Formal Establishment of College Archives
Presented by
Irene Herold, Dean of Mason Library
Robert Madden, Special Collections Librarian
Lucy Jones, College Archivist
Mason Library is pleased to present to the College community for your information and comment the mission of the Keene State College Archives. The first sentence is intended to define the functions of the archive and the archive’s intended patrons. The second sentence places the mission within the context of the college, specifying the topics of the records of enduring value and the scope of the holdings by listing all incarnations of the College.
College Archives have three main functions, one of preservation, another of maintaining information, and finally providing access to the information of the institution. While providing access to information is a familiar function of libraries, preservation and maintenance may not be. Preservation refers to the physical condition of what is placed in the Archive. Preservation would be re-housing fragile materials and capturing information produced on materials or in formats that will deteriorate over time so they will be available for the future. Maintaining refers to the organization and development of the collection. Maintaining in this context involves the creation of records management procedures to ensure that the history of the college is routinely captured and placed where future generations can access the information.
New Hampshire Higher Education Assistance Foundation (NHHEAF) Network Educational Foundation awarded to Mason Library and Franklin Pierce University’s Library a twelve-month joint grant for the creation and implementation of records management at the respective institutions. The grant-funded archivist, Lucy Jones, commenced her work in January. As she works to establish records management protocols for Keene State College, Mason Library is simultaneously developing supporting documents of policy and procedure to formally establish the College Archives. This mission statement is just the first official step in this process.
Keene State College Archives Mission:
The College Archives preserves, maintains, and provides access to institutional records of enduring value as a resource for Keene State College students, staff and faculty, alumni, researchers, and the interested public. In support of the mission of Keene State College, the College Archives is committed to providing access to information about the College’s origins, goals, and programs, including its former incarnations as Keene Normal School and Keene Teachers College.
I think the mission statement is good!
Looks good to me.
ann
As someone whose scholarship has focused on developing local archival collections for writing programs in colleges and universities and as a board member of the National Archive for Rhetoric and Composition, I first want to say how happy I am that KSC has taken on this commitment to developing an archive! I would be interested in supporting this effort as it moves forward.
In terms of the mission statement, I think that it speaks to key roles that the archive can play in an institutional environment, and have just one additional suggestion. In my role as part of a research team building a writing program archive in conjunction with the Dimond LIbrary at the University of New Hampshire, I observed additional functions of an archive that I think might be useful to consider as the KSC Archive is in its beginning construction. Certainly preservation of materials that are fragile should be a priority. But also, I think that it would be important to include in this work a mention of the present moment as a living history for future historians and researchers–to think now about our current moment at KSC and the materials generated in coursework, in administrative and committee work, in the social and extracurricular life of the campus as materials that could be part of a living archive. I’ve found this perspective to be transformative in my own daily work, allowing me to think of the work I do as speaking to both a present audience and a future audience, to be in the process of developing an archive that can not only be useful for researchers but also for future new faculty and administrators who are seeking to understand how certain curricular practices or administrative structures came about or evolved over time. For instance, as I collected and labeled materials for the archive I developed at UNH, I found that I altered the ways that I generated materials in the writing center as well–offering more contextual traces (the author of the document, the context in which the document was used, the audience for the document, etc) on documents that I developed daily in order to explain to incoming administrators how certain decisions had been made and to describe the daily work of the writing center in this particular institutional context (as we know administrative and curricular practices evolve in relation to the institution itself and to its local environment).
I’d be happy to talk more about this idea, if you’d like to and again to be involved in supporting this work in any way I can.
Kate Tirabassi, Assistant Professor, English