A Trip Home - From the Archives, Literally

This week the rest of the #explore1918 group and I are on spring break! I'm very glad to be spending the week in my (warm) hometown of Sarasota, FL. But even though we're on break, the history doesn't stop.

Yesterday I visited my alma mater, New College of Florida, a small, weird, public liberal arts college. While there I made sure to check on my biggest point of pride from my undergraduate experience, the New College Student Alliance (NCSA) Archives.

The sign on the door to the archives, which I fought to get the school to fund.

Forgotten for years,

I didn't hear about the archives until I was in my 3rd year of college. A tiny, unmarked room in our student center housed decades of student publications, art, photographs, event fliers, petitions, and even original school blueprints. The room was totally disorganized and had become more of a storage closet than an archive. As an energetic history major, I enlisted a fellow student, Cole, to help me begin organizing the room. We eventually turned the project into a class called "Archives Tutorial." In addition to cleaning up the physical space, we wanted the student body to know about this incredible resource for institutional memory. Promoting the space involved getting the sign pictured above, and being featured in the school newspaper.

The preview for the article about our project in the student newspaper, The Catalyst. The article encouraged students to come check out the archives. I'm pictured on the left holding a preserved banana from the 1990s.

We continued working for the next year and a half

Cole and I made a lot of progress. We got funds to purchase special archival boxes and folders to store materials. We continued to gain student interest in the space. We established a relationship with the school newspaper who began using the archives to research articles. We drafted a document to establish best practices to future archivists. Yet, unfortunately, the project was far from over when I graduated.

I knew that I was leaving the space in good hands with my friend Cole, who still had two more years of school. Still, I wasn't sure what would become of the space. Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised to see a new generation of students working hard to organize the archives.

Photo taken by me. Notice in the back right that the Facilities department donated a door!

The new crop of students are currently planning an open house that will invite students, staff, and faculty to come see featured items from the archives. I shared with them what I have been learning in graduate school (including Steemit!), discussed plans to create a digital finding aid, and talked about the room's future.

I don't know what will happen to the NCSA Archives

But I do know that, for now, the room and those helping to promote and organize it are helping foster institutional memory at this small community that means so much to me. While there is still a long way to go in terms of meeting professional archival standards, the more people who know about and use the archives, the more support there will be for its enhancement.

With that, I leave you with a photograph of New College's 1994 "Headbangers Ball" party. Courtesy of the NCSA Archives, of course.

Archives tutorial lives on!

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Within the next couple of days, I'll be back to posting for the Philadelphia History project. In the mean time, check out @phillyhistory's posts about our funding ideas!