Our Featured Collections
Current Featured Collection: The Papers of Kirk Douglas
In the 21st century libraries and archives face enormous changes brought on by the advent of the digital era. Digitization delivers both opportunities and challenges. Enhanced possibilities for making information available in digital forms, whether online or in easily shared formats, promise a new era of accessibility, but it also creates problems never before faced by archivists accustomed to geographically situated collections of papers in boxes on shelves. And information disseminated on the web can sometimes be extremely valuable, but how to tell legitimate, grounded information from the spurious and trivial?
In 2007 the WCFTR developed a pilot project to test the waters of the digital era. Funded by a generous gift from UW alumnus Stephen Jarchow, we embarked on an expanded website (the one you’re reading now) that would use the unique characteristics of the WCFTR – an archive closely connected to one of the leading film and media studies graduate programs in the country – to provide a special kind of digital access to our collections: authoritative scholarly websites focused on WCFTR collections that combine well-researched information with digitized selections of primary-source materials from our archives.
We began with one of our earliest and most forward-looking donors, the legendary Hollywood star and producer Kirk Douglas. Douglas realized early on that he had created a legacy of cultural work worth preserving in detail for future generations. His first contact with the WCFTR came in 1963, leading to the donation of more than 60 boxes of materials that arrived on campus in 1970. More donations followed; the collection now covers the period 1945 to 1978 and traces not only Douglas’s career as an actor but as one of the most successful Hollywood independents of the 50s, 60s and 70s.
Short essays on Douglas’s career and cultural impact have been researched and written by Film and Media Studies faculty and graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Carefully selected documents and visual materials enhance and illustrate the information, and links to other key electronic resources and published information are provided throughout. We hope this will serve both as a showcase of Douglas’s cultural impact and accomplishments and as an authoritative scholarly resource for scholars and the general public.
We intend to expand our featured collections over the next few years to focus on many other significant figures in American cultural history. We hope these pages will not only supply reliable and fascinating information but will lead scholars and researchers to come to Madison to pursue their investigations further.
