Meeman Archive finds new home at MSU
The Meeman Archive, the nation’s collection of environmental reporting in newspapers, is housed at Michigan State University.
The collection, which was donated to MSU’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, is part of a growing collection of resources on environmental journalism, including books, audiotapes, 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."
The archive contains copies of more than 1,400 articles on environmental topics that were published between 1980 and 1996 in American newspapers.
Knight Center graduate assistant Hannah Northey is working with Joy Palmer, projects director of MATRIX The Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online, to organize the collection. They hope to create a searchable database that will enable researchers to find articles on specialized topics.
"My hope is that we will be able to develop ways to make the 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 under exploration 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.
The Meeman Archive was established in 1982 with grants from the Scripps Howard Foundation. 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.
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."
