A Student’s Archive
Can college students actually keep an archive? What would it look like?
This week we visited the different archives of University Circle. I visited the library of the Cleveland Botanical Gardens, where the institution is in the process of building the archives. As I listened to the head librarian, Gary Esmonde, talk about the process of building and maintaining an archive, I realized that all undergrad students go through a process similar to that of building an institutional archive.
Esmonde told us what the fundamentals of building an archive were. The first thing that all archives should have is a copy of the blueprint of the institution, the principles upon which it was built and what it wishes to achieve. They must then go through their collections and decide what should be kept or discarded. The basis of these decisions is a series of questions:
· Are the items of any value, an asset to the institution?
· Do they have any significance; historical, educational, or otherwise?
· Will the public want to see these items?
These types of question can also be applied when weeding the collections. Only some archives participate in the practice of weeding, going through the collection and keeping item based on the amount of importance, because they don’t have the amount of space necessary to keep everything they acquire.
A student’s archive, while not as vast as an institution’s, follows the same guidelines. It begins with a blueprint, the student’s major, giving the student a sort of guiding principle of what will go into his/her collection.
The next step is refining the collection. A student goes through a weeding process also by using the following criteria:
· Which books have some sort of value? Will they be useful in the future? Which books should I get rid of?
(For example, if you were majoring in engineering, your Intro to Physics book may be more useful than your Art History book.)
· Which of my papers should be kept?
(Here at CWRU all undergrads are required to submit a writing portfolio to complete their English requirements. Some papers should be excluded from that collection.)
· Will the public want to have access to these items?
(The public in this case is normally the student and an evaluator of their work.)
Even if students don’t realize what they are doing, they are in fact building their own personal archive. Over the course of their undergraduate and possibly graduate studies they are in a sense building a collection of knowledge, through the collection of books and papers, that can be accessed for later reference.
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