In my senior project I plan to learn about archivism by investigating and organizing the LREI archives. For the first section of my project I am going to learn about the principles of archivism, and learn how other archives around New York City were created and stored. I plan to visit archives around the city, read articles about the principles of archivism, and meet with Yukie Ohta, the school’s archivist, to learn about the goals of the archive. For the next and largest part of my project, I am going to conduct a survey of the archives and begin to reorganize the documents based on the results of my survey. I will also again work closely with LREI admin and Yukie to make sure that my goals for the archives are in line with theirs. Finally, I will create a finding aid and archives policy based on my findings from the research aspect of my project. My goal concerning these documents is to make the LREI archives as accessible as possible to the LREI student body.
Throughout this project, I want to answer the following questions; How can I make the LREI archives accessible to and relevant for the LREI student body? What is the role of an archivist? How do archives shape our view of our collective history? These questions directly relate to LREI’s value of citizenship, and allude to another fundamental question of my project; as a lifer about to leave LREI, how can I uplift and participate in the history and values of LREI?
I will measure the success of my project by the overall accessibility of the LREI archives, and whether I have succeeded in making them inline with LREI’s values and the goals of Yukie and the LREI administration. I will measure whether I have personally grown through my ability to answer the questions mentioned above, whether I have learned about the values and importance of archivism.