MAJOR MUSEUMS “AVIDLY” COLLECT OCCUPY WALL STREET EPHEMERA

Approximately a half-dozen major museums and organizations, including the Smithsonian Institution and the New York Historical Society, have been “avidly” collecting artifacts from the Occupy Wall Street movement, reports Cristian Salazar and Randy Herschaft of the Associated Press. In an article posted on the Chicago Tribune website, Salazar and Herschaft note that “staffers have been sent to occupied parks to rummage for buttons, signs, posters, and documents. Websites and tweets have been archived for digital eternity. Museums have approached individual protesters directly to obtain posters and other ephemera.”

At the same time, Occupy Wall Street has formed an archives working group to prevent established institutions from shaping the movement’s history. The archives group is currently being approached by museums looking to borrow or acquire Occupy materials. Amy Roberts, a library and information studies graduate student at Queens College who helped create the archives working group, notes that the group is discussing donating the entire collection to the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, which, as noted in the article, “is among the country’s oldest of materials on socialism, communism, and social protest movements in the United States.” An exhibition featuring archival material from Occupy Wall Street will open at the Museum of the City of New York next month.