The Associates of the Boston Public Library is proud to underwrite the salary of the BPL Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, a role filled in February by Viv Williams. 

Viv comes to the BPL with eight years of Special Collections experience, most recently as the Commission Archivist at the Cambridge Historical Commission. She dreamed of being a librarian from the age of five. After completing a bachelor's degree in English at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, she moved to Boston to attend Simmons University. She landed her first archives job as a Library Assistant at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Viv has a dog named Bonsai and a cat named Banshee. In her free time, she enjoys gardening, painting, and crocheting.

In this role, Viv will steward, develop, and promote collections dating from approximately 1800 through the present day. In the months to come, Viv will work primarily on the BPL’s Anti-Slavery Collection which includes archives, collections of books, ephemera, manuscripts, newspapers, photographs, and other formats, many of which were donated by leading figures in the 19th-century American abolitionist movement. Examples include scrapbooks concerning Anthony Burns and John Brown, the papers of William Lloyd Garrison and the full run of The Liberator; a first-edition copy of Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom, among others.

Specifically, Viv will reconstitute and re-contextualize BPL’s anti-slavery holdings with respect to their provenance and processing history to create accurate, detailed finding aids and other discovery tools, making these historic materials more accessible than ever.

Congratulations and welcome, Viv!