Sense of Place: Disorientation, Excitement, Nostalgia

Yesterday, I served as the moderator of a session titled "Creating Your Career: Alternatives to Traditional Employment" at the autumn New England Archivists' conference. I was excited to be returning to the school from which I received my Master's 20 years ago. I hadn't been on campus in 15 years. In fact, when I was last at Simmons College, they didn't really have a campus. I was familiar with the main building and a parking lot that was a constant cause of consternation. Parking was precious with not nearly enough space to accommodate the student body. Though I knew that Simmons had a great school of management and other programs in different buildings, it was as if those schools were not really part of my own since we were separated by architectural design.

I pulled into the underground parking lot and found a space with ease. The trip down from New Hampshire was smooth, though my sense of direction was not. Everything looked different. New businesses and construction confused me and I ended up driving out of my way to get where I was going. I was already feeling disoriented when I exited the parking garage and went up the elevator to a quad area. Simmons actually has a real campus now with buildings for the different schools connected by an outdoor area. A shiny new building greeted me for my conference across the way. It was clean, light, and full of glass. "Wow! This is MY school." I felt proud of the leaps my "little" school has taken in the past couple of decades. But I also felt a little old and disconnected. I realized that there was a definite generation gap between current students and my generation.

Having arrived early, I worked my way up to the library. It was basically my second home for one and a half years. I took an elevator up, admired the archives on display outside the information center and wandered in. Computers were everywhere, which was not unexpected. Comfortable sitting areas, clean tables, carpeting, and more showed off the best side of library science. Unlike MY Simmons library, this one comfortably combined resources for all of Simmons' schools. I wondered how students could really get the full impact of a cataloging class by sitting in such a cushy space. I was nostalgic for the hard tables and chairs surrounded by shelves of Library of Congress cataloging guides.  I had a deja view moment when I passed a copier. Something was familiar. Was this part of the old design? (Having a lousy sense of direction and less than stellar spacial relation skills, I couldn't be sure.)

Simmons College graduation day, 1993.

The student body seemed very young. I was the youngest person in the program when I attended Simmons. It now seemed like everyone wandering the halls was in her/his early twenties. That is, everyone looked young until I passed another woman looking as dazed and confused as I felt. "Wow, this place has changed," she muttered. She had the poised, intellectual look of a well-informed librarian. She was working her way through the conference with a sense of professional grounding, I think. I knew that she was seeking a few pointers that she might have missed along the way. She was not bouncing from program to program quickly taking as many notes as she could to figure out who she wanted to be and what path she would follow to launch her archives career. "When did you graduate?" I asked. "1992," she responded. "Hmmm...do we know each other?" No. But we both knew that we shared the same sense of place. We were part of the same Simmons community with a sense of place that differed from many others at the conference that day.

Then, I reached it. I stood in the main entryway of the old Simmons building that I knew so well. It  looked virtually the same. The old architecture greeted me with open arms. I felt markedly more relaxed and thought, "I'm so glad they left you intact." This was/is MY Simmons. This was the hall that held my memories and I could practically hear the voices of my generation beating from the walls. I welcome change, but I am once again reminded of the importance of memory and sense of place. They are so intricately woven into our sense of self. They are part of the thread of our history. Sense of place is a delicate thing. Markers reminding us of where we have been help ground us and let us walk confidently into our future.

I entered the lecture hall. I was ready to share what I could to help this new generation, with their new sense of place, to find their own confident stride.

The Only Archivist in the Room

I was up and out with the sun this weekend
to attend the NEHA conference in Worcester

I very much enjoyed attending the spring session of the New England Historical Association Conference this weekend. I recently joined NEHA to widen my professional circle. As a proponent of cross-professional collaboration in the cultural heritage fields, this seems like an important group with whom to be networking. Composed primarily of academic historians, I figured this group would present me with alternate views about working with archival resources. I was right and also pleasantly surprised by my interactions.

The early conference sessions were presented by students pursuing PhDs in history fields. The first session I attended included a student presenter who had written a paper about a "Suffrage Coffee House" in Ayer, Massachusetts. She described the suffragettes in town who met there and the MIT educated female architects who renovated the coffee house building. My ears perked up because of past work I have done with the papers of Ida Annah Ryan, the first women to graduate from MIT with a Master's in Architecture and an active suffragette. (I've even written briefly about Ida Annah Ryan in this blog.) Some of her records are housed in Waltham and I was able to share this with the writer at the end of the session. She seemed genuinely interested in pursuing the paper trail to see if there is a strong connection to her architects. I felt like I was doing an archivist's work outside of the archives, steering a researcher to records that would help her scholarship. There is a lot to be said for archivists making themselves more visible outside of institutions in this way.

The second speaker in my morning session discussed clothing of middle class women in the late 19th century. (As an aside - It seems my month has been packed with clothing history, something to which I paid little attention before. My mind is now whirling with ideas about fashion's place in an historical context.) The student based her talk on a clothing collection that has been passed down through her family. She has photos of her great-great grandmother wearing some of the clothes at her home in Jamaica Plain Massachusetts. The story wove ideas about femininity, middle class identity, home life, shopping, advertising, and more. I was fascinated by the interplay of the clothing artifacts with the photos she showed. I was very curious about the provenance. How did she know from whom all these clothes came?  The photos were a strong clue, but was there more documentation? The student said that she did talk with her advisor about this problem. She is not sure if her ancestor owned the clothes that she was photographed in or if they were borrowed. She also does not have photos of the woman in all of the items that came down to her. She recognized that some of them may be from another person, perhaps her great-great grandmother's sister, who was also a relatively small woman. I also asked about the storage of the clothes. Were they passed down in a big (romantic) trunk or were they hanging in a closet. She laughed and said that they were in cardboard boxes. It was clear that my questions were outside the initial curiosity of my fellow conference attendees. Here I was focused on the objects and their care as much as I was attentive to the story.

It was kind of nice being the only archivist in the room. I realized that I could learn a lot from the historians and that I have a lot to offer them. At lunch I sat at a table with the plenary speakers. These included professors and a U.S. park ranger. (I was not the only non-scholar, but I was the only archivist.) We talked about students and how they learn. We talked about  a web site one of the professors has designed to link these students to online information about primary sources. The plenary session focused on immigration, so these historians are very interested in the types of resources I encounter every day that talk about the "average" person's experience.

I hope that my membership in NEHA will be expanding for me and for the group. There are over 800 members, so I'm sure there must be another archivist among them - at least I hope so. My focus on the protection of resources dovetails nicely with their work. I hope to raise awareness about how similar we are and how we can help each other. Working with historians (and genealogists, and oral historians, and film documentary professionals, etc, etc.) will strengthen our ability to preserve and promote our heritage. Thank you NEHA folks for a wonderful time!