Interview about Lafayette College Archives

Laura Wu & Elaine Stomber

02/14/2019

  • What are your mission as an archivist?

The department serves as an academic repository at Lafayette College. The three main collections are respectively rare books collection, manuscript collection, and college archives.

The Special Collection and College Archives houses 15,000 volumes of rare books. They are locked in a special space where has climate control and fire suppression system. The temperature and humidity remain constant throughout the year, because too humid climate will cause the deterioration of book materials and the breaking of binding.

The manuscript collection contains alumni’s personal papers affiliated with Lafayette College and their research papers. Most of the research papers are from humanity majors, such as History, Art, International Affairs, Government and Law, and Anthropology and Sociology.

The department also documents the history record of the Lafayette College naming back to 1826 and mini books of Easton. The archives have the earliest record of the history of Lafayette. The collections are primarily in paper, but also sound recordings, pictures, and films. An interesting collection is an audio recording of a sermon in the Chaplain’s office.

Nowadays as the technology advances, the department uses digitalization to archive the collections and documents. When records are transferred to Lafayette Archives, the archivists try to respect original order as much as possible to organize the documents, guess how researchers would want to approach them and post the materials information on website. Most researchers are students and professors at Lafayette College.

Besides collecting and arranging the materials at Lafayette Archives, the department also provides an array of classroom instruction opportunities in some First-Year Seminars.

  • What is the procedure to archive?

The first step is contacting people who want to make donations, whether or not the materials fit the telescope of Lafayette Archives. In order to make the valuable materials discoverable, the archivist will help donors to find another repository if Lafayette Archives is unable to collect the donations.

For people outside the college, the archivists also need to consider the donor agreement signing and copywrite issue to make sure the copywrite is cleared. Once the copywrite is established, the archivists will do an initial survey to get a sense of the materials and assess the conservation issues.  Then they will develop a processing plan of the collection and an inventory folder of the collection.

  • When you do archive paper/digital documents, what are your requirements

The contents of the documents are the most important criteria not the format. If the material is original art work not the copy, then it will be housed at Lafayette Art Collection. The College Archives tent to have more paper documents, art sketch books, smaller drawings, and reproductions art works.

  • Is there ever a charge to archive?

There is no cost for researchers. However, there is a huge cost of equipment, such as buying boxes, folders, maintaining the climate control and fire suppression systems, and hiring people to be trained. The staff in the collection archives also have to obtain the ability to build the online platform and digital repository infrastructure to enable the materials searchable by researchers.

  • How to order the materials?

The archivists try to be consistent with the original order of the materials if they come in collections. If the materials are come in single pieces, then they are most likely out in chronological order. Each collection is put in individual folders with an inventory.