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VCU Libraries Archive Projects
Virginia Nursing Hall of Fame
For more than 20 years, Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences has supported the Virginia League for Nursing and the Virginia Nurses Association in their efforts to stimulate interest in the history of nursing and to preserve their archives. 
The library provides a home for the historical records of both organizations and responds to requests for information from their archival collections.
Working with the two organizations, the library created a Web site in 2000 to provide electronic access to the print publication, “Highlights of Nursing in Virginia,” as well as other materials that document the history of nursing in the commonwealth.
In 2001 the groups collaborated again to create the Virginia Nursing Hall of Fame, a virtual memorial hosted at VCU to honor those nurses who shaped health care in Virginia. Through this collaboration, the nursing community and the general public have gained access to unique historical information and learned of the nursing profession’s rich heritage in the Old Dominion.
Archives of the New Dominion
In 2005 VCU Libraries launched its Archives of the New Dominion project to locate, secure and make accessible the paper history and archives of Central Virginia’s African-American, gay and lesbian, Hispanic, and women’s activist communities. The history of these four communities in Central Virginia is rich but, unfortunately, not adequately documented. This project sought to raise awareness within these communities about the importance of preserving their historical records, which are too often lost to fire, flood, accident or neglect.
With the belief that a community grows through, and is rooted in, its history, VCU Libraries is the only group that is systematically supporting community growth by helping communities preserve their historic roots. The initiative took a proactive approach to archives and history by working directly with these four communities to identify organizations and individuals who are or were agents of change on behalf of their communities. To date the project has resulted in the acquisition of the papers of such notable individuals as Dr. Francis Foster and Hilda Warden and the organizational records of St. Paul’s Baptist Church, the Fan Free Clinic and Equality Virginia, to name a few. VCU Libraries has also worked with members of the Latino community in order to preserve and make accessible copies of El Sol and El Eco de Virginia, the first two Spanish-language newspapers in Virginia.
Oral history archive
For more than three decades, VCU Libraries’ Special Collections and Archives has collected and initiated an oral history archive documenting the narrative accounts and culture of Virginians. The archive was begun in the 1970s when Special Collections and Archives became the repository for the Richmond Oral History Association collection. During the past 20 years, a series of collaborative projects between VCU Libraries and the African-American community has helped to grow the oral history archive to include interviews of notable African-American activists and leaders.
The Voices of Freedom was one such project that resulted in more than a dozen interviews with civil rights figures who tell stories about the “Jim Crow” segregation laws that prevailed up until the mid-1960s. Interviews from this project include Oliver Hill, Raymond Boone, Henry Marsh III and Elizabeth Cooper.
More recently, interviews have been conducted with RPI and VCU professors and administrators, literary figures and women’s activists. Francis M. Foster, Warren Brandt (VCU’s first president) and local women’s rights leader Zelda Nordlinger are among the individuals interviewed in the past few years. These interviews are a part of an ongoing effort to improve access to these materials by uploading the audio interviews and transcripts into VCU Libraries’ Digital Library.
Get involved
To support this program or get involved as a volunteer, contact Jodi Koste at jlkoste@vcu.edu or Alex Lorch at ahlorch@vcu.edu.