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President Clinton To Dedicate The Dodd Research Center
Richard Fyffe
Bibliographer for the Humanities
The Senator Thomas J. Dodd Research Center will be dedicated by President Bill Clinton on Sunday, October 15, 1995 in an outdoor ceremony at 1 p.m. This ceremony will be followed by a convocation at the Gampel Pavilion at 3 p.m. featuring an address by President Clinton on the theme of human rights. These ceremonies inaugurate a four-day period of lectures, panel discussions, exhibitions, and other events on the theme "Fifty Years After Nuremberg: Human Rights and the Rule of Law." Featured presenters will include, among others, Madeleine Albright, Oscar Arias, and Elie Wiesel.
Dedication of the Dodd Research Center signals a new era in the University of Connecticut's commitment to collecting, preserving, and making available primary source research materials in a variety of languages, time periods, and subject areas.
The Center enables the Library to consolidate the collections and services of the Special Collections Department and the Historical Manuscripts & Archives Department in a single operation to be known as the Archives & Special Collections Department. This will significantly enhance opportunities for cross-disciplinary teaching and research in the fields of history, art, literature, politics, and area studies. Current subject strengths include Connecticut history and culture (particularly the state's post-Civil War industrial, political, and cultural history); labor and activist movements of the 20th century; Latin American history and culture; American literary and cultural history, particularly of the post-Second World War period; and contemporary children's literature and illustration. A number of new collecting areas also have been made possible by the Center. News will be forthcoming as these possibilities are realized.
Facilities provided for the Archives & Special Collections Department include an attractive 40-seat reading room for research use of the collections; generous work space for processing and cataloging the collections; and the most advanced climate-control system in Connecticut for preserving rare and fragile research materials. To assure their long-term availability, collections will be housed in closed stacks.and will not circulate outside the Center. Through a major donation from the H.W. Wilson Foundation, the reading room will be named for the late John P. McDonald, former University Librarian and a staunch supporter of special collections.
In addition to the Archives & Special Collections Department, the Dodd Center will house the Center for Oral History and the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. Seminar and conference space, including a 185-seat auditorium and a lounge, will be available to the University community for lectures, films, and other public events. An exhibition gallery will feature changing displays from the Center's collections.
Public tours of the Dodd Center are scheduled for the months of October, November, and December. Collections will be moved from the Special Collections and Historical Manuscripts departments during the month of December. The new Archives and Special Collections Department will commence regular service operations in January, 1996.
Creation of the Dodd Research Center has been supported generously by many individuals and corporations. Above all, the support of U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd and the Dodd family have helped make this new enterprise a reality. The personal and congressional papers of Thomas J. Dodd will be housed in the Center that bears his name. Thomas Dodd was U.S. Senator from Connecticut from 1952 to 1970. His distinguished career in public service included positions with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Civil Rights Section of the Department of Justice. In 1945 and 1946, Dodd served first as vice chairman of the Board of Review and then as executive trial counsel for the United States in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, Germany.
For further information, contact 486-2219 or visit the Dodd Center World Wide Web home page at: http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/.
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