The WWC way

Technically speaking, I am not a lone arranger.  I have someone who works with me in the archives.  Here at WWC the vast majority of students have a job.  It's part of the triad: work-service-learning--which makes this place unique.

Amanda is in her third semester in archives.  Her main project this semester has been to put together an exhibit about the Farm School/WWC Junior College football team.  The team was started in 1922 and lasted until 1947.  It was never well-funded and always lacked for proper equipment.  Uniforms were raggedy.  Some years, the team barely had enough players to fill the roster.  Some years they didn't, and so they didn't play. 

But the Aggies played enough to develop a serious rivalry with cross-county schools Christ School and Ashville School.  In 21 contests with the AS Blues, the Aggies won only 1 game, tied 2 at 0-0.

Former farm manager and beloved WWC icon, Ernst Laursen, donated a football from the 1934 game with Christ School and a helmet.  Amanda found some good photographs and wrote captions and text about the team from research in the Owl & Spade and The Echo.  The school/college also had a pep band and cheerleaders. 

There are no cheerleaders now, nor pep band (but there is an awesome step team that performs at half-time during basketball games on occasion).  Mountain biking and canoeing has replaced the resource-intensive football and baseball.  And for one short period of time, football reigned where cows and chicken graze.

It's a little chaotic at the moment, but very soon, this jumble will become a wonderful homage to the long-gone football team.  Amanda has put in a lot of time on creating this exhibit.

The exhibit on the Aggie Gridiron should be up soon in the downstairs exhibit case in the library.  Come by and cheer Amanda on as she learns the art of exhibit-making and story-telling.

In the hot spot...

We've reached that point in the semester where I am completely overrun--with reference, with students, with requests for my time and my brain and our records.  Working part-time when there are full-time demands is definitely not the way to go.  Not this week.

Fortunately, my student archivist has become bored with sleeving photographs, her current project, and eagerly took on two reference requests.  One was on the history of the lately departed Carson Hall; the other, how the furniture pieces in the Farm School's woodworking shop were sold or marketed.  Her attention to this level of detail and research will serve her well, as she is patiently sifting through a huge folder of financial records.  Awesome. Because I'm sifting through a pile of Henry Randolph correspondence from 1928 for a lecture I'm giving next Thursday.

And that means, of course, records go unprocessed, undescribed, uncataloged.  How to balance the life of research with that of making the records available.  The eternal dilemma of the lone arranger.

Thursday musings

Greetings! Since I now have entered the world of archives blogging, I suppose I should post regularly about our activities. For the first time since I've been at Warren Wilson College, I have two mostly full-time processors and one mostly full-time extra student who has been setting up our brand new, shiny website. This is really novel for me. When Max, Katie and Julie are in here with me, as we are on Wednesday afternoons and Friday mornings, it gets pretty crowded. Over the next week or so, I want to highlight what they're doing because lots of good things are happening. This week I've been concentrating on getting text written for the website. It's been nearly 4 years, so it's about time. I hope to put up basic html documents of the finding aids, some photo libraries, and an exhibit about the White Barn. But I'm working on getting the basic information and downloadable documents that I use most often. Keep checking the website for updates.

But first, a photo: This is the archives main work area. Katie works at the far end, and I'm closest in. I can spread out and write on the laptop and send things back to the main computer. If you squint, you can see Max's chair in the dark. He's the senior member of the squad so he gets his own office. :D It looks like it's a mess, but the stuff on the table is actually quite organized. Sometimes you have to have a little chaos before imposing order.

The archives has very nice compact shelving which maximizes our limited space. I've never been a huge fan of compact shelving, but it really is appropriate.