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ASIS&T (or ASIST) is a professional association which creates, organizes, disseminates, and applies knowledge regarding information and its transfer. ASIS&T was preceded by the American Documentation Institute (ADI), which was founded in 1937 with the goal of acquiring and indexing the knowledge of the world. Name changes followed in 1968 (ASIS) and 2000 (ASIS&T). The records consist of correspondence, business and financial documents, minutes, bylaws, memoranda, manuscript and printed journal articles, printed promotional material, microfiche, photographs, and audio and video tapes covering the society's activities (and those of its predecessor organizations) from 1925 to 2001, with the bulk falling between the 1930s through 2000. Organizational business affairs and activities, including the conceptual evolution of its purpose and mission, are well-documented in several series, most notably in the Council Files. These broad areas are also covered in the Committee Files, but in a more detailed fashion, focusing on specific activities or issues. This series also represents the scope of ASIS's liaison committees, ranging from the American Library Association to the Egyptian Society for Information Technology. Documents generated by ASIS-approved regional and student chapters and the organized professional groups within ASIS devoted to special interests (SIGs) are found in the large Chapter Files and Special Interest Groups series. The Publications series includes significant editorial and administrative documents as well as some manuscript submissions for the "Annual review of information science and technology, and the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science." Special note may be made of the Special Libraries Association Merger Files which chronicle the history of the ultimately unsuccessful merger of ASIS and SLA. The main correspondents found in the collection include: Robert McAfee, Assistant Executive Director; Joshua I. Smith, Executive director (1973-1976); Bonnie Carroll, Councilor and President; Linda Resnik, Executive Director (1985-1988); Samuel Beatty, Executive Director (1976-1984); and John Brokenshire, ASIS Financial Officer.

For the purpose of clarity, the organization shall for the most part be referred to as "ASIS"--the name by which it has been known for most of its history and to which it is mainly referred in the records--throughout this section.

Throughout the record group, the year listed for a folder is often the fiscal year rather than calendar year. This is particularly so for records in the Financial series. The fiscal year for ASIS runs from October through September.

The Benjamin Brown collection is made up of correspondence, documents, and artifacts related to the showman's career as a circus owner in the early 1800s. Many of the letters relate to his journey to Egypt between 1838 and 1840, as he attempted to procure giraffes for an American menagerie company; to his other travels; and to the contemporary American circus industry.

The Benjamin Brown collection is made up of correspondence, documents, and artifacts related to the showman's career as a circus owner in the early 1800s.

Letters, documents, and printed materials concern Brown's early ventures as a show owner, including correspondence and financial records pertaining to his travels in the Caribbean and to the northeast coast of South America in the early 1830s. These materials document the difficulties of transporting exotic animals by sea, the type of equipment necessary to run a circus, and other logistical issues.

A later group of letters and documents reflects Brown's experiences in Egypt, where he traveled as an agent of the June, Titus, Angevine & Company, attempting to purchase giraffes. Many of these letters are from Stebbins B. June, who was also in Egypt at the time, and several items relate to George R. Gliddon, United States consul in Cairo. Brown's friend Gerard Crane wrote about Brown's business affairs in New York, and frequently reported the increasingly frail health of Brown's father. Benjamin Brown received a letter from P. T. Barnum, who asked him to find a pair of fortune tellers for Barnum's museum. He also inquired about locating a pony small enough to accommodate his performer Tom Thumb (June 29, 1843). While in London, Brown frequently received letters from his sister, Eudocia Brown Noyes, who wrote of the Brown family farm and provided other news from Somers, New York.

The collection includes playbills and broadsides advertising Brown's circus; Brown's marriage license (March 20, 1841); a pencil sketch of Brown; two passports; and three fragments of an Arabic-language scroll, offering protection to the bearer. Later material includes newspaper clippings from 1879, 1880, and 1931, on Brown's life and career, as well as an audio tape of an interview with his grandson, Benjamin Brown.

• Kapitein Dick Op Zijne Shetland Poney: Op Verzoek Van Verscheidene Heeren En Dames, Zal Den Heer Broun Op Zaturdag Den 23 October 1830, Van 's Middags 1 Tot 's Avonds 10 Uren, Aan Het Geëerd Pupliek Ten Toon Stellen... Paramaribo: Ter drukkerij van de erven C.J. Fuchs, [1830].
• Royal Gazette of the United Colony of Demerary & Essequebo: Saturday, January 8, 1831. [Georgetown, Guyana: W. Baker, 1831].
• Royal Pavilion Circus in the Temple Yard: by Permission of His Excellency the Governor : On Thursday Evening Next the 22d Instant Mr. Brown and His Corps of Equestrians Will Have the Honor to Present to the Public a Splendid Performance, When He and His Company Will Endeavour to Gratify the Ladies And Gentlemen of the Island by Representing Various Extraordinary Feats of Horsemanship. [c. 1830?].

Box 2 of the collection includes correspondence, documents, printed items, photographs, and audio recordings related to the history of Benjamin Brown, the circus, and Somers, New York. Principally organized around the career and research of Carrie Brown Rorer (1903-1969), President of the Somers Historical Society and Benjamin F. Brown's great-grandaughter, the material provides insight into public history, memory, and research on the circus. Included is a typed document, "Circus History: Recollections by Benjamin Brown (1877-1962) as told to Carrie Brown Roher, (1903-1969), who was one of his three daughters," which details memories of Benjamin F. Brown and family stories about him.

• Two shoes, [1800s]
• Burnoose, [1800s]
• Black circus jacket, [1800s]
• Pipe stem and bowl
• Two rocks
• Fragments from an ostrich eggshell
• Canopic jar lid
• Two small boxes
• Ushabti figure
• Harpocrates figure

The Egyptian figures may date to around 600 BCE.

Naomi Long Madgett is a prominent poet, educator, and editor, recognized for her significant contribution to African-American letters. Since 1972 she has run, single-handedly, Lotus Press, which publishes poetry by African-Americans and others. The collection documents Madgett's career and the operation of Lotus Press, through correspondence, manuscripts (both by Madgett and by authors published by Lotus Press), ephemera, audiovisual material, and photographs.

The Naomi Long Madgett Papers document the prominent career of Ms. Madgett as a poet and a teacher, and her operation of Lotus Press, which Madgett has run single-handedly for more than 30 years. Thus, the collection makes a good source of insight both into Madgett's own writing and aesthetic sensibility, and into the cultures of lyric poetry and African-American letters in the latter decades of the 20th Century. The bulk of the material covers the 1980s, the 1990s, and the first few years of the 21st century, with Madgett's activities in the 1970s being fairly well represented as well. From the correspondence collected here a vivid picture emerges of Madgett's relationships with some of the authors whose work she published--such as James Emanuel and Gayl Jones--as well as with other authors, such as Gwendolyn Brooks. In addition, correspondence and ephemera evidence the growth of Madgett's own reputation, documenting her many professional activities, awards, and honors over the years. While manuscripts by Madgett herself do not comprise a large part of the collection, the fortunes of one of her most famous poems, "Midway," are documented in detail, and an unpublished autobiography ( Pilgrim Journey) provides an extensive synthesis by the author of her own influences and career (a section of which has been published by Gale's Contemporary Authors' Autobiography Series). Finally, the collection provides a close look at the daily operation, from its inception, of a small literary press.

The Naomi Long Madgett papers have been arranged into nine series: Personal, Writings, General Correspondence, Workshops and Events, Author Files, Business Records, Ephemera, Photographs, and Audiovisual. Books published by Lotus Press, as well as other books and periodicals from Madgett's library, have been catalogued individually and are shelved by call number in the Special Collections Library. Within the collection, however, much material is available from the production of certain Lotus Press books; see below Writings and Author Files.

The Stinchfield family papers contain the correspondence, business records, financial and legal documents, photographs, and genealogical papers of the Stinchfield family, founders of a successful lumber business in Michigan in the mid-19th century. The collection also includes materials related to social and family events in Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, through the mid-20th century.

The Stinchfield family papers consist of the correspondence, business records, financial and legal documents, photographs, and genealogical papers of Jacob W. Stinchfield, his wife Maria Hammond Stinchfield, and their descendants. The collection's correspondence and documents are organized by generation, reflecting their original order. The earliest items in the collection (Generation I series) include real estate transactions involving Jacob Stinchfield of Lincoln, Maine, dating from 1837. Beginning in the 1860s, after the family’s move to Michigan, the records include correspondence, accounts, and other financial records relating to the lumber business, begun by Jacob and continued by his son Charles Stinchfield. The materials provide information respecting the management of men in lumber camps, logging in winter weather conditions, methods of transportation, the challenges of rafting logs downriver, and other lumber business operations in volatile market conditions. Jacob and Charles Stinchfield’s partner, and frequent correspondent, was David Whitney, Jr., a wealthy Detroit businessman.

The Stinchfields expanded their company to include railroads (to facilitate their logging operations) and mineral mines. Many documents in the Generation II series, including manuscript and printed maps, concern land development in Michigan, where the family owned a farm in Bloomfield Hills, and in the West, especially Wyoming. The family traveled extensively and corresponded about their experiences in Europe, Asia, and the western United States. The Civil War is represented with small but significant holdings -- among them, a September 21, 1864, note written and signed by President Abraham Lincoln, requesting a fair hearing for a furlough (probably for George Stinchfield), and a February 14, 1863, letter from Vice President Hannibal Hamlin to Jacob W. Stinchfield, assuring him that George McClellan would not be ordered back to the command of the army.

The collection's twentieth-century materials (Generation III and Generation IV series) consist largely of the personal correspondence of Jacob Stinchfield’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The life of Charles Stinchfield, Jr., is well documented, from his schooling at St. John’s Military Institute in Manlius, N.Y., and a brief time at Cornell University, through his roles in the family business, his marriage, and the raising of his three children. Interactions between Charles Stinchfield, Jr., and his father, Charles Stinchfield, a demanding and energetic businessman, are also well represented in the collection. The materials reveal relationships between family members and their servants, and spiritualists' attempts to contact Charles Stinchfield III, who died of appendicitis in 1933 at the age of 15. Later papers provide descriptions of the social life of a wealthy family in the early and mid-20th century, at their residence in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and at their country home in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

The Genealogy series, compiled largely by Diane Stinchfield Klingenstein, contains extensive background research on family members, copies of Ira and George Stinchfield’s Civil War records, transcriptions of letters written by Charles Stinchfield on a journey west in 1871 (not otherwise represented in the collection), and a typewritten draft of Diane Klingenstein’s family history, "One bough from a branch of the tree: a Stinchfield variation."

In addition to materials organized by generation, the collection includes photographs, scrapbooks, pastels, realia, and books. Many of the photographs are individual and group portraits (both studio and candid) from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The images include many exterior views of the land and buildings of the family’s country home in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (Stonycroft Farm, ca. 1910), and of the Stinchfield residence in Grosse Pointe, Michigan (ca. 1940s). Early 20th-century lumber camps and railroads in Oregon and mining camps in Nevada are represented in photographs and photograph albums. The collection contains photos from trips to Japan (ca. 1907), the American West, and Europe. The collection's scrapbooks include newspaper clippings, invitations, and photographs, mainly concerning the life of Diane Klingenstein in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, during the 1930s and 1940s.

The Stinchfield family papers contain three pastel portraits of unknown subjects. The Realia series includes a bone ring likely made by George Stinchfield when he was a prisoner on Belle Isle, Virginia; a ring bearing Ira Stinchfield's name and regiment, in case he died during the Civil War; hospital identification and five baby pins for Diane W. Stinchfield (1925); a variety of additional Stinchfield family jewelry; and several wooden, crotched rafting pins, apparently from Saginaw, Michigan.

The Books series includes a copy of The Pictorial Bible, given to Charles and Mary from Father Fish, June 12, 1879, and a selection of 9 additional publications, which are cataloged individually. A comprehensive list of these books may be found by searching the University's online catalog for "Klingenstein."