Today I want to talk about a very unique collection located here in Tuscaloosa. That special collection is the Division of Special Collections at the University of Alabama, more commonly referred to as the Hoole Library which is located at Mary Bryant Hall. You might be asking if the collection at TPL is so good, why are you suggesting I visit another collection. You should visit the Hoole Library because it is a little different from the collection at TPL, while we are an open collection meaning anyone can walk in and access our materials, the special collections at UA are a closed collection meaning that you have to request that a staff member retrieve items you would like to use in your research.
I highly recommend that before you visit Hoole that you check their website for all of their policies and procedures (https://www.lib.ua.edu/libraries/hoole/). Parking is one of the biggest challenges when visiting Hoole, I recommend if possible that patrons visit on Tuesday or Thursday evenings after 6, when one can park right next to the library. If you choose to go to Hoole during the day your best best is to park at one of the parking decks on campus, just know it is $5 going in. If you need a map showing the different libraries and parking areas e-mail me at genealogy@tuscaloosa-library.org and I will send you one that I made up using a campus map.
Hoole has a wide variety of items that are very useful in research of the West Alabama area. Because TPL does not have much archival space, when we receive donations of materials that are too fragile for our open shelves those materials are sometimes donated to Hoole. Hoole not only has the ability to preserve materials, but has the resources to digitize large amounts of material. Acumen is the digital collection aspect of the Hoole Library. I recommend that before you go over to Hoole that you check to see if materials have been digitized. In testing it out I found a photo that had been digitized and now I plan to make a trip to get a good copy of the photo and to see if there are any others that haven’t yet been digitized.
One other neat thing that Acumen allows one to do is to transcribe documents that have been digitized. On the right hand side of any image are a couple of small icons, one of which looks like a piece of paper with the right corner turned down. Patrons are encouraged to transcribe documents using that icon so that items are more fully word searchable and not just searchable by their title or by any tags that have been given.
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