NACR Collections Indexed by folder (whole or part), URI/Robert Schwegler
- Beal Collection (URI Holdings): 14 Boxes (Click HERE for Finding Aid). For UNH Beal Collection holdings , click HERE.
- Bizzell Collection: 5 Boxes
- Bloom Collection: 15 Boxes plus books
- Bruffee Collection: 4 Boxes
- Crowley Collection: 7 Boxes
- Ede Collection: 4 Boxes
- Haswell Collection: 3 Boxes
- Lauer/Daniloff Collection: 1 Box
- Little, Brown Collection: Several Boxes
- Lowenstein Collection: 1 Box
- Maimon Collection: 2 Boxes
- McLeod Collection: 2 Boxes
- Schwegler Collection: 4 Boxes
- White Collection: 2 Boxes
The National Archives of Composition and Rhetoric (NACR) was founded in the early 1990s by Robert Connors, Robert Schwegler, and Charles Christensen (Bedford Books). The basis of the collection were the papers, textbook reviews, and textbooks donated by the family of Richard Beal of Boston College. Richard Beal was the director of freshman and sophomore English at Boston College, advisor for four textbook publishers (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston; Little, Brown; Prentice-Hall; and Bedford Books), and chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. To these materials were added the records of the English program of the college division of Little, Brown and Company. Working with a board of advisors including Lynn Z. Bloom, John Brereton, and William Ross (University of New Hampshire Special Collections), Connors and Schwegler put out a nationwide call for papers on all aspects of writing studies and composition instruction, including programmatic materials, scholarly papers, and ephemera. The collection was thus designed to be nationwide in scope, though certainly not an exclusive repository for the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies. The collection was split into for convenience in processing and storage, with the books being held in the Special Collections of the University of New Hampshire and papers being held and indexed at the University of Rhode Island. Robert Connors augmented the textbook collection with his own historical collection of books on the history of rhetoric and composition, and others have continued to contribute texts to it. Numerous scholars have contributed to the collection at the University of Rhode Island. Some of them Include Lynn Z. Bloom, Elaine Maimon, Richard Haswell, Wayne Booth, Susan McLeod, Patricia Bizzell, Sharon Crowley, Alan Purves, Toby Fulwiler, Art Young, Lisa Ede, David Schwalm, Edward White, Ross Winterowd, Linda K. Shamoon, Kenneth H. Bruffee, Libby Miles, Edward P.J. Corbett, Jeanne Gunner, Walter Minot, Erika Lindemann, Susan Miller, and others. At present, the collection consists of approximately 300 linear feet of materials.
In fall of 2017, the first index to the Archives should be available online. It will consist of a folder level index of the Bloom Collection (papers and books of Lynn Z. Bloom), Ede Collection (papers and materials of Lisa Ede), Haswell Collection (Richard Haswell); and initial entries for the Beal Collection. The index will be expanded regularly to include further collections, hashtags generated by the archivist, and hashtags generated by users (to form a folksonomy).
For further information, please contact the following:
Robert A Schwegler
Kingston, RI 02881
(401) 874-2979
rschweg@uri.edu