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Into the Archives

Though strategies for appealing to students differ among libraries, one goal remains constant: to emphasize that the collections are for everyone despite their specializations. The Schlesinger team, for example, hopes undergraduates will recognize that its collections are not solely geared toward those concentrating in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. “Although our collections document the history of women in America, it doesn’t mean the only things you can investigate are women’s studies,” Dunn says. “All of these records allow you to explore American history, because they document the lives of all people, just through a woman’s experience.”

HIDDEN MESSAGES, HIDDEN OPPORTUNITIES

Aside from manuscripts, watermarks and letters, among the collections’ most valuable offerings are the little-known employment and funding opportunities they provide students. This past summer, Alona M. Bach ’16 worked with CHSI through Harvard’s Summer Humanities and Arts Research Program. For Bach, part of the appeal of working at CHSI was the recurring opportunity to hidden secrets of the collection. “We were looking at [marble tablets], and we took these little squares...out of the frame and looked at them under UV light. All of a sudden, we could see place names and numbering systems previously hidden,” Bach says. “These objects are so easily accessible, and the possibility of discovering something new is just so exciting.”

Though not all undergraduates will end up seeking employment at the collections, the librarians agree that it is still possible to have this hands-on experience simply by visiting. The number of classrooms attending Houghton’s collections has increased in the past few months, a trend Hyry attributes to a burgeoning interest in an interactive approach to education. “Teaching has really changed. With a book like ‘Moby Dick,’ you can talk about that in front of people and have this abstract idea, or you can show them this manuscript of ‘Moby Dick’ along with the first edition,” Hyry says. “There’s something that can really come alive: The technical term I think is ‘experiential learning.’ We want to see Houghton as a center for that.”

Additionally, several of these academic spaces, including Houghton, Schlesinger, and the Hiphop Archive, offer monetary stipends for pursuing scholarly work linked to the collections, something of which officials want undergraduates to be more aware. “We have student fellowships that we award every year, for the summer or the school year, that provide students with up to $2,000,” Dunn says. “But these are under-applied for, so we would love to see more students express interest in these research grants.”

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Past projects have included everything from papers covering the political participation of Middle Eastern immigrants in the post 9/11 era, to theories of how food trucks evolved from roach coaches, to podcasts about the Houghton library and its collections. Regardless of the subject, the fellowships provide students with the opportunity for a newfound appreciation for the academic material they use in their studies. “From looking at an object instead of just hearing about it, you can see how it was held, or find what spot might’ve been used the most; or if it was broken, see that someone cared about it enough to keep it and mend it,” Bach says. “You can really learn something about the value of an object.”

PRESERVING AN INTELLECTUAL SPACE

Regardless of fluctuating student attendance and the occasional opportunity left untaken, those running Harvard’s special collections are simply glad that such spaces for scholarship exist on campus. For some, the collections’ significance lies in their ability to weave threads between ostensibly unrelated topics. “There’s a history to hiphop that matters, one that’s connected to the history of the United States for the past 40 years,” Atkins says. “It illuminates the different things we study in academic disciplines, as well as speaks to them. And these connections are there, but we’re not necessarily making them.”

For others, the collections act as safeguards for historical voices at risk of being forgotten. “We do history here, and we’re an extraordinary resource for original scholarship,” Dunn says. “I suspect that women’s history would still be somewhat invisible if some of these prominent women archives—including the Schlesinger—didn’t exist.”

According to Morgan, the archives can even cultivate a greater sense of community. “People are really hungry for this,” Morgan says. “Hiphop—and the archive—is a symbol to so many people on what they can do, who they can be, and how they can dream. They think, ‘If a place like this exists, then I belong somewhere.’”

Nearly all, however, agree that the collections house more than historical artifacts; they act as repositories for the accounts of generations prior. “There are so many smaller stories that are hidden within the libraries themselves that have really never been worked on and can complicate received narratives of history,” Bach says. If anything, the items stored away in Harvard’s collections are vestibules. Each manuscript, correspondence, and piece of art bears with it a story of shared dreams, failures, and experiences that link the distant past to the present. The collections provide students with the opportunity to examine who we are, and also, to consider where we’ve come from.

—Shaun V. Gohel can be reached at shaun.gohel@thecrimson.com.

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