On Monday, Nov. 13, patrons gathered at the Argenta Community Theatre to celebrate former U.S. Congressman Vic Snyder and his legacy of work.
Presented by Blue Cross Blue Shield, the event raised $19,550 to oversee the archival costs of Snyder’s political papers, which will call the archives at UA Little Rock’s Center for Arkansas History and Culture (CAHC) home.
Snyder’s connection to UA Little Rock is twofold, having graduated from UA Little Rock’s William H. Bowen School of Law, as well as having served UA Little Rock during his time in congress as it falls in the Second Congressional District.
The collection is quite large and includes over 700 boxes full of items Snyder amassed during his political career, spanning his time in the Arkansas Senate, from 1991-96, as well as his seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, from 1997-2011. Archivists have only just begun work on the collection.
So far, they’ve found invitations, letters, photos, scrapbooks, news clippings, photos of school groups that visited him at the Capitol, as well as a plethora of papers that detail his work drafting legislation.
The entire collection is expected to take two years to process. Items will be sorted, organized into folders, and stored in acid-free archival boxes. The collection will then be permanently housed in the archives at the CAHC. The goal is to make the information contained in the collection available to the public.
Dr. Deborah Baldwin, Associate Provost for Collections and Archives at UA Little Rock, is overseeing the project.
“Archives are not meant to be housed in dark places,” says Baldwin. “They are meant for the general public to use – for students, teachers, scholars, for anyone.”
The end result will include a web exhibit, a searchable “finding aid” with detailed information about the collection’s holdings, as well as teacher curriculum guides and more.
This article was written by Becca Bona and originally appeared in The Daily Record’s Nov. 20-26, 2017 issue.
