Federal Theatre Project
The Federal Theatre Project was a relief measure that employed American theater workers during the Great Depression. It was sponsored by the Works Progress Administration. After Congress discontinued the Federal Theatre Project in 1939 over accusations of communist sympathies, the project's vast archive was broken up and only partially cataloged. Eventually, in 1964 the Library of Congress placed a large portion of the materials in a hangar in Maryland, where it sat untouched for ten years.
I worked in a group to create a libguide with resources about the Federal Theatre Project. We designed the guide for undergraduate researchers, and included pages on the history of the Federal Theatre Project nationally as well as specifically in New York City; key figures and productions of the project; archives containing materials from the Federal Theatre Project; and instructional videos on how to search archival repositories. The LibGuide was an assignment for INFO-652 Reference and Instruction.
The part of the guide that I created was the “FTP Archives” page. I included a variety of sources on the page, such as databases, archival collections, primary sources, and secondary sources contextualizing the archival materials. I designed this page based on the ACRL framework “authority is constructed and contextual.” Using the dispositions in this framework, I aimed to create a page that offered not just a list of resources, but also a guide for thinking about archives and research critically. One reason that I felt this was important was that in my own research, I encountered scholars writing about how politics, race, and class shaped the Federal Theatre Project and its legacy. I wanted our libguide to reflect this research and scholarship.
One instructional tool that I used to encourage critical thinking was a video about how to use ArchiveGrid to find primary sources. I felt it was important to tell the material history of the FTP archives on the archives page, because that history affected how the materials were preserved and distributed. I used the FTP archive history to frame the ArchiveGrid demo, with the intention of illustrating that the political history of an archival collection is connected to and affects our ability to search and use it. The demo therefore underscores the broader instructional frameworks of the page.
View the libguide and read more about my process