter Wesley Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U, box 4.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B. Letter to Florence Murray. 9 Aug. 1943. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B. Letter to E.M. Phelps. 8 Jan. 1938. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B. Letter to Florence Shreeve. 1 July 1938. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B. Letter to Henry O. Tanner. 28 Jan. 1936. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B. Letter to Neil C. Van Deusen. 21 Sept. 1939. Dorothy Porter Wesley Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U, box 5.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B.“he Librarian and the Scholar: A Working Partnership”. Proceedings of the Institute on Materials by and about the American Negro, School of Librarianship, Atlanta U, 1967, pp. 7180.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B. “Library Sources for the Study of Negro Life and History”. The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 5, no. 2, 1936, pp. 232–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B.he Negro in a Changing World.” Circa 1940s. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U. Flyer.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B.Projects—The Moorland Foundation.” 16 Mar. 1936. Moorland Foundation, annual reports, Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U. Typescript.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B.The Role of the Negro Collection in Teaching and Research at Howard University.” 1967. Dorothy Porter Wesley Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U, box 32. Typescript.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B.Subject Headings Used in Moorland Foundation Catalog.” Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U. Typescript.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B.Tentative Plans for the Administration, Reclassification, and Cataloguing of the Moorland Foundation of Howard University.” 1932. Moorland Foundation, annual reports, Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U. Typescript.Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy B.Tentative Supplementary Classification Scheme Used for the Books by and about the Negro in the Moorland Foundation, Howard University Library.” Circa 1930s. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U. Typescript.Google Scholar
Powell, A.V. Letter to librarian. 26 Mar. 1938. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
Power-Greene, Ousmane K. Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement. New York UP, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Price, Leah, and Thurschwell, Pamela, editors. Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture. Ashgate Publishing, 2005.Google Scholar
Quarles, Benjamin. “Black History Unbound”. Daedalus, vol. 103, no. 2, Spring 1974, pp. 163–78.Google Scholar
Rambsy, Howard. The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry. U of Michigan P, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reser, Anna. “‘My Working Will Be the Work’: Maintenance Art and Technologies of Change”. The New Inquiry, 14 Dec. 2017, thenewinquiry.com/blog/my-working-will-be-the-work-maintenance-art-and-technologies-of-change/.Google Scholar
Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa. Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America. Little, Brown, 2011.Google Scholar
Richards, Thomas. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. Verso, 1996.Google Scholar
Richardson, Pearl G. Letter to Dorothy Porter. 18 Oct. 1938. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
Roberto, K.R. Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front. McFarland, 2008.Google Scholar
Robertson, Craig. “Learning to File: Reconfiguring Information and Information Work in the Early Twentieth Century”. Technology and Culture, vol. 58, no. 4, Oct. 2017, pp. 955–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roffman, Karin. From the Modernist Annex: American Women Writers in Museums and Libraries. U of Alabama P, 2010.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, Daniel. “Stop, Words”. Representations, vol. 127, 2014, pp. 8392.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rushing, Naomi J.Summary of Thesis.” 1941. Negro History Collection Policies, Tougaloo College Historical Files, Tougaloo College Archives. Typescript.Google Scholar
Rushing, Naomi J. The Technical Organizing of Special Collections of Books by and about the Negro. 1940. Columbia U, master's thesis.Google Scholar
Scarupa, Harriet Jackson. “he Energy-Charged Life of Dorothy Porter Wesley”. New Directions, vol. 17, 1990, pp. 617.Google Scholar
Schomburg, Arthur A. Racial Integrity: A Plea for the Establishment of a Chair of Negro History in Our Schools and Colleges, Etc. August Valentine Bernier, 1913. Negro Society for Historical Research Occasional Paper 3.Google Scholar
Scott, David. “On the Archaeologies of Black Memory.” Introduction. Small Axe, vol. 26, 2008, pp. v-xvi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shetterly, Margot Lee. Hidden Figures. Harper Collins, 2016.Google Scholar
Simms-Woods, Janet. Dorothy Porter Wesley at Howard University: Building a Legacy of Black History. History Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Sinnette, Sinnette Elinor Des. Arthur Alfonso Schomburg: Black Bibliophile and Collector. New York Public Library/Wayne State UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Smith, Shawn Michelle. American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture. Princeton UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri. “he Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives”. History and Theory, vol. 24, 1985, pp. 247–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Springer, Anna-Sophie, and Turpin, Etienne, editors. Fantasies of the Library. MIT P, 2016.Google Scholar
Stevens, Elizabeth. “Howard Shows Nation's Finest Negro Works”. Te Washington Post, 25 Dec. 1965, p. A4.Google Scholar
Stewart, Nathaniel. Letter to Dorothy Porter. 19 Jan. 1940. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Thompson, Gladys Brown. Letter to Charles H. Wesley, forwarded to Dorothy Porter. 30 Jan. 1939. DorothyGoogle Scholar
Porter Wesley Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U, box 5.Google Scholar
Towner, Isabel L. Classification Schemes and Subject Headings Lists: Loan Collection of Special Libraries Association. Special Libraries Association, 1949.Google Scholar
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Van Slyck, Abigail A. Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890–1920. U of Chicago P, 1995.Google Scholar
Walker, Christopher H., and Ann Copeland. “The Eye Prophetic: Julia Pettee.” Libraries and the Cultural Record, vol. 44, no. 2, 2009, pp. 162–82.Google Scholar
Waters, Kristin, and Conoway, Carol B., editors. Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds. U of Vermont P, 2007.Google Scholar
Watson, Lena H. Letter to Dorothy Porter. 1 Oct. 1951. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
Watts, Jane. Letter to Dorothy Porter. 10 Sept. 1940. Records of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Record Group 1, University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U.Google Scholar
Wiegand, Wayne A. Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey. American Library Association, 1996.Google Scholar
Wiegand, Wayne A. Part of Our Lives: A People's History of the Public Library. Oxford UP, 2015.Google Scholar
Williams, Zachery R. In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926–1970. U of Missouri P, 2009.Google Scholar
Wright, Alex. Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. Oxford UP, 2014.Google Scholar
Wright, Richard. Black Boy. World Publishing, 1945.Google Scholar
Wright, Richard. “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow”. Uncle Tom's Children: Five Long Stories. Harper, 1938, pp. ix-xxx.Google Scholar
Yates, JoAnne. Control through Communication: The Rise of Systems in American Management. Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Yocom, Frances L. A List of Subject Headings for Works by and about the Negro. H.W. Wilson, 1940.Google Scholar