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Guide to the Records of the Institute of African American Affairs RG.9.8

Records of the Institute of African American Affairs

Call Number

RG.9.8

Dates

1963-2020, bulk
; 1963-ongoing

Creator

New York University. Institute of African-American Affairs

Extent

102.75 Linear Feet
in 44 record cartons, 29 manuscript boxes, 1 half manuscript box, 3 card boxes, 2 cassette boxes, 5 flat boxes, 1 folder in shared housing, and 37 boxes without container profiles.

Extent

84.24 Gigabytes
in 5,185 computer files and 28 unimaged born-digital carriers

Extent

32 Betacam

Extent

269 VHS

Extent

270 audiocassettes

Extent

61 MiniDV

Extent

4 DVCAM

Extent

153 U-matic

Extent

627 sound tape reels

Extent

3 Hi8

Extent

3 Cassettes
microcassettes

Extent

2 websites
in 2 archived website.

Language of Materials

Materials primarily in English, with some publications in French.

Abstract

Founded in 1969, the Institute of African American Affairs (IAAA) at New York University's mission is to research, document, and celebrate the cultural and intellectual production of Africa and its diaspora in the Atlantic world and beyond with a commitment to the study of Blacks in modernity through concentrations in Pan-Africanism and Black Urban Studies. The Records of the Institute of African American Affairs date from 1963 to the early 2000s. Included in these records are conference and event materials in paper and computer files, and audiovisual recordings of these events. Events with a significant amount of material in the collection include the Black Male Conference; Black Theater Forum; the Artists and Scholars-in-Residence program; Black Genius; the Yari Yari conference for Black women writers; and the Slave Routes: The Long Memory Symposium. These records also contain material related to the files of various IAAA Directors, including Founding Director Roscoe C. Brown Jr., Edward M. Carroll, Earl S. Davis, and Manthia Diawara. Files related to the Association of Education in Journalism internship program, which was co-founded by Dr. Roscoe C. Brown Jr. can also be found in this collection. Audio recordings of the radio talk shows The Soul of Reason from the 1970s and The Urban League Presents from the 1960s, as well as May 1965 recordings of an NYU Teach-In, which was organized in protest of the Vietnam War are in this collection.

Historical Note

The Institute of African American Affairs (IAAA) at New York University, which was initially called Institute of Afro-American Affairs, was founded in 1969 to research, document, and celebrate the cultural and intellectual production of Africa and its diaspora in the Atlantic world and beyond. The New York University Senate created the IAAA to coordinate the university-wide academic and service activities focusing on cultural programs for NYU's Black students, faculty, staff, and larger New York community.

The IAAA is affiliated and shares leadership, staff, and facilities with NYU's African Studies Program. Both organizations are committed to the study of Blacks in modernity through concentrations in Pan-Africanism and Black Urban Studies. The Institute also founded the first statewide organization of scholars in the field (The New York State Black Studies Conference) and played a pivotal role in the creation of the NYU Association of Black Faculty and Administrators.

Along with many programs, panels, and conferences, the IAAA also each year hosts Artists and Scholars-in-Residence, who during their residencies participate in seminars, offer public presentations of their work, and meet with students. Past Artists-in-Residence have included author Walter Mosley; poet and essayist Amiri Baraka; actor, playwright, and performance artist Anna Deavere Smith; poet Jayne Cortez; actor and producer Danny Glover; and Malian musician Salif Keita. Scholars-in-Residence have included Nigerian author and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka; and David Levering Lewis, MacArthur Fellow and Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers.

Source: IAAA 50th Anniversary Program, hhttps://wayback.archive-it.org/10560/*/https://nyuiaaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/IAAA-50th-8x8in-20191011-FINAL-950am-1.pdf

Arrangement

The records are arranged into five series, one of which has been further arranged into three subseries. The series and subseries arrangement of the records is as follows:

Series I. Event Files
Series II. Association for Education in Journalism
Series III. Director Files
Series IV. Audiovisual Recordings
Series IV.A.Soul of Reason Audio Recordings
Series IV.B. Events Recordings
Series IV.C. Pre-Institute Recordings
Series V. Administrative Files
Series VI. 2022 Accretions
Series VII: Archived Websites

Scope and Contents

The Records of the Institute of African American Affairs (IAAA) date from 1963 to the early 2000s with a large portion of the collection consisting of material related to the planning and promotion of IAAA conferences and events, in the form of paper files, computer files, and audiovisual recordings. Events with a significant amount of material in the collection include the Black Male Conference; Black Theater Forum; the Artists and Scholars-in-Residence program; Black Genius; the Yari Yari conference for Black women writers; and the Slave Routes: The Long Memory Symposium. A small amount of work files for the IAAA publication Black Renaissance Noire are in this collection, dating from 1992 to 2004.

Files created by IAAA Founding Director Roscoe C. Brown Jr., Acting Director Edward M. Carroll, Earl S. Davis, and Manthia Diawara date from the 1960s to the early 2000s. These files typically contain meeting minutes, correspondence, and research related to the IAAA. Internship program files dating from the 1970s to the 1990s in this collection relate to the Association of Education in Journalism, which was co-founded by Dr. Roscoe C. Brown Jr.

The collection also contains 266 recordings of The Soul of Reason, a radio talk show that aired between 1971 and 1986, with interviewees which included politicians, professional athletes, medical professionals, and contemporary artists. Audio recordings of another radio talk show, The Urban League Presents can also be found in this collection. These recordings date from 1963 to 1973 and cover a wide range of topics impacting the Black American community. Audio recordings in this collection from May 1965 highlight an NYU Teach-In which had been organized as a protest against the Vietnam War. Founding IAAA Director Dr. Roscoe C. Brown Jr. was a speaker at the event.

Subjects

Organizations

Genres

People

Topics

Conditions Governing Access

Administrative records and unpublished reports of New York University are closed for a period of 20 years from the date of their creation. Access to files spanning multiple years will be opened to researchers based on the date of the most recent materials. Board of Trustees records are closed for 35 years from the date of creation. Materials related to personnel, grievances, job and fellowship searches and applications, and all files that fall under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) are permanently restricted. Additional restrictions may apply to other materials in this collection. For questions regarding specific restrictions, please contact the University Archives.

Material pertaining to individual student records may be restricted in accordance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Please contact the Archives with specific questions regarding access to such records.

Individual restricted files in open series are notated in the file title (e.g., "Correspondence RESTRICTED"), physically separated, and stored in shared restricted boxes.

Conditions Governing Use

Any rights (including copyright and related rights to publicity and privacy) held by The Institute of African American Affairs are maintained by New York University. Permission to publish or reproduce materials in this collection must be secured from New York University Archives. Please contact special.collections@nyu.edu.

The Soul of Reason Audio Recordings that comprise Series IV.A were co-produced by New York University, which is a copyright holder to those recordings.

Preferred Citation

Suggested format for citing materials in a collection: Identification of item, date; Records of the Institute of African American Affairs; RG 9.8; box number; folder number or item identifier; New York University Archives, New York University.

To cite the archived website in this collection: Identification of item, date; ecords of the Institute of African American Affairs; RG 9.8; Wayback URL; New York University Archives, New York University.

Location of Materials

Some materials are stored offsite and advance notice is required for use. Please request materials at least two business days prior to your research visit to coordinate access.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

The Institute initially transferred material in 1994 to the University Archives. The June 2018 Accretion was transferred by the Institute of African American Affairs, 2018. The accession number associated with this transfer is 2018.018. The December 2018 Accretion was transferred by Jaira Placide, Associate Director, Institute of African American Affairs and Center for Black Visual Culture on July 2018. The accession number associated with this transfer is 2018.044. A further accretion of administrative records was transferred in March 2022; the accession number associated with this transfer is 2022.014.

https://nyuiaaa.org/ was selected by Janet Bunde and captured through the use of Archive-It in June 2018. Archive-It uses web crawling technology to capture websites at a scheduled time and displays only an archived copy, from the resulting WARC file, of the website. The accession number associated with this website is 2018.047. In July 2023, https://cbvc.nyu.edu/ was added. The accession number associated with this website is 2023.035.

Audiovisual Access Policies and Procedures

Access to audiovisual materials in this collection is available through digitized access copies. Researchers may view an item's original container, but the media themselves are not available for playback because of preservation concerns. Materials that have already been digitized are noted in the collection's finding aid and can be requested in our reading room.

Born-Digital Access Policies and Procedures.

Advance notice is required for the use of computer records. Original physical digital media is restricted.

An access terminal for born-digital materials in the collection is available by appointment for reading room viewing and listening only. Researchers may view an item's original container and/or carrier, but the physical carriers themselves are not available for use because of preservation concerns.

Appraisal

The following material was separated from the collection, according to New York University's Special Collections Deaccessioning Policy.

Issues of Black Renaissance Noire

1997 Yari Yari Conference registration forms containing personal information and related files containing student information.

48 computer files pertaining to personnel issues and student-related information have been separated from the collection.

Damaged/commercial born-digital material: 33 CDs, 1 DVD, and 21 computer floppy disks. Also, a small amount of computer files containing privacy issues were removed from the records. Titles of these carriers can be found in Medialog.

Damaged, blank, or commercial audiovisual material: 27 audiocassettes, 1 Betacam tape, 2 commercial CDs, 45 vhs tapes, and 1 u-matic tape (this tape was moldy and disposed of on 10/20/2020). An inventory was created of these titles.

Take Down Policy

Archived websites are made accessible for purposes of education and research. NYU Libraries have given attribution to rights holders when possible; however, due to the nature of archival collections, we are not always able to identify this information.

If you hold the rights to materials in our archived websites that are unattributed, please let us know so that we may maintain accurate information about these materials.

If you are a rights holder and are concerned that you have found material on this website for which you have not granted permission (or is not covered by a copyright exception under US copyright laws), you may request the removal of the material from our site by submitting a notice, with the elements described below, to the special.collections@nyu.edu.

Please include the following in your notice: Identification of the material that you believe to be infringing and information sufficient to permit us to locate the material; your contact information, such as an address, telephone number, and email address; a statement that you are the owner, or authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed and that you have a good-faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; a statement that the information in the notification is accurate and made under penalty of perjury; and your physical or electronic signature. Upon receiving a notice that includes the details listed above, we will remove the allegedly infringing material from public view while we assess the issues identified in your notice.

Collection processed by

University Archives staff and Stacey Flatt

About this Guide

This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2024-10-22 20:38:18 UTC.
Using Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language: Finding aid written in English

Processing Information

Decisions regarding arrangement, description, and physical interventions for this collection prior to 2018 are not yet recorded.

In 2020, unprocessed paper material was rehoused in new acid-free folders and boxes, kept in their original order, and inventoried at the folder level. Unprocessed audiovisual material was labeled with unique numbers, grouped by format, placed in appropriately sized boxes, and inventoried to the item level in chronological order. In the finding aid, the unprocessed material file titles were added onto the end of existing inventories for some series, while new series and subseries were also created for new material. Select creator-supplied titles containing racist and ableist language were identified in this collection, but have been retained to convey important contextual information regarding time and place in which the documents and titles were created. Additional processing notes were added at the series and subseries level where these titles are listed.

Previously processed paper material was refoldered and reboxed when necessary, and all file-level barcode notes were removed from the inventory.

New York University Libraries follow professional standards and best practices when imaging, ingesting, and processing born-digital material in order to maintain the integrity and authenticity of the content. Data CDs, DVDs, and floppy computer disks were forensically imaged, analyzed, and arranged in Forensic Toolkit. Sixty digital objects were created and added into the collection inventory to repressent the over 5,000 computer files.

Series-level dates, extents, and scope and content notes were added to the finding aid.
Further accretions have been rehoused in archival boxes and folders and added as discrete series, with a folder-level inventory.
In 2022, a retrospective accession was created for the archived website and the website was added to the resource record as a series. Additional website was added in 2023.

In 2024, two blank audio reels were deaccessioned.

Revisions to this Guide

April 2016: Edited by Andrea Kutsenkow to include description of The Soul of Reason audio recordings
June 2018: Updated to include materials integrated from accession number 2018.018 by Kate Fisher
December 2018: Updated to include materials integrated from accession number 2018.044 by Kate Fisher
October 2020: Updated by Stacey Flatt to include unprocessed material; added required note fields; and identified potentially harmful racist and ableist language in file titles
February 2021 - May 2024: Updated by Rachel Mahre, Lyric Evans-Hunter, and Olivija Liepa to state that audiovisual materials have been digitized and are accessible to patrons
March 2022: Updated by Rachel Searcy to reflect 2022 accretion
April 2022: Updated by Rachel Searcy to reflect 2022 accretion
August 2023: Updated by Nicole Greenhouse to reflect additional administrative information and added archived website
October 2024: Updated by Rachel Mahre to record a deaccession

Repository

New York University Archives
New York University Archives
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library
70 Washington Square South
2nd Floor
New York, NY 10012
https://library.nyu.edu/locations/special-collections-center/