Holdings
The Collection currently contains over 50,000 books, 8,000 serials titles (including nearly 800 current periodical subscriptions) records and tape recordings of speeches, debates, songs, and oral histories, sheet music, buttons, posters, photographs, and comics. On the Labadie Collection’s website one can view over 900 photographs, read descriptions of over 100 archival collections, peruse listings of some non-print materials, explore its online exhibitions, and browse a directory of nearly 9,000 subject files, containing brochures, leaflets, clippings, and other ephemera.
Since its creation in 1911 hundreds of people have made donations out of trunks, attics, garages, basements, and even prison cells. In addition to anarchism, in which the Collection is particularly strong, other topics include socialism, communism, primitivism, labor (especially late 19th and early 20th century), sexual freedom (including the gay liberation movement), animal liberation, feminism, ecology, youth and student protest, censorship, Black liberation movements, anti-war and pacifist movements, and the radical right. After his arrest, Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, officially designated the University of Michigan as the recipient of his writings, letters, and other papers for the Collection.
Recent advances in technology have made it easier to access the Labadie Collection’s holdings. Web access to MIRLYN, the University of Michigan Library’s online catalog, allows searching of books, pamphlets, serials, and archival collections. The Labadie’s own website is useful in finding other treasures, such as listings of subject files, audio recordings, manuscripts, political buttons and photographs. Working to satisfy an ever increasing demand, digitization projects are underway to make parts of the Collection accessible online. The first batch of digitized pamphlets (over 200) is available online at http://www.hti.umich.edu/l/labadie. Visitors travel from all over the world to use the Collection, which is constantly growing due to the continuous proliferation of ideas and action on the part of those hoping to change the world.
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Famous quotes containing the word holdings:
“Polarized light showed the secret architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the mind is opened, now one color or form or gesture, and now another, has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)