The Martin Luther King Reading Room will reopen with an entire reorganization of the Martin Luther King, Jr. collection Friday, after being closed for about two and a half years.
The collection, a two-year project undertaken by the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will include more than 80,000 pieces, HGARC spokesman Chris Gately said. The room is on the third floor of Boston University’s Mugar Memorial Library.
‘The goal is re-cataloging, and we are making it also accessible,’ Gately said. ‘We’re using this new technology called Archivist Toolkit that will help researchers when they want to come look at the collection.’
Martin Luther King, Jr., who received a PhD in systematic theology from BU in 1955, donated the 80,000-piece collection to BU in 1964.
‘He had such a good experience here that he donated this massive amount of papers and a lot of his personal correspondence and office papers,’ Gately said. ‘It’s a very sizable collection.’
The room serves as a ‘reading room’ for students, Gately said.
‘Students can come in and study in there,’ Gately said. ‘We have a lot of his material on display there, but the archive itself has the full collections.’
The HGARC will celebrate the project and room reopening by sponsoring the MLK, Jr. Leadership Lecture, which will be given by King’s sister Christine King Farris Friday at 7 p.m. at Metcalf Hall. Farris will be talking about her work as an author and her personal memories of the King family.
Staff writer Eileen Reslen contributed reporting to this story.
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