Council on Library and Information Resources

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University of Alabama

NOTE: All postdoctoral fellowship positions are contingent upon funding. Applications are accepted via CLIR's online application system. Review of applications is already underway, but applications will be accepted until all positions are filled.

The University of Alabama Libraries seeks a highly motivated post-doctoral fellow to assume a leadership role in designing and executing a plan to catalog and digitize an exceptionally large and diverse photographic archive relating to the history and culture of the South. Reporting to the Associate Dean for Special Collections, the fellow will:

  • apply his/her academic training to organize and describe the contents of the archive;
  • collaborate with the heads of metadata and digital services on matters relating to policies and standards; and
  • lay the foundation for making digitized images accessible via the Internet.

In addition, the fellow will be afforded opportunities in the form of presentations, publications, exhibits, and/or guides to promote use of the archive by scholars and K-12 teachers.

The Archive: Housed in the A. S. Williams III Americana Collection and spanning the period 1850 to 1960, consists of some 14,000 examples. These range from images produced by such major 19th-century photographers as Alexander Gardner and the African American daguerreotypist Augustus Washington to images by commercial and amateur photographers of the 20th-century.

The largest segment of the archive falls into three major categories:

  • The Southern Photographer, 1860-1910,
  • The American Civil War, and
  • General Southern Photography.

The collection relating to Southern photographers and their studios may be the most comprehensive in institutional hands. Covering the period of the carte de visite and the cabinet card and including a small collection of daguerreotypes and ambrotypes, the archive documents the spread of photography as a commercial enterprise in the South. The cartes de visite alone number approximately 4,000 images, representing approximately 2,500 different studios. Reference materials, including books, articles and biographical sketches of Southern photographers, add to the research value of the archive and will assist the fellow in processing the collection.

The Civil War portion of the archive is replete with battlefield stereographs and cartes de visite, as well as larger formats. Included are a number of original albumin photographs by George N. Barnard and a rare complete copy of Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Washington, 1866). Additionally, there are several hundred carte de visite style images of Confederate and Union officers, public officials, and prominent civilians, many of which are signed.

Those portions of the photographic archive classified as general Southern photography date from ca. 1855 to the mid-twentieth century and include many family photographs, some of which are preserved in keepsake albums and multi-generational collections.

The A. S. Williams III Americana Collection: The Collection is the former private library of Mr. A. S. Williams III, a retired Alabama insurance executive who began collecting works by and about the U. S. presidents in the early 1960s. He quickly developed close working relationships with the leading antiquarian dealers throughout the United States specializing in Americana. With their assistance, he proceeded to build an extensive scholarly collection of books and pamphlets, photographs, maps, diaries, letters, business records, financial documents, and original works of art, prints, and lithographs—all pertaining to the financial, economic, military, political, and social history of what is today the continental United States. When the Collection came to the University Libraries in 2010, it was believed to be the largest such collection in private hands.

Large parts of the Williams Collection are unstudied, providing scholars an extraordinarily broad range of teaching and research opportunities. Further details regarding the Collection may be found at http://www.lib.ua.edu/williamscollection.

The University Libraries: The exceptional holdings found in the Williams Collection and those located in the separately housed William S. Hoole Special Collections Library combine to make the University Libraries one of the nation’s richest repositories of materials relating to Southern history and life. The University's strong support of the Libraries over the past decade has enabled librarians to significantly expand print and electronic collections to their current size of more than 3 million volumes, nearly one million electronic books, and more than 100,000 e-journals and their back files. Exceptionally generous private funding has allowed the development of a well-rounded digitization program and permitted the Libraries to play a leadership role on campus in advancing a variety of digital humanities research projects. The Libraries maintains membership in the Association of Research Libraries, SPARC, the Center for Research Libraries, the Coalition for Networked Information, and the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries. The Libraries’ homepage may be accessed at www.lib.ua.edu.

The University of Alabama: Current enrollment at The University of Alabama is 33,600, of which roughly 5, 000 are graduate students. The Department of History has long enjoyed a national reputation for the study of Southern history, and the Summersell Center for the Study of the South (http://scss.ua.edu/) also enjoys national prominence. The University is rich in tradition and takes great pride in promoting scholarly achievement, ethnic diversity, and nationally recognized athletic programs.