archivistrising321.blogspot.com

  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 Since I have been collecting historical documents myself for many years, I was very excited to get the opportunity to volunteer at the Clarke Historical Library starting in the Fall 2025 semester.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...

  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...

  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...

  Yesterday, while sorting some CMU Athletics folders, I found this 1958 photograph in a folder labeled Swimming Miscellaneous. The caption glued to the photograph is: Mt. Pl. Michigan, Members of the Mid-Michigan Muskies, a skin-diving group composed of Central Michigan College students, take their skin-diving seriously. Here, some of the divers prepare to go under 7 inches of ice covering the Mount Pleasant Mill Pond. The group boasts 40 members, two of which are women. Last summer, the Muskies found a 200-foot schooner at Lake Charlevoix. United Press Telephoto. 1958 is written in ink on the label.  A few things about this label. First it is interesting to me that both men and women were skin diving at the time. Secondly a press photographer took the photograph because CMU did not have staff photographers until the 1980s, so it is common to find photographs taken by family members, students, members of the public, or the press in CMU Athletics records. The unidentified scho...

  Tuesday was snowy. And in other news you can submit a proposal to MAA! The Michigan Archival Association (MAA) Programming Committee is now seeking session proposals for our 2026 annual meeting, to be held from June 15th - June 16th, 2026! Are you presenting for MAC, SAA, or another conference in a related field? Double dip! Do you need presentation experience and want to wet your feet in a low pressure environment? Present with us! Are you a student? We’re excited to have you sign up for a session! Possible session topics include, but are not limited to: All things digital (access, preservation, new technologies, etc.) Career planning/advice Collections management Donor relations/cultivation Fostering a diverse and inclusive profession Invisible or contingent labor Promoting collections Reference Special projects  Archivists in non-traditional settings (e.g., private archives, consultants, corporate) Cataloging and metadata Conservati...

Fall 2025 has been a busy, satisfying term for me. I again successfully taught HST 583 Archives Administration, a class I created and taught annually  2012-2023. After a two year break, due to the budget, I'm shifting to teaching it every other year. A highlight of the course for me now is when I teach the students how to read penmanship using handwritten CMU postcards. Teaching is, of course, on top of my full-time job as archivist and subject bibliographer for combined History/World Languages & Culture department at CMU. I am very grateful for all my students. This term I had film processors Max and Rebekah, paper processors Natalie, and my two volunteers, Kelsey and Hunter. We've been very productive. Next term I will happily have all those students again, except Hunter will intern with me, and I will have two more interns, Zoe and Maci. Our top priorities will be continuing to process Channel 9&10 film and inventorying a 167 cubic foot collection of Indigenous genea...