My wonderful volunteer student processor Kelsey

 

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 Since I have been collecting historical documents myself for many years, I was very excited to get the opportunity to volunteer at the Clarke Historical Library starting in the Fall 2025 semester.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 also showed me how important it is to be organized in my own collection! Working behind the scenes at an archive really gives you an appreciation for all the work that goes into them and how they actually operate in practice. They do so much more than just take in collections, put them on the shelves, and call it a day. Everything has to be thoroughly organized, researched, listed, catalogued, and encoded. And since archives collect a variety of media, that means that each type needs specific considerations. It also made me think about situations where you really need to consider ethical practices from every angle, since there might be certain perspectives that do not come to you automatically. Working at the Clarke was a great experience that I am sure will help me in the future, even if I do not get a job in archives.