Audience & Users

The records and collections, which the project will utilize, have a varying degree of use. The Ohioana Collection, for instance, is one of the most heavily used. Several members of the Geography faculty use exercises that bring students to use materials such as the historical atlases and recent county plat books that show the changing rural landscape. The UMWA District 6 Collection has been used by outside scholars and by students studying labor-management bargaining. But this and other large manuscript collections--the Columbus & Hocking Coal & Iron Company and the Nelsonville Foundry and Machinery Company Collection--have potential for greater use. The same is true for the local government record series identified here. The Athens County Naturalization Records (sample images) are used frequently by genealogical researchers, who constitute one-third of our 1600-1800 day visitors annually, while the Quadrennial Enumerations (sample images) (which documents the time the African-American clergyman Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. worked as a young coal miner in Perry County) and Coroner's Inquest are rarely used.

The department has worked with others on these collections. Genealogical groups from nearby counties occasionally visit together to learn about our resources. The Sunday Creek Associates organization has borrowed items from the C&HC&I collection for an exhibit. We have encouraged faculty in the College of Education to familiarize undergraduate and graduate students about our resources for community history, most closely with elementary social studies methods classes, and are working to expand this interaction.

We expect familiarity with these materials to open up the uses of the records and collections for study of the social fabric in this portion of the broader Appalachian region. We believe our presentation of story-line information on individuals both prominent and ordinary will show the possibilities for academic social history in the French tradition.

Beyond this, we believe that having this material on the World Wide Web will help instill a pride of place for residents and students here in the rural Appalachian area. Developing self-esteem in the students of the region is difficult; this will be a resource for showing how people here played important roles in the frontiers of a century ago-the technological development of the extractive industries, the organizational development of complex corporate structures, and the social development of the labor union movement. Additionally, students and the general public from urban areas will be able to gain an appreciation of the role coal played in the expanding industrial infrastructure, the way the landscape changed with new settlement in the area, and the ethnic diversity that was a part of coal camp life and an obstacle overcome by the UMWA.