The university archives are somewhat intimidating when you first see them: A scattering of papers, artifacts, folders, and shelves behind a set of locked doors in the basement of the Blough-Weis library. But the truth is, the archives are full of fascinating—sometimes even funny!—collections of items dating back to SU’s founding in 1898.
To learn more about the collections, I spoke with Meg Garnett, the Special Collections Librarian who works in the University Archives, Apple Rare Book Room, and Pennsylvania Room. Meg is also the departmental librarian for history; music, language, literatures, and cultures; art and art history; museum studies; and graphic design.
The Photo
As Meg leads me down into the “dungeons,” as she jokingly calls the archives, she begins to explain how items are organized. “A lot of stuff randomly comes in over the years” from university offices, she says, mostly from alums or their children—say, a class ribbon, a yearbook, or a photograph.
One photograph is particularly interesting: a black-and-white image of five men sitting on the steps of a building. The photo “turned up between the pages of a yearbook that was part of a bunch donated to us over the summer,” Meg explains to me in an email. It appears to be taken in the early 1920s. Her best guess is that the men are posed on the steps of GA Hall, an old SU residence hall that abruptly and somewhat mysteriously burned down in the 1960s.
The men in the photo are not identified at all, however. Meg and another librarian, Brianne Dort, as well as some of Meg’s students, have attempted to “ID” the men based on sources from the time period. She shows me a junior yearbook from 1921 used for matching some of the photographed men’s faces. The yearbook includes personal information as well: there are listed quotes, traits, inside jokes, and even the political parties of the students.
“You can come to know a little bit about them,” Meg says.
The photo also offers visual clues as to when, where, and how it was taken. Meg points out the leaves on the trees reflected in the window on the left; from this, she guesses it was taken in the fall or late spring, in the mid to late afternoon. She chose the 1921 junior yearbook to look into because of the cap on the bottom right of the photo, which is imprinted with a small white “22.” One of them men on the right is holding a baseball and glove, and another could be wearing cleats.
But this probably isn’t a team photo, given the student’s dress. “They would’ve been required to dress for dinner at the time,” Meg explains, the men having to wear collared shirts, the women skirts and blouses—and given their formal attire in the photo, that’s likely what was going on. She also notes it “wouldn’t have been totally unusual to have a camera” at this time in history, so someone could’ve quickly paused to take the men’s picture as they tossed a ball around after class.
When I point out that one of the men looks particularly old, maybe beyond traditional college age, she explains that would’ve been normal at the time. With soldiers returning from World War I, college students ranged from about 17 years old to their mid or late 20s. There was even a high-school-level academy on the campus, she explains, that allowed students to move back and forth between the two.
Meg shows me half-sheets of paper that the staff and students have been using to track the IDs in the photo. They show rough outlines of the men, or boxes in their places, with scribbled names and question marks. One woman’s paper uses arches to mark where the men are placed. “She turned them into tombstones,” Meg laughs.
In addition to yearbooks, Meg says they can use alumni directories to learn about past SU students. Flipping through one, she shows me a postcard that alum can fill out to archive their current job, degree, marriage status, children, and area of residence. For the men in the photo, you can look them up based on their class status—however, some of them may have graduated in a different year or not at all, Meg says, complicating the process of identifying them.
The University Archives
In the archives, the overall means of organization is by “record group,” but more specifically, “collection.” Meg explains collections as units sorted by the person or office that created them. Most collections are sorted into gray boxes in the archive room, but items can also stored in manilla folders, binders, and shelves. Specific sorting depends on the items that come in. For example, faculty minutes are sorted by year because that’s simply how they are recorded.
I ask about the main reason why people need things pulled from collections – Meg tells me really it can be any reason. Sometimes alumni need proof of a performance, a club they were a part of, or a paper they wrote. Other times faculty might need access to a host of things for research purposes.
When something needs archived, the first step is something called an “accession form.” This notes basic information, such as where and who the item is from. Then it is placed in a container and labeled—from there, it is archived and potentially entered online. Not everything is digitized, though, Meg says, and a lot of things become digitized simply because people ask for them to become digitized. While I’m there, I watch Meg upload the baseball photo, the scanner humming as it brings the men to life on her computer screen.
To access the digital archives, you can go to the Blough-Weis library’s website: library.susqu.edu/home. Click the “Collections” menu on the home page, and scroll down to “University Archives & Special Collections.” Click the orange “Collections” box—from there, go to “All SU Collections on Internet Archive” to search for something specific, or click on any one of the blue collections links to browse.
If you would like to access the in-person archives like I did for a specific purpose, you can email Meg Garnett at garnett@susqu.edu. Maybe you’ll find what you were looking for—or even something you never expected!
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