Welcome back faithful readers! Today we will be discussing an interesting discovery that I have made while working on my internship. I was brought to this room earlier in the semester by Pam King, who is the libraries Digital Initiatives & Scholarly Communications Coordinator, accompanied by my supervisor, Jane Stirling. The inside of the room is quite simple, two bookcases on one side of the room, loaded with books, other bindings, and bankers boxes full of material. On the other side is a table with several chairs, and an expensive looking scanner that is most likely used to scan material in the room for external use and digitization.
What am I talking about? I am talking about UTM’s very own archives room!
In terms of the content in the room; I do not have a complete grasp of the material hidden in the room even after two 1 hour sessions browsing the bookshelves. But during my two hours looking around, I have discovered quite a few interesting things in the room.
In addition to original copies of every newspaper published at UTM, and books upon books of principal’s reports, geological surveys, and faculty publications, there were several interesting and unique items in the archives. For example, there was a small black box, about 12 by 8 inches, which contained a miniature diagram of the Kaneff Center. There was another box that contained a key that was presented during the grand opening of the South Building. There were tape recordings of the content played on Radio Erindale, interesting photos of half-naked students in art class, and video cassettes of Hazel McCallion’s birthday celebrations.
Though I cannot show you pictures of these things, I can show you intersting articles that I found in the Erindalian; UTM's first newspaper. Feel free to read through them and see the interesting things that happened at UTM during the past.
The archives are incredibly interesting, partially because of what I have found in them thus far, but more so because of the fact that I did not know of their existence before this semester, and that there is still a lot of material hiding away that I, nor many I assume, have ever seen before.
And with every great story, there is a conflict. Though the archives have a lot of potential for my internship, I have been unable to take advantage of it, and considering the circumstances, I am not sure if I will be able too.
As you may know, my internship is focused on researching interesting events in UTM’s history that will then be placed on the 50th anniversary website in the form of a timeline. With that being said, you can understand the criticality of having these archives as a resource. Unfortunately, however small and simple the room may look, or however recent the material may be, I am not allowed to be in the room by myself and touch the materials by myself. The process is for me to let the newly appointed archivist know in advance when I would like to visit the room and what kind of material I am looking for, so that she can pull that material aside for me to browse through.
The problem with this is that the room is disorganized; it hasn’t been catalogued yet, thus there is no existing list of items that can be found in the archives (the archivist was hired to fix this, but she will not begin working on it until the New Year). This makes it very difficult for me - how do I ask for the archivist to pull something aside when I don’t know the full extent of what exists in the room? And how do I learn about what’s in the room if I cannot touch anything or be in the room to simply browse?
As of right now, I do not plan to use the physical archives in my research for the timeline, but this is something that has the possibility of changing. There is an entire semester left and who knows what the internship still has left in store for me.
Tune in next time to see if the UTM archives plays a bigger role in my project than I originally anticipated!
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All images in this post are from The Erindalian, UTM's first newspaper. The newspaper has been digitilized, and can be found here. For direct links to the three clippings found in this post, look here, here, and here respectively.