Drexel University College of Computing & Informatics (CCI) Assistant Professor Alex Poole, PhD recently received the 2018 Arline Custer Award for his article titled “Pinkett’s Charges: Recruiting, Retaining, and Mentoring Archivists of Color in the Twenty-First Century.”
The award recognizes the best books and articles written or compiled by individuals and institutions in the MARAC region — the District of Columbia, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. This award honors the memory of Arline Custer (1909-1975), MARAC member and editor of the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections.
MARAC Arline Custer Memorial Award Committee selected Poole’s article because it "addresses an important issue currently facing the archival profession: namely, racial and ethnic diversity and inclusion. The article offers valuable insights based on the experiences of archivists of color, and identifies constructive action items for our profession's future."
Poole also recently received the 2018 Bob Williams History Fund Award for his publication titled "Harold T. Pinkett and the Lonely Crusade of African American Archivists in the Twentieth Century." The Bob Williams History Fund, presented by the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T), was created for the purposes of supporting and encouraging research and publication in the history of information science and technology.
Poole was selected from among a pool of outstanding candidates who were judged based on the relevance of the central topic or question to be researched to the history of information science and technology.
Poole received the same award in 2017 for another paper, "'Could my dark hands break through the dark shadow?' The North Carolina Negro Library Association's War on Information Poverty in the Long Civil Rights Movement, 1935-1955." Click here to read more on ASIS&T’s website.
Poole's research interests center on digital curation, digital humanities, pedagogy, diversity and inclusivity in the LIS profession, and all matters archival. Among other venues, his work has been published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, American Archivist, and Archival Science. He received the Theodore Calvin Pease Award from the Society of American Archivists for his article “The Strange Career of Jim Crow Archives: Race, Space, and History in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South.”
Poole earned his doctorate in information science and a master of science degree in library science from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, a master of arts degree in history from Brown University, and a bachelor of arts degree in history from Williams College.