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Its shrill electronic cry shattering the silence, the phone on the desk of Elaine McCluskey Stomber ’89 rang. She picked up the handset, waiting with expectation. From the earpiece came a voice that uttered a most disturbing revelation: “So I understand you’re an anarchist.”
What the caller needed more than anything else was a dictionary. For Stomber and fellow archivists Emelie George Rubin ’02 and Kathy Stewart Jordan ’91 don’t create chaos, rather they find a way to tame it and make it a useful source of information for generations to come.
So please don’t call them anarchists — or librarians.
“A librarian works with books,” says Jordan, digital initiatives and web services manager for the state-run Library of Virginia. “An archivist works with the things that people create on a daily basis that help us understand their lives: their letters, diaries, records of public office, etc.”
Or a lock of the Marquis de Lafayette’s hair. Or 19th century ladies’ kid gloves engraved with his image. Or even, as Rubin recalls of her past work as an archivist at the National Agricultural Library, a set of 20 T-shirts emblazoned with pithy statements about the sterilization of every cattle rancher’s nightmare, the flesh-eating screwworm fly.
“At dinner parties, people wonder how you know about weird things like that,” she notes with a wry smile.
All three alumnae gained inspiration, experience, and mentoring from Diane Shaw, special collections librarian and College archivist, at different stages of their academic careers. Rubin worked for Shaw throughout her time as a student; highlights included putting together two major exhibits and designing web content. Jordan served a graduate internship with Shaw, working with historical papers and preparing an online exhibit on New Jersey Congresswoman Helen Meyner’s work with the Red Cross during the Korean War. Stomber worked for Shaw from midway through her time as a student through graduation and returned years later after becoming established in the field.
With so much important information locked up in sources other than books, they learned, the archivist is every researcher’s friend.
Stomber, associate College archivist, explains: “You have 50 boxes of material that came out of a physicist’s or mathematician’s basement, and you have to figure out how to organize it in a way that when a researcher comes in and says, ‘I need information on this topic,’ you can say, ‘Ah, yes, I can find it for you.’ Because if you have 50 boxes with no organization, inventory, or intellectual control, it’s useless.”
Rubin, the institutional archivist for Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. (the “West Point of medical schools”), adds, “There’s something really Zen about organizing, arranging, and collecting. It’s rewarding to help someone find something they didn’t know existed. I think it affects their lives to find that missing piece of their research.”
More than ever, that research requires globe-spanning communication. Managing archives today means employing the latest technology. (In fact, Jordan’s work comes under the auspices of the library’s IT department.) Digitizing archives through the use of high-end scanners and making them available on the web is one of the primary daily functions of today’s archivists. By opening their collections to the Internet, archivists can promote their treasure troves of knowledge to the world and gain new recognition for their collections and their work.
“We have more people visit online than come into the library,” Jordan says. “I’ve been able to work on a project with a professor in Germany that would not have been possible if not for email.” She adds, “Increasingly, our visitors are going to be virtual.”
But not all archives convert well to bits and bytes. How does one capture an item’s atmosphere or aroma, for instance?
In her previous role as an archivist and art historian at The Cloisters, a special archive of religious artifacts and texts collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Stomber worked within the walls of crumbling gothic cathedrals removed from Europe and reassembled in Manhattan . Not only did visitors experience the feel, smells, and looming presence of the medieval, but so did the archivist.
“I worked under the tombs,” she says, “using a folding chair and a table in the crypt. You worried about rodents. It was a very appropriate place for me to work.”
Mice nibbling on historical papers is the least of most archivists’ worries, though. Preserving the past means safeguarding against other forces, like time, decay, and even theft. Climate-controlled storage rooms, chemical washes to remove the damaging acids that cause old papers to yellow and decay, and costly conservation efforts that use alchemy-like science to transform the very matter that comprises priceless papers and artifacts�”archivists employ a host of high-tech tricks to keep their material ready for use by the next generation.
Still, despite the sterile nature of acid-free papers, bits and bytes zipping through the Internet, and fragile items stored behind sheets of acrylic, many archived materials retain a human connection.
Jordan, who also oversees genealogical, organizational, and business records, tells of one such emotional project: “We’re getting a new collection on adoptions, letters from birth mothers to the children they are giving up and cases of toys the mothers left for them.”
Rubin adds, “At the National Agriculture Library, we did a traveling exhibit on the Prestele family, German botanical illustrators who came to this country in the late 1800s. They did amazing watercolor illustrations, many of them of grapes. Descendents of that family came to the exhibit, so it was rewarding to see them react to their ancestors’ work.”
Such collections transcend mere information and make the job of archivist all the more compelling for Stomber, Jordan, and Rubin.
On a recent family visit to Washington, D.C., Stomber experienced such a connection when her eldest daughter encapsulated what drives archivists to remain committed to the work: “When you tour the Capitol visitors’ center, you go through an exhibition space that details the things that have happened in the building. Clare said, ‘Mom, did you know that the Marquis de Lafayette was the first foreign dignitary to address Congress?’ I said, ‘Yes, the College actually has the original handwritten manuscript of Lafayette’s address.’ That’s a wonderful moment for me.”
And wonderful for everyone who values the past and what it can teach us in the present.