Meeting with Mimi Bowling and Martha Foley, Independent Archivists, April 8, 2015

Here at the LREI Archives we are moving forward this month by looking at the range of consultant(s) we could hire for this project, if any.  Consultants cost money, but would probably also save us money in the long run by advising us about best practices and big ideas.

It seems that the world of independent archivists is a small one.  On April 8, LJ, Ryann,trustee/parent Tim Merjos ’80, and Alumni Relations Associate Violeta Picayo ’09 met with Mimi Bowling and Martha Foley, two independent archivists, about the possibility of consulting on the LREI archives.  Mimi was my professor when I studied archives for my MS in Library and Information Science and Martha, her associate, turns out the be the person who consulted with LREI about 15 years ago and organized a good chunk of our archives, so she is very familiar with our collection.

Mimi and Martha toured our collection, visiting the lower school basement closet, the off-site storage space, and the archives room at the high school.  They will get back to us with a proposal and rates shortly.

We also received a proposal from History Associates, a historical research company based in Maryland. They are a large company with a huge staff of archivists, records managers, and historians that work with a long list of companies and nonprofits to build and shape their institutional histories.

The benefit of working with a large company such as History Associates is that they are able to consult in a wide range of areas, from archival services, digitization, records management to exhibition design and interpretive planning. The drawbacks are that they are expensive and that they are not based in New York City, so someone would have to travel from Maryland to work with us.

Mimi and Martha, on the other hand, are local and are familiar with LREI. Working with independent archivists also gives the flexibility to change course as we go along the archiving process, as much of the work will be billed on a day-rate rather than an overarching contract.  Mimi and Martha would also be able to recommend people to work with us in areas such as digitization and exhibition design that fall outside their sphere of expertise.

Finally, Ryann approached The Winthrop Group, another large archiving company based in New York City, whose clients include Trinity School, Ethical Culture Fieldston School, and Poly Prep Country Day School, as well as many universities.  She has not yet heard back from them with a proposal.

So there you have it. The world of archivists as we have seen it thus far.  It is now up to us to choose the person or company that is the best fit for LREI!

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!

 

Visit to the City & Country Archives with Jordis Rosenberg, School Archivist
146 West 13th Street, NYC
January 21, 2015, 1 PM

Today, I met with Jordis Rosenberg, the archivist at the City & Country School.  C&C just celebrated its centennial in 2014 and is also a small progressive private school in downtown Manhattan.  I wondered how they organized and processed their archive so I decided to pay them a visit.  I thought that the C&C archives and the LREI archives would have many things in common.  I also thought that we could learn a lot from their recent experience using archives as part of a centennial celebration.

The C&C archives room is a small, climate controlled room in the basement dedicated to their archives.  The room is lined with shelving that holds documents, photos, and artwork by students.  There is a good portion of the archive that has not yet been processed, but what has been accounted for is divided into 16 record groups, for example:

RG 1: Bureau of Educational Experiment Records
Early curriculum records and minute observational notes of the school.

RG 2: Associated Experimental Schools Records
Notes, letters, and minutes related to the school’s involvement in the AES in the 1930s.

RG 3: Caroline Pratt Collection
Articles, manuscripts and correspondence written about Caroline Pratt, as well as the most complete collection of her own written work.

Each record group has a section of shelf space, and the documents are housed in archival boxes appropriate for their contents and labeled. Photos are in binders categorized by activity, not year.  A flat file cabinet holds student work and other oversized items.

Jordis, who was not the archivist at the archives’ inception, explained to me that almost all of their archival materials were processed by school librarians and parent volunteers and that they used few outside vendors.  They did, however, hire someone to consult with them about designing the grand plan of the project before they began.  This might be a good idea for LREI, and we could look into contacting The Winthrop Group, a vendor other schools have used to plan their archives and perhaps a few others.

I asked Jordis about how they handle yearbooks, but it turns out that most classes, except for a span during the 1950’s, did not have a yearbook.  They did, however, have a full runs of their sixth grade poetry journal and the eighth grade newspaper from the founding of the school to the present.

Last year, the C&C archives put together an exhibition as part of the school’s centennial celebration that was on view at Jefferson Market Library.  This was a good place for them to have an exhibit because it is a publicly accessible historic building that is part of the larger C&C community—and the space was free of charge!  This is a venue that LREI could consider when planning its centennial exhibition.

C&C has a small online presence, but most items have not yet been digitized, nor do they have an online searchable finding aid.  This is something, Jordis said, we should consider from the outset, as this allows multiple tags for cross-referencing (a photo can have multiple tags such as “comic book club,” “class of 1979,” and “faculty”).

All in all, my visit with Jordis was very helpful and I will probably be in touch with her with future questions.

 

Trip to inventory the archive
January 16, 2015 9:00 am

Tamar, Tim, and Vio, all of whom are LREI alums and work with alumni affairs, took me to visit the archives room at the high school and the off-site archives storage space. Tamar and Tim have been working tirelessly to get archival materials in order and have done a pretty good job thus far.  The problem is that some materials have been sorted, most not, and everything is being stored in three separate locations without even a rudimentary finding aid.

The LREI Archives Room on the first floor of the high school building  is quite stunning with cabinets to house archival materials, shelves to display photos and other items, a large seminar table, a large screen for presentations, and a wall of windows looking out onto the courtyard.  It also has one small closet.

However stunning it is, the room needs a few adjustments in order to protect our archival material better. The display shelves face the windows, and photographs fade when exposed to light. The room’s window could be UV protected, or UV glass could be installed on the shelves themselves to protect our photos and papers on display.  The cabinets do not have locks, allowing people to stash their unwanted books, telephones, and other miscellania amongst archival records and photos. Small locks could be installed to discourage people from using them as their own personal storage spaces.  The closet has built-in shelves.  The shelves could be removed and a shelving unit that accommodates archival file boxes could be put it.

With a little work and imagination this room will be able to house a large portion of the LREI archives and already houses several containers of photos and many back issues of yearbooks. I took a quick inventory of what is there, took some measurements of the cabinets and closets, snapped several photos, and then we moved on to the Manhattan Mini Storage closet that Tamar and Tim have kindly rented for LREI to house the bulk of the archival materials

At Manhattan Mini, numerous file boxes full of photos and papers sit on Metro shelving and on the floor. Some boxes are labeled, others are not. We did not have time to open the boxes but, again, I took a quick inventory of what is there, took measurements of the shelves, and snapped photos. We will be returning to the storage space again soon to begin transferring boxes to the LREI Archives room.

I figured that since I took preliminary inventories of the archives room and the storage space today, I might as well go back to the Lower School and poke around in the archives closet down by Ryann and LJ’s office. Again, like the room at the high school, people had over the years mixed miscellaneous items (paper lanterns, a boom box, novels and other books) in with the archival materials. There are many photos and yearbooks and other school publications on shelves, some in labeled archival boxes, as well as an assortment of LREI-related DVDs and VHS tapes.

 

The only group of archival material that we have not seen is with Nick O’Han, the school historian and high school teacher. He is writing a book about Elisabeth Irwin and thus may have a significant amount of valuable early material. Once we have ascertained what he has, we will have a better idea of what we’re working with. To read an article by Nick about the history of LREI, click here.

To view my preliminary inventory list, click here.

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….)

This fall, I was approached by LJ Mitchell and Ryann Imperioli in the LREI development office to possibly work with them to create an institutional archive in advance of LREI’s centennial celebration in 2021. I am an LREI parent who also happens to be an archivist, and I was delighted with the idea. LREI has saved important archival material since its founding, but it has not yet to date been catalogued as a comprehensive collection, and I, as well as everyone else, thought that an institution as important to New York and educational history should have a proper archive that can be made accessible to staff, alumni, current and future families, and researchers.

An archive will not only be a record of LREI’s rich history, but can also serve as a development tool as well as an educational tool for students. Online exhibitions of items from the archives could bring together alumni scattered across the world, thus kindling school spirit and nostalgia, which would in turn widen the growing LREI community. Students can learn to use archival materials as research tools before going off to university, where they will be asked to perform rigorous research with primary source materials.  Historians of New York, education, and social movements would be able to access the materials and add LREI to their research. There are myriad ways that an archive can represent the school to diverse audiences and spread the word about a place where progressive education thrives.

This is an all around positive move for the school and I am honored to be part of this project. I will be blogging here about the progress of this project.  Anyone who is interested can track our activities, contact us to donate material or to volunteer their time, and write in with ideas and suggestions, so please check back regularly or subscribe to this blog now!