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Article: Meeman Archive Finds New Home at MSU
From the Fall 1997 issue of EJ News
The Meeman Archive, the nation’s best collection of environmental reporting in newspapers, has found a new home at Michigan State University.
The collection, which was donated to MSU’s Environmental Journalism Program by officials at the University of Michigan, is now being housed in sixteen filing cabinet drawers in the Communication Arts Building. It is part of a growing collection of resources on environmental journalism, which includes books, audio tapes, videotapes and other materials.
"We are delighted to have been given such a valuable collection," said Jim Detjen, director of MSU’s program. "The Meeman Archive will serve as a valuable resource for students, journalists and scholars."
This fall, Janelle Brieske, a master’s degree student, is organizing and cataloguing the collection. The Meeman Archive contain copies of more than 1,400 articles on environmental topics that were published between 1980 and 1996 in American newspapers.
Brieske is working with Terry Link and Mary Murphy, two MSU reference librarians, to develop ways to best organize the collection. They hope to create a searchable database that will enable researchers to find articles on specialized topics.
In addition, a storage area in the Communication Arts Building is being refurbished to serve as the repository of the collection. Bookshelves, filing cabinets, a desk and chairs will be installed in this room when construction work is completed.
The Meeman Archive was established in 1982 at the University of Michigan with grants from the Scripps Howard Foundation and the university’s School of Natural Resources. Among the articles in the collection are newspaper stories submitted to the Scripps Howard Foundation as part of its Edward J. Meeman national environmental journalism contest and to the Washington Journalism Center as part of the Thomas L. Stokes awards for natural resources reporting. When the University of Michigan made a decision to end its journalism program the Meeman Archive was put in jeopardy. U of M’s Department of Communication Studies wanted to use the room where the archive was housed for other purposes.
Unfortunately, two University of Michigan educators threw many of the original articles away in December 1996. The reasons for this action remain unclear, since both Michigan State University and the University of Colorado had offered to house the collection.
Fortunately, backup copies of most of the articles remained in storage in filing copies at U of M. When Detjen found out about these copies he persuaded Patty Cottingham, executive director of the Scripps Howard Foundation, and Doreen Fussman, of the University of Michigan’s Communication Department, to donate the backup copies to MSU.
In March, Detjen and Joe Harry, a doctoral student in MSU’s Mass Media program, rented a van and drove to Ann Arbor. They then hauled the materials back to East Lansing.
"My hope is that we will be able to develop ways to makethe archive into a useful resource," Detjen said. "When they were housed at the University of Michigan access to the collection was very limited. We hope to make the collection much more accessible to journalists, students and researchers."
One of the ideas being explored is to place summaries of the articles and some of the award winning series in the collection onto MSU’s environmental journalism program web site.
In addition to the Meeman Archive, a variety of other materials are housed in the collection. These include audio tapes of interviews that Philip Shabecoff, the former national environmental writer for the New York Times, conducted with many world environmental leaders, including Vice President Al Gore.
More recently, Shabecoff donated to the MSU Environmental Journalism Program more than 100 books on environmental topics. Other journalists, including Mark Schleifstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at The New Orleans Times-Picayune, have donated copies of their award-winning articles.
"We are delighted at the generosity that Phil Shabecoff and Mark Schleifstein have demonstrated," said Detjen. "We hope that others will also donate articles, books and tapes to the Environmental Journalism Archive."
The Edward J. Meeman Award for Environmental Journalism
Article: Meeman Archive finds new home at MSU