Meeting with Dr. Peter J. Wosh, Director of the Archives/Public History Program at NYU
January 14, 2015 10:30 am

Today Ryann, LJ and I met with Dr. Peter J. Wosh at NYU to pick his brain about where to begin our archiving process and where to go once we’ve begun. It turns out that Peter had been in to consult about LREI’s archival material about 15 years ago, so he was already familiar with what we had. He had many great suggestions, some of which we had already begun discussing internally, but it was great to hear from a seasoned archives pro that we were on the right track. Basically, what we need to figure out is a grand plan of what we would like to accomplish by 2021 (or sooner, if possible). One thing we discussed was getting graduate students in archival studies interested in taking on a specific project, for example, creating an online exhibition or taking on the organization of one part of the archive so that they can lend their expertise to us and we can give them practical hands-on experience they put on their resumes. Peter also suggested planning a gallery exhibition at a local venue, perhaps at NYU. We also discussed approaching an outside archives processing vendor such as the Winthrop Group to work on tasks as large as processing everything to small specified projects such as cataloging and scanning yearbooks. Peter gave us so many new ideas and I’m sure we’ll be in touch with him in the near future of further guidance! (But first, we need to do an inventory to see what exactly it is that we’re dealing with….)