Meeting with Alumni Association Archives Committee
February 11, 2015 11:30-1:15, Archives Room @ High School

Today I had the pleasure of meeting with the Archives Committee of the LREI Alumni Association, individuals who were active participants in the formation of LREI history and therefore people have much stake in the completion of the archives project.  L.J. and Ryann were also present.

The archives committee has been working on getting the archives in shape for years, and it turns out that we are ahead of the game due to their efforts.  The committee has not only been tirelessly  guarding and sorting LREI’s archival material, but that the committee received a grant from The Documentary Heritage Program of The New York State Education Department to do an extensive survey in the early 1990s.  The collection was processed by Martha Foley and S.L. Hunter, who wrote up a Finding Aid and Inventory of the 42.77 cubic feet of materials entitled, “Papers of the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School 1921-1988.”  (to view the document click here)

Unfortunately, Since the finding aid was generated, the collection has been broken up and may not currently exist in the processed order.  Nevertheless, if we can piece together as much as possible, this will be a great head start on processing the entire collection.

In addition, Ryann reported on the conversations she had with two outside archiving consultants.  The first, Mimi Bowling, is an independent archivist who happens to work often with Martha Foley, the person who co-wrote the original finding aid.  As Foley is already familiar with the collection, bringing in Bowling and Foley as consultants on this project might be helpful.

Ryann also spoke with History Associates, an archiving company, who also seem as if they would be worth considering as a consultant.  They are very flexible and could do anything from process the entire collection to design an archiving plan that we could execute with volunteers to anything in between.

In any case, bringing in an experienced consultant that has worked on institutional archives at the outset is a very good idea.  If we can clearly define our end goals, then they can give us a game plan that would save us much time and labor by streamlining the process and elimination the duplication of tasks.

At 12:30, Nick O’Han, a teacher at the high school, joined us after his morning classes.  O’Han is writing a book about Elisabeth Irwin and is therefore very familiar with the archival materials relating to the founding of the school.  We discussed ways that we could process the material that he is using concurrently with his research activities and proposed that if we housed the material in a locked closet that is accessible to Nick and the archives committee, then we could work with the material simultaneously.

All in all, a pretty productive meeting—and we got to sample the cafeteria’s fabulous salad bar to boot!