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Save Michigan History Disaster Response Workshops!

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We are excited to announce that registration is now open for our 2026 Save Michigan History Disaster Response Workshops! Please see the attached flyer and feel free to share with your audiences or anyone you think would be interested in attending one of these workshops. Below is additional information that helps describe the initiative, which we have been using in our outreach efforts thus far. We would greatly appreciate any assistance in spreading the word, or any recommendations you may have for organizations that would be interested in passing this message along. A social media post from the Archives is also currently in the works. The Archives of Michigan is excited to announce an initiative to create a cohort of “cultural heritage first responders” who are trained to take action when a natural or human-made disaster impacts Michigan’s historical records. Over the course of two years, the Archives, in partnership with instructors from the Northeast Document Conservation Center ...
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The Barbara Madison collection

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  Left to right-Noelle, Hunter, Maci, Kelsey, Zoe and me by what remains of the Barbara Madison collection in May 2026. Here is the crew that inventoried, processed and described the Madison papers. They also withdrew obvious duplicates, learned a lot of contextual and relationship information necessary to understand the collection, and helped review my future processing plans for the Barbara Madison papers. They have processing skills like no others! Barbara Madison was a Michigander and genealogist who specialized in tribal research, working for multiple tribes in Michigan and throughout the US. This is the most complex, challenging collection I have experienced. There are multiple people's penmanship and typed materials, publications, miscellaneous notes, lots of government, personal, church, legal, tribal, land records, and other stuff in the collection. After 3 months of all of us inventorying we withdrew 105 out of 170 cubic feet of copies, duplicates, drafts, and downloads f...
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My wonderful intern Maci

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This blog is from my wonderful intern Maci. Brand new to archives, she did a wonderful job with the complex challenges of the Madison collection.    I had no prior experience working in archives or a historical library prior to my internship at the Clarke and with Marian. I had never even taken Marian’s class to have an inkling of what it could be like. I worked with other interns and volunteers to begin inventorying the Madison collection, which was 170 cubic feet of physical material (not considering digital materials). We were able to successfully inventory  and withdraw duplicates, copies, and materials found elsewhere. Zoe, another intern, and I also processed and encoded part of the CMU Athletics Collection, specifically the swimming team material from the 1950-1980. I assisted Marian with other minor tasks as the semester went on, including inventorying a CMU Scrapbook Collection, sleeving postcards. At the very end of the semester, the group of us starte...
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My wonderful processing student Hunter Loubert

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Here is a blog by Hunter who volunteered and interned with me this academic year. He did a very good job and is graduating May 9. I wish him well! Hello, my name is Hunter Loubert ! I am a senior at Central Michigan University , close to graduating as an undergrad with a major in History with minors in Anthropology and Museum Studies. During the 2025 Fall Semester , I volunteered and was involved with working on the CMU Athletics collection. I  a rchivally processed the  archival material and wrote  the box and list for the Athletics collection. The processing of the collection allowed me to gain experience on whether I was interested in the archival and collection process.  During spring term 2026, I worked with Marian in the Clarke Historical Library as an intern . I was involved in inventorying, keeping the inventory updated, processing , archiving ,  and withdrawing parts of the Barbara Madison genealogical collection as well as learning...
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My wonderful volunteer student processor Kelsey

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  My volunteer student processor Kelsey helped me accomplish a lot this term with several collections, mainly collaboratively processing the Barbara Madison collection with several other students. He will continue collaboratively processing Madison this summer for awhile. I wish him well in his future. My name is Kelsey Kirchner, and I’m graduating with my master’s degree in history in May 2026. Since I have been collecting historical documents myself for many years, I was very excited to get the opportunity to volunteer at the Clarke Historical Library starting in the Fall 2025 semester. In my roughly 6 months of working at the Clarke, I helped process the CMU Athletics collection, the Kathy Wilbur collection, and the Barbara Madison collection, and also did some pre-cataloguing work for periodicals. The Madison collection proved, by far, to be the most challenging, and showed me how important it is to be selective with which materials an archive retains. Not to mention it al...
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My amazing film student Rebekah

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  Here's a blog from my amazing film processing student Rebekah. My name is Rebekah Harmon, and I am earning my MA in History at CMU. I graduated from CMU in 2023 with a BS in secondary education for social studies and a minor in museum studies. I taught at a middle school for two years, and then I decided to come back to CMU for more! I volunteered and worked at the Clarke Historical Library in undergrad, and I was excited when I got the opportunity to work here again as a graduate student. My work at the Clarke consists of processing our 9&10 Michigan News film collection, and I have experience processing paper items at the archive. My favorite part about working with the film is the visual connection I get to the past. For example, I see people’s facial expressions, fashion, and hand gestures, which provide such a rich connection to the past. I also work at the CMU Museum of Natural and Cultural History on campus, primarily in educational programming. I help lead educational...
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my amazing film processing student Max

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  At the end of each term or year that my students work in the archives, I have them blog about their experience. Here is a blog from Max, one of my two excellent film processing students.  I'm Maxwell Maksymowski, and I am a CMU Junior. I'm a Broadcasting and Cinema Arts Major and a Technical Theater Minor. I hope to work behind the camera on a television set, or to be a post-production professional. I have been working at the Clarke as a moving film archivist for three years. I make sure that the film I work with, Channel 9 & 10 News raw film footage, is stable and able to be archived properly. I also watch the stabilized film (film that would not fall apart or degrade) on the film projector and describe what I see so that researchers can search for it and find it in the finding aid. This year we worked and finally processed all of the film from the 1980s, and moved onto 1981. Within the next year, hopefully all of Channel 9 & 10 done, and move onto the Eye on Mich...
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