Today's Hours
This blog post was written by Professor David Nocera, an esteemed member of the CCNY Libraries team, who passed away suddenly on March 26, 2020. Professor Nocera held an MA in Political Science from the University of Connecticut where he was a Roper Fellow, and an MLS in Library Science from Queens College CUNY with a Certificate in the Preservation of Cultural Heritage. He was also the cherished partner of Prof. Ellen Handy of the CCNY Art Department and a valued CCNY Libraries collaborator and champion. David's post is testament to his knowledge, skills, enthusiasm, and his commitment to interdisciplinary teamwork. CCNY Libraries offers our deepest condolences to Ellen and the entire CCNY community for this loss.
by Professor David Nocera
This semester (Spring 2020) a new course entitled Archives, Archivists, and the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, appeared in the English Department catalog, and was cross-listed by MCA. I was assigned as the instructor, and twenty five students enrolled. How this course came to be is an interesting story, with numerous twists and turns, surprises and circumstances that should be familiar to anyone in the CCNY community.
My part in this story goes back to very near its beginning, in two faculty dining rooms, where I met MCA Advertising and Public Relations Program Director Professor Ed Keller and five ORCA scholars who were valiantly trying to make some sense of the 2,500+ cubic feet of mixed materials that entailed the life’s work of George Lois. George Lois is an American art director, designer, and author, best known for over ninety-two covers he designed for Esquire magazine between 1962 and 1972. Thirty-two of these Esquire covers were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 2008.
With very little to go on re: why this collection was stacked all over two faculty dining rooms, what was immediately obvious to me was that the collection was here, and therefore it was now someone’s responsibility to process it, house it, and provide access to it. After a brief conversation with Professor Keller, that someone was determined to be me! So after briefly considering trying to persuade the folks at CCNY to give it back to the donor, I had to figure out how I was going to archive it. At the time I knew this might be a once in a lifetime collection. The entire scope and content is so impressive, but the inclusion of twenty-seven original sketches of Lois’ iconic Esquire covers makes this archive truly historic.
The basic facts were not encouraging: we now “owned” a huge collection, but we didn’t yet know its enduring archival value, if any. All of this was happening at or near the point of maximum austerity at CCNY; there was absolutely no money to house, process, arrange, describe, create records, or service research requests. Did I mention it was a very large collection?
However, there were sufficient people of good will to allow for a plan to go forward: I would serve as the project archivist supervising a staff of untrained undergraduate student workers who would arrange, describe and create resource records in ArchivesSpace, an open source archives information management application. We would house the collection in a series of temporary storage locations scattered around the campus, six and counting so far, never fewer than two at a time, and all either inadequate or inappropriate for archival storage. Each time the collection was moved it got more shuffled until all semblance of original order was lost.
Students would learn by doing; I would train, supervise, schedule, budget and otherwise shepherd them. I would, in short, teach them to be archivists. Along the way I began to notice something remarkable about the thirty or so students who worked on the collection. Our students arrive at CCNY thinking that “research” is something one does on one’s phone. Works of art are digital images, and naturally, they are about the size of a passport photo, because that’s what will fit on a phone.
One way we might correct that misapprehension is to assign a visit to an archive in a research methods course. We could require the students to request an artifact from an archive, meet the archivist, put on their gloves, and take it out of the box. It is something of a sacrament in my profession: the act of holding an original source archival object in one’s hands, looking at it closely, smelling it, turning it over and noticing what’s on the back is usually at least enlightening, and sometimes transformative.
But along the way I also discovered another invaluable pedagogic experience we might offer to our students. We could require them to arrange and describe an archival collection. We could require them to create resource records. We could provide an immersive experience, teach them SAA-DACS or some other formal descriptive language. Along the way, I discovered that something very valuable happens to students who are required to learn the detailed taxonomy of archival preservation. They better understand the ontology, the big picture, the “story”, with all of its nuance, contradiction, omissions, and lacunae. In short, they become intimately familiar with all of the things that come with “history.”
Along the way I got some serious help from the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) in the form of a generous fellowship for one student per semester who would work at the Center for real world pay, two days (15 hours) per week. That partnership with the RAC was the seed from which sprouted the idea of an undergraduate course in archival studies.
It took the better part of a year. I wrote a syllabus. I shopped it around to the department heads in the Arts and Humanities Division. And eventually we had a course. Without the stewardship and encouragement of Arts and Humanities Deputy Dean Renata Miller, I’m not sure that it would have ever happened.
But it did happen: the first twenty-five students are attending classes on archives, the work of archivists, and the nature of cultural heritage preservation. They read and discuss current literature from the world of archives and archival science. They attend lectures on theory and practice. And they all spend two hours per week working on archival collections in the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute with Archivists Idilio Gracia Peña and Jessy Perez, on the CCNY Art Collection with Professor Ellen Handy, in the Archives and Special Collection with Professors Sydney Van Nort and William Gibbons, in the Music Library Archive with Professor Michael Crowley, and several students work with me on the Lois Collection. They are also the pool of applicants for future Rockefeller Archives Center Fellowships. Indeed, the RAC has recently expanded their support from two students per year to six.
There is now active consideration of an Archival Studies minor underway, as well as a plan to forge closer ties to our own Harlem neighborhood through outreach aimed at partnerships with community historians and archives. Professor Gibbons has already forged partnerships with the NYPL Schomburg Center, The Museum of the City of New York, and other neighboring institutions toward that end.
And I’m happy to report that the same adventure in deeper learning that my thirty Lois Collection Student Archivists first had is well underway every week in the NAC and elsewhere. Students are taking hold of archival content in their gloved hands, arranging it, describing it, creating resource records, providing access to it, and in so doing, better understanding how it fits into the overall story than is perhaps otherwise possible.
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