Special Collections Exhibits

New acquisition: Elections Committee of the County of Orange (ECCO) records, 1984-2009

March 27, 2013 by Alix Norton Leave a Comment

MS-R166_b1_f22_001 — ECCO at March on Hollywood, ca. 1990

The history of LGBT communities in Orange County, California, is an important and ever-growing collection focus here at UCI Special Collections and Archives. Last year we featured materials from our LGBT archival collections in our “LGBT Communities in Orange County: Highlights from the Archival Collections” exhibit in Langson Library, and hosted a reception with honored guests who donated their historical documents, photos, and ephemera to the archives.

One of the newest collections donated to our LGBT archives contains the records of the Elections Committee of the County of Orange (ECCO, also known as ECCOPAC). ECCO is a political action committee run completely by volunteers that promotes LGBT rights in Orange County. Established in 1982, it is one of the oldest LGBT PACs in California. This collection includes materials from ECCO’s annual awards dinner, including posters and programs. The 180+ Reporter newsletter and additional ECCO newsletters and reports from 1998-2005 are included, as well as photographs, campaign posters, banners, stickers, and t-shirts.

See the finding aid for the collection on the Online Archive of California here.

For more information about supporting the efforts of preserving LGBT history, please see our brochure Documenting the LGBT Communities in Orange County.

New Exhibit on LGBT History in Orange County, August 20 – December 14, 2012

August 24, 2012 by Steve MacLeod Leave a Comment

The new exhibit “LGBT Communities in Orange County: Highlights from the Archival Collections” is on display in the Special Collections and Archives lobby on the fifth floor of Langson Library from August 20 – December 14, 2012.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists and community organizers in Orange County have left a rich documentary trail over the past forty years, and we are preserving it! The UCI Libraries’ Special Collections and Archives Department is actively building collections in this area. The new exhibit in the Special Collections lobby on the fifth floor of Langson Library includes only a small sample of materials from the wide variety of LGBT archival collections here at UCI. We have included material that reflects these four themes:

Pride and Identity
Politics and Civil Rights
Support and Organizations
Social life and Culture

History helps us understand ourselves and how the society we live in today came to be. By preserving the voices of LGBT communities in their own words, we ensure that future generations have access to a diverse historical record. Studying a shared past builds a common identity within a community and provides a sense of continuity and accomplishment.

The history of LGBT communities in Orange County is rich, but not adequately documented. Too much of it is already lost. It is important to start now to save the history of LGBT experience in Orange County. How can we do this? By preserving archives!

For more information about supporting these efforts, please see our brochure Documenting the LGBT Communities in Orange County.

Derrida in Photographs: new exhibit in Special Collections and Archives

July 11, 2012 by Steve MacLeod Leave a Comment

A new exhibit “Derrida in Photographs” is on view in the Special Collections and Archives lobby, just outside of our Reading Room on the fifth floor of Langson Library, from July 10 – August 10, 2012. This exhibit is presented in tandem with the 3rd Derrida Today Conference, held at the University of California, Irvine, July 11-13, 2012. The exhibit includes a sample of the photographs from the Jacques Derrida Papers (MS-C001), housed in the Critical Theory Archive in the Special Collections and Archives Department at the University of California, Irvine.

The photographs in the Jacques Derrida Papers consist of approximately 60 color and black and white images of Derrida, both individual and group portraits. The exhibit includes publicity photographs, photographs which document Derrida’s participation at various conferences and other events, and a few examples of Derrida manuscripts. The collection includes publicity photographs, produced by Derrida’s publisher, and also

Derrida Today researchers in the Reading Room

photographs which document Derrida’s participation at various conferences, most notably the 1997

Colloque de Cerisy, L’animal autobiographique. In these and other group photographs, Derrida is photographed with Gilles Deleuze andothers at Cerisy in 1972, with Francis Ponge, Harold Bloom, Louis Althusser, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jorge Luis Borges, Hans Georg Gadamer, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Pierre Bourdieu, J. Hillis Miller, Ornette Coleman, Nelson Mandela, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Hélène Cixous, among others. Most of the photographs date from the 1980s and 1990s. The photographs are arranged chronologically in the exhibit.

Other archival and manuscript collections directly related to Derrida include: Safaa Fathy Video Recordings of Jacques Derrida Lectures (MS-C014); and Jacques Derrida Listserv Collection, 1991-1994 (MS-C008).