Archival Appraisal, Arrangement, and Access

Fall 2025 welcome post

First, sign up for a Commons account. Then, add your contribution in the comments of this post!

Please take a browse through the Queens College instance of JSTOR Community Collections. This JSTOR instance has both archives and museum collections, but for the purposes of this assignment please make sure you are reviewing archives collections (to differentiate–if housed by Special Collections and Archives, yes, if housed by Godwin Ternbach Museum, no).

Select one digital item that grabbed your interest, showed you something new, surprised you, etc., and write a couple sentences about what intrigued you (please include the link to your item). What questions do you have about the item? Why is it in Queens College Special Collections and Archives?

Then, try and think of all the places an archivist interacted with this one item so that you could see it in this form. List those interaction points! Which part of the archiving process are you most excited about?

Commenting on other posts is not required but is encouraged!

26 responses to “Fall 2025 welcome post”

  1. Zoë Knable Avatar
    Zoë Knable

    I really enjoyed peeking around the QC special collections + archives. My mom is a Queens College alum (class of’85), so I was initially curious to see if I could find a picture of her, or a flyer for one of her student films. After this unsuccessful pursuit, I instead became transfixed by the 1937 Queens College seal proposals. Specifically, I was particularly enamored by what appeared to be the only seal made with color: https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.31916369?searchUri=%2Fsite%2Fqueenscollegearchives%2Fqueenscollegesealdesigns%2F%3Fso%3Ditem_title_str_asc%26searchkey%3D1756485806987%26doi%3D10.2307%252Fcommunity.31916369&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Af07958d2b0162322cffc06d3c87b936d&searchkey=1756485806987&seq=1 (Sorry, not sure how to paste that in a more elegant manner).

    I wasn’t previously aware that there had been some sort of a competition held for the QC seal. I wonder what the parameters of this competition were… was it a students-only competition? And what were the guidelines for the design? …How did each artist decide on what latin phrase to include?

    I liked this design by Hannah Stewart because of her detailed description of her choices, which the other deisgns lack. I also liked her chosen latin phrase, which more or less translates to, “correctly and gently”/”rightfully and agreeably”, which I found to be a little coquettish and bizarre.

    Clearly, the seal proposal is in the QC Special Collections and Archives because it is a part of a design competition which seems central to the college’s identity and establishment. When did Queens College begin collecting materials for the special collections and archive? I would guess that this seal was handed over to the archives from either an administrator, the history department, or the library. From there, it was likely appraised, stored, and later, digitized. Does the archives have a conservation lab? I’m curious to learn about preservation techniques!

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  2. Lindsey Avatar
    Lindsey

    After browsing the collections, I found myself particularly drawn to a collection that I wasn’t expecting to be so interested in — the Queens College Course Bulletins, and more specifically, the color brochures that advertised radio courses to the general public. I chose the object: “We invite you to listen…to two stimulating courses”, Radio Courses, Spring 1959 Brochure. [http://bit.ly/4oTORQV]

    Coincidentally, this summer I took a group of high school students on a tour of Chicago’s public radio station, WBEZ, and learned that the call letters for the station were named for the Bureau of Education, because the radio station was used to disseminate educational programming when it first began broadcasting in the 1940s. (The Z was a design flourish to look like a lightning bolt.) I hadn’t realized that WNYC (and Queens College) also offered educational courses over the airwaves — and that you could apply them as college credit for the low-low price of $31 per credit. It also struck me as somewhat similar to the MOOC movement from earlier in the 2010s.

    While the other two brochures advertised courses that seemed more geared at the kind of social engineering I would expect from that time period, this one sounded much more fun — focused on music and theatre appreciation.

    This object made me wonder why they started this program (and when), and how long it lasted. Was this a widespread practice I just haven’t heard about before? Was it popular with WNYC listeners? Did it reach potential students who wouldn’t have otherwise had access to programming, or did it reach an echo chamber of WNYC listeners? I also really wanted to hear the courses — does QC have recordings? Or does the WNYC archive?

    To make this material available to me today, an archivist would have had to acquire it, presumably from the University’s own institutional records. They would have to decide it was of value, describe and digitize it, and maintain and store it since it’s a physical document as well. I also wonder if there were considerations for the people named in the brochure, if they were consulted in making this freely available online?

    Reply
    1. Amerigo Cleffi Avatar
      Amerigo Cleffi

      Interesting post. I had no idea about the QC radio classes. Did you know QC had a radio station until somewhat recently? While wandering around the Student Union last year, I came across the office. From what I was able to piece together, the station was low-watt for many years, and more recently online only. It seems to be completely dormant these days.

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      1. Lindsey Avatar
        Lindsey

        I had no idea there was a QC radio station! I am a former college radio person myself, so I’ll definitely be looking into this — I wonder why they died out…

        Reply
  3. Alex Fiano Avatar
    Alex Fiano

    Hello, Everyone;

    I was looking through some items that were connected to social activism/human rights, and those reminded me to look up Andrew Goodman. There were several items connected to to him, including what I choose here, an essay and personal recollection entitled “Kevin Donnellan Recollection of Andrew Goodman,” dated 1993. Andrew Goodman was a Queens College student, and he, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner were young civil rights activists who traveled to Mississippi as part of the Congress for Racial Equality’s (CORE) Freedom Summer project of 1964. They were murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan. I was interested in these items because I’ve taught about these three men in my own classes.

    This item is a typewritten three-page paper with the title “GOODMAN” at top. In the paper, Kevin Donnellan (also a QC student and activist) describes conversations with Andrew Goodman in 1964. They were both going to travel to Taxco, Mexico for volunteer work, but Goodman decided to join the Freedom Summer project instead. Kevin tried to talk him out of it, but Andrew was determined to do something about the voting discrimination in the south by registering Black voters as part of CORE. Kevin describes Andrew and what he believed in, recounted specific conversations, and his own thoughts afterward. One thing about archiving that appeals to me is preserving and sharing memories of people. Discovering stories about people and their lives is what I’m most excited about regarding the archiving process.

    This item showed me something new in a personal account from that period in Andrew Goodman’s life, and brought home the connections to the Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner Clock Tower, dedicated to these men in 1989. The essay is part of the Arthur Gatti Papers, which is part of the Activism and Social Change Collection. Gatti was also a student activist and worked with Kevin in Mexico that summer of 1964. Gatti’s collection was donated in 2009. An archivist would have interacted with this item through accession of the collection, examining and cataloging it, any preservation/re-housing necessary, digitizing it, and uploading for the QC/JSTOR site. My question would be what were the circumstances of attaining Kevin’s essay.

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.32468128

    –Alex

    Reply
  4. Felix Mastropasqua Avatar
    Felix Mastropasqua

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.34291264?searchUri=%2Fsite%2Fqueenscollegearchives%2Fglasa-journals%2F%3Fso%3Ditem_title_str_asc&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A618f2c87588a875ea9b76e21e76189bc&seq=3

    One area of focus that caught my eye were these journals from the Gay and Lesbian Union that were kept in the Student Union here at QC for a few decades. Specifically, I was interested because my three friends and I had a similar project of a collaborative journal in middle school. (It was called The Journal™ and it was a very goofy affair that involved sliding the journal across the floor to each other during class; yes it got confiscated several times.) Confronting the journal/diary is an interesting one for an archivist, as it’s a form generally meant to stay private; my middle school Journal™ definitely was. However, this object was meant more as a public forum to share thoughts, perhaps akin to a guest book at a museum. I picked this specific year because I figured that queer students at the time would have been sharing their feelings about the HIV/AIDS crisis. They were, but they were mostly commenting on their day-to-day lives, including using it as a record of who was there at what time so they could track each other down; as well as discussing upcoming club elections. As one student succinctly wrote, “The simplicity and boredom of life as described in the previous paragraphs show just how little is going on … (maybe not)”

    In terms of how many hands it’s passed through- not just all the students that wrote in it, but also the person who processed it, and whoever digitized it, including redacting sensitive info like last names. There are also pages ripped out at times, with of course no way to know who performed the action, when, why, or what’s missing. I love getting a glimpse into the everyday lives of people living through momentous political and social change. I would love to work with records like this. The only problem is that it would take me twice as long to archive anything because I would be reading it all. I guess that’s a question I have for practicing archivists: how closely do you read the material, because just skimming may often give you the info you need. In my current volunteer archives position, I was really slow in the beginning, because I kept seeing the names of people I personally know and stopping to scrutinize for fun. I quickly realized that I would be there forever and, as I am not getting paid, I sped things up.

    Reply
    1. Kris Berg Avatar
      Kris Berg

      Wow, this is fascinating! It’s so interesting to compare an item like this to current social media platforms– people seem to be using them in the same way (Complaining about being bored, airing social/political grievances, contacting their friends). I also really liked seeing each contributor’s handwriting.

      Reply
  5. Sarah Gail Croft Avatar
    Sarah Gail Croft

    When scrolling through the archives, I was immediately drawn to the GLASA (Gender, Love, and Sexuality Alliance) journals (https://www.jstor.org/site/queenscollegearchives/glasa-journals/?so=item_title_str_asc). I was delighted to see that the records spanned from 1988 to 1994, which includes the year I was born (1989). I specifically did a deep dive into the volume from 1989-1991 to see the records from right around the time I was born (although there is no entry from my exact birthday). I was surprised by the emotions I felt flipping through the digital pages—everything from feeling touched by sweet welcome messages, to chuckling over everyday notes conveyed with over-dramatic urgency (“Dear Mary, I REALLY NEED THE BOOKS, PLEASE CALL ME” fills up much of page 5), to little twinges of sadness at casual mentions of the struggles those students were dealing with (one entry from 4/10/89 notes that “the signs had been defaced again”; another entry from 8/8/89 raises the idea of renaming the group from the GLU to the LGBU because the writer felt that “lesbians are still basically invisible to the public”). I felt a powerful sense of kinship to the writers, and was reminded of the time I spent in my own undergraduate university’s LGBTQ group. I’m very glad these items have been included in the Queens College Special Collections and Archives as a piece of queer history.

    It’s fascinating to me to think about all the hands these notebooks must have passed through for me to be able to read them today. I suppose officers at the GLASA must have held on to them for some amount of time before donating them to the archives, at which point they would have been examined and documented by archivists. I am particularly grateful to the archivist who was responsible for digitizing these records; from the state of the pages in the scanned images, it looks like these notebooks were already getting pretty old and fragile at the point they were digitized. Digitization is probably the part of the archival process I’m most excited about, as I feel like it’s a vitally important way of preserving records like this even after the physical item begins to deteriorate, as well as making them available online to people who are unable to travel to see the archives in person.

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  6. Anjuli Rathod Avatar
    Anjuli Rathod

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28487227

    I was interested in looking through the Civil Rights collection because I’m unfamiliar with the history of how students from Queens College collaborated and volunteered with Black activists in the south in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement. This photograph stood out to me because of the toddler participating in a Junior NAACP sit-in outside a segregated movie theater in Farmville, Virginia. A few feet behind the child on the other side of a rope are two intimidating looking, nearly identical white police officers. While youth participation in the movement is not new to me, I’m always both moved and disturbed to see how children risked their safety, whether or not by choice, for the right to move freely, have an education, and other basic rights. I wonder where this child and the other young people in the photograph are today. I also wonder what the onlookers in the background are thinking about.

    This photograph came from the Phyllis Padow-Sederbaum Papers; she was a student at Queens College who volunteered with the Student Help Project in Prince Edward County, Virginia in the summer of 1963. This was during white “Massive Resistance” to integration; public schools in the county were closed for five years. Students volunteered to tutor African American children who were shut out of an education during this time. This collection of papers had to have been donated to Queens College, I presume from Phyllis Padow-Sederbaum. The direct connection of Phyllis Padow-Sederbaum to the school would make this collection relevant. Queens College seems to emphasize social justice issues as both a part of its legacy. On the QC website, there’s a note that SCA started collecting materials from alumni involved in the Civil Rights Movement and other social justice movements in 2009, so seems possible that QC SCA reached out to Padow-Sederbaum directly to donate these papers.

    Archivists would have had to appraise this collection, and then work to process, contextualize, digitize, and apply metadata to each item. There is also the work of handling image rights if someone wants to publish a copy of an image in the collections. In other photographs, I noticed that sometimes people are identified by name and which group they were involved with. I wonder if archivists at institutions do this part of work, like taking oral histories to add context to items in the collection. I enjoy spending time looking closely at materials, so I would be excited to do that. I also would enjoy handling the physical photograph itself and working on conserving each item in the collection to slow deterioration. Another aspect I would enjoy is assisting people researching this time period. Archivists look at so many materials every day, and we see things that other students and researchers may not know about or know to ask for.

    Padow-Sederbaum, Phyllis. (1963). Junior NAACP Demonstration. Queens College Special Collections and Archives (Queens, New York). Civil Rights Movement Photographs. Queens College . https://jstor.org/stable/community.28487227

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  7. Kris Berg Avatar
    Kris Berg

    While browsing the QC Special Collections, I found myself gravitating towards the materials related to student activism. In particular, I was intrigued by a document titled “1980 Queens College SEEK Demands”:
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.37765567?searchUri=%2Fsite%2Fqueenscollegearchives%2Factivism1960s%2F%3Fso%3Ditem_title_str_asc&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Ad4899e9ca4c4347378e19f25be1995c3&seq=1
    The document was included in the Activism and Social Change Collection, as well as the SEEK collection. It appears to be a list of grievances against the administrators of the SEEK program, most likely compiled by QC students. There is a heavy focus on racial justice topics; I gather from this document that students of color, especially Black and Hispanic/Latinx students, felt ignored or disrespected by SEEK.
    I found this item interesting because it references events and controversies that appear to be lost to time. For example, multiple bullet points call for the dismissal of a man named Herman Jenkins, but I could not find any information about who he is and why his involvement with SEEK caused such outrage. Jenkins’ dismissal was obviously important to a lot of people, but 45 years later, all that’s left of the situation is this document. It’s fascinating to think about the lost iceberg of controversy and activism underneath this single remaining item. I would love to learn why these grievances were written, who wrote them, and if anything came of their publication.
    I believe that this item was added to Special Collections because it is a historical example of students attempting to hold QC administrators accountable for perceived injustices. Adding an item like this to the collection could be seen as an example of said accountability– instead of sweeping this sensitive topic under the rug, the college has preserved it so that future generations of students and faculty can learn from it.
    The list of grievances most likely passed through a lot of hands before ending up on JSTOR: the group of students who collectively wrote the list, the SEEK and QC administrators who received it, the archivist who took inventory of the physical document, and the archivist who digitized it.
    The aspect of the archival process that I am the most excited to learn about is arrangement. I find the process of categorizing things and concepts to be interesting, so I am looking forward to seeing how that process differs between various types of preserved items.

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  8. Danny Jimenez Avatar
    Danny Jimenez

    As I was scrolling through items, this item in particular (https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.39217867) immediately grabbed my interest because 1199 is the union that my mother and aunt are in. They are both adamant about the importance of hospitals, hospital workers, and hospital adjacent personnel. The phrase makes a very distinct demand, one that I could not ignore as I was scrolling through items. A couple of questions that come to mind are why is this specifically in this collection, and what was happening around the time this sign was being used.

    From what I can deduce so far is that while this protest/labor movement had many moving parts, this particular sign came from a protest that happened in Queens. Unfortunately this isn’t dated but we are told that it is a black and white poster.

    I think an archivist can come into contact with this kind of stuff in looking through signage from labor movements or if there was a collection pertaining to the history of the 1199 union.

    I am very excited about the archival process of piecing together a collection from boxes/folders of different materials. It is very fun to get your hands physically on the material.

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  9. Zara Tzara Avatar
    Zara Tzara

    Upon scrolling through the options for the many collections of the QC Special Collections an Archives, I was immediately drawn to “Life at Queens College” photograph collection.

    This collection on JSTOR contains ~1770 photographs from a wide range of years dating back in QC history. Primarily documenting student life on campus, the collection also shows some faculty, librarians, school buildings, classrooms and activities. I initially wanted to look for animals in this archive as it is one of my areas of scholarly interest; there are four I could find total: two of the same cat (extremely exciting to find!), one puppy and one monkey in a laboratory experiment.

    However, I want to comment on the photograph “Student Smoking on the Quad” (date unknown): https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.38535243

    This photograph features a single person, identified as a student in the item title, sitting with a group of people who are out of frame. Based on the posture of the hand and the general vibes, the student appears to be smoking a joint on the quad’s lawn in the afternoon sun. I am drawn to this photo for three reasons: the student is most likely female if we are to presume, but the overall demeanor and presentation are ambiguous; the shot is taken unawares to the student, while in the act of smoking, giving a vitality to the image; finally, if we assume (again) the student is smoking a joint, then this is also a document of counter-culture. If I had to guess the year it was taken, I would wager between 1967-1973.

    This photograph’s inclusion in the collection is important to me because it signals an openness about the college’s past, a nostalgic moment in history perhaps, as opposed to a very buttoned-up presentation of our educational institution. Documenting counter-culture is extremely important, in my opinion, because it is a reminder that outliers have always existed and gives power to the subjects who might otherwise be deemed unimportant.

    In order for me to find this little treasure, an archivist would have had to receive a scan of the photograph (after being taken, developed and printed) and decide to add it to this particular collection. Thus, at some point someone deemed this item important to the collection, ie telling the story of “Student Life” at QC. The archivist would also have to have cleared the rights to the photo in order to put it onto a JSTOR collection that is freely accessible like this one; there is no photographer cited as the originator, only QC generally. Additionally, the archivist named the photo “Student Smoking on the Quad” which identifies within the title multiple aspects of the photograph’s subject / depicted content.

    I am most excited about the prospect in archiving of discovery: of uncovering little treasures such as this and investigating their origin stories.

    As a bonus, here is the aforementioned feline:
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.38225532
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.38535278

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  10. Amerigo Cleffi Avatar
    Amerigo Cleffi

    Through the Activism and Social Change collection, I came across a few interesting documents detailing the QC administration’s response to “campus unrest.” The items can be found under “Administrative Responses to Campus Unrest.” The first of these was an April 1969 document by “department chairmen [sic], dean of faculty and the president.” The statement is surprisingly tolerant of student protests and concludes that outside police agencies are not needed to respond to demonstrations. The document’s authors state: “We will not be provoked into overreacting to tactics which may be viewed by some as requiring a so-called ‘hard-line.’”

    The immediate context seems to be efforts by the university to suspend 3 students who engaged in protests earlier that year. The authors of the document note that they all voted against suspending the students. The document admits that the college’s protest rules were insufficient and concluded “…in the midst of the serious difficulties we have undergone since January we have also undergone a profound learning experience concerning the nature of the contemporary university in a time of deep social change.” I found this particularly interesting, considering the current university administration’s very different approach to handling protest, by effectively banning it. I can’t imagine the QC admin in 2025 taking such a thoughtful, introspective tone. While there are other documents in the same collection that show a much-less-lenient approach to protest at QC, this particular item is a good illustration that things have been different, and can be different (if there is enough pressure on the ground).

    This document is in standard letter/memo form, and has no visual elements that would make it stand out to someone processing materials for an archive. The archivist who processed it likely had a good eye, and some knowledge of where to look for such documents. Perhaps the document was found in a collection of personal papers that were gifted to the archive? The archivist who scanned the item would have had to have realized the importance of the document (or at least had good instincts) and then scanned the item, and passed it on to JSTOR. The part of the archival process I am most excited about is the rare instance where you come across something that is not only an interesting, previously unearthed bit of material, but that can also be used to affect change.

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    1. Amerigo Cleffi Avatar
      Amerigo Cleffi

      Sorry, I forgot to include the url: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/community.29234759.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3A9775d53733df5878078f296196e2c2c2&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontr

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  11. Aida Riddle Avatar
    Aida Riddle

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.32164575?searchUri=%2Fsite%2Fqueenscollegearchives%2Factivism1960s%2F%3Fso%3Ditem_title_str_asc&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Aff9f880101c8169bac1fbe4db7f2c577

    I decided to review the Activism and Social Change collection and found several interesting photographs and documents about activism at Queens College. One item that caught my eye was an image of anti-Vietnam War Counter-Protesters in Queens. The protestors are carrying signs in support of the Vietnam War and notably against Communism, citing efforts against the war as unpatriotic. Of course, there are counter-protesters at Anti-war rallies, but it’s not something I’ve ever considered. The description of the photo notes that the amount of protestors in the counter protest is much smaller than the amount of protestors against the war. Previously, I hadn’t considered the extensive history of counterprotests to progressive movements. One question I have when looking at this photo is why Boston COllege is mentioned in one of the protest signs. It seems out of place if the protest is happening in Queens. Was Boston College somehow being indicted for being communist? WHat was Boston College’s role in the war and supporting or suppressing student activism and how does that connect to Queens College?

    Austensibly, the archivist has interacted with the item physically and digitally, calling up the process of digitization of records. It is possible that the archivist received the image digitally to start, perhaps at the hands of another archivist, but it’s more fun to imagine that they digitized it precisely to be part of this collection. I can’t imagine how it came to be on Jstor or part of the collection. Did the archivist recieve the picture and propose it to be part of the collection, or was it given to them from an already established collection to be digitized?

    The part of the archiving process I’m most excited about is seeing a collection move from a part to a whole. I want to see how objects gain context as they’re arranged.

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  12. Eskimo Omolade Avatar
    Eskimo Omolade

    I chose the Freedom Summer collection (https://www.jstor.org/site/queenscollegearchives/civilrightsphotos/freedomsummer-38830827/?so=item_title_str_asc&searchkey=1756928623238) , which is part of the Civil Rights Movement Photographs. I was specifically interested in the photos by Mark Levy. I was first introduced to his work by Robert Masters in 2024 during the virtual program honoring the 60th anniversary of the Queens College Freedom Summer. During the zoom presentation, Robert Masters mentioned my mother Barbara Jones (Omolade), who placed an ad in the Phoenix newspaper for volunteers (timestamp 1:02, https://www.qc.cuny.edu/fsac/)
    Robert Masters invited me to the stage reading of The Invaders: A Freedom Summer Play, written by Ralph Carhart and performed at the Kupferberg Center for the Arts at Queens College. The play honored the sacrifice of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and the work the Andrew Goodman Foundation continues to do by promoting voting rights. The Andrew Goodman Foundation website, https://andrewgoodman.org/ also includes the Memorial Booklet from 1964, https://andrewgoodman.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/1964-08-05-memorial.pdf I was able to see the eulogy my mother provided (pages 10-11). I was surprised to read something my mother wrote when she was only twenty-one years old.

    This Queens College Special Collections and Archives provides a cohesive experience of the significant role Queens College partook in with the Civil rights movement of 1964. It displays the extraordinary outcome achieved by “ordinary” students. From the perspective of a photographer, personal narrator, advocator, and the tragic sacrifice of life for the right to vote for others.

    I can’t wait for the digitized version of Dr. Barbara J. Omolade’s https://qcarchives.libraryhost.com/resources/barbara_jones_omolade_papers archives to be included as well.

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  13. Jackson Denahy Avatar
    Jackson Denahy

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.39586161

    I chose to explore the Life at Queens College Photographs Collection, where I found this undated arial view of the Queens College campus. This is my third semester in our program, and I have spent very little time exploring the campus. I usually show up after work for a 6 o’ clock class a couple of minutes late because of the long commute and have little time to do so. This past week, I found myself with some extra time. I went looking for the orbs that can be found outside of the museum because someone had told me about them. In that courtyard I found myself intrigued by the buildings, what would be on display in the museum, and what else I may have been missing out on around the campus. Unfortunately, I did not have time to explore in depth, and the museum was closed. So this item caught my attention as an opportunity to gain a new perspective on the campus. Of course, it is undated and once the image loaded I realized that it was likely quite old. Nonetheless, I found it as interesting as my experience in the courtyard. It shows the campus and surrounding neighborhood at a mysterious moment, looking quite idyllic. The first question regarding this item is a given, when was the photograph taken? But I also wondered what had changed since this time. While I think I recognize some of the buildings, others are less familiar. An item like this does not present information about the future and what buildings were later to join the architecture of Queens College. Given how little I know about the campus both then and now, whenever then was, the photograph is steeped in mystery. What I can assume is that Queens College likely commissioned this photo for a survey or advertisement, based on a feeling and the other items in the collection. However, I do not see a concrete answer available.

    I imagine that this photo wound up in the archive fairly quickly after it was printed. Then it was probably catalogued and eventually scanned. Some items in this archive are not scanned yet. I assume it is in a binder somewhere. The most exciting sounding aspect of archiving for me at this time is accessing items like this as I catalogue them, and getting to spend some time with each one, even if its briefer than I’d hope.

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  14. Ingrid Wamg Avatar
    Ingrid Wamg

    https://jstor.org/stable/community.33095446

    From browsing the massive Life at Queens College Photographs collection, I became particularly interested in a 1989 image titled “Queens College Anti-Tuition Hike Demonstration”. Of the digital collections available for exploration, the Life at Queens College Photographs collection is one of the largest, currently including 1,779 images of “Queens College grounds, buildings, faculty, administration, students life, and academics, from the 1930s to today.” Both of my parents attended QC in the late 80s shortly after immigrating to Flushing, although they have very few personal photographs from this time period and have never described witnessing or participating in any protests or demonstrations.

    I was not aware of the full protest history, though the issue of state funding for the university is an important part of the college’s history and remains relevant today. There are ongoing concerns over the affordability of an institution that serves many lower-income and minority students – protests were held as recently as 2023, 2019, and 2011. I’m curious to see the full history of recorded tuition hikes and budget strategies. In this digital collection I found several anti-tuition hike demonstration images, corresponding mostly to the 1989 and 1965 tuition hikes. I love how quippy and period-specific the signs in this one are, they read “Queens Says Don’t Believe The Hike” and “Read My Lips Mario, No Tuition Hike” – referring to then-governor Mario Cuomo, George HW Bush’s no new taxes quote, and the Public Enemy song that would have come out the year before.

    Interaction points for an archivist might have included its donation by the photographer (the source is Queens College Creative Services Photographs, which seems to have been a unit in QC’s publicity office), preservation of the photographic print, scanning and digitizing the image, appraisal by the archivist for context and historicity, and the addition of descriptions or metadata for accessibility.

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  15. Sahsa Slansky Avatar
    Sahsa Slansky

    After being directed to the QC archive I was naturally oriented toward the “Activism and Social Change” collection and was particularly drawn to the statement “Administrative Response to Campus Unrest” from 1969, which you can see here. https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.29234759

    As a longtime college student who has been involved in many forms of campus protest, strikes, and “unrest” over the years I am very used to reading statements like this from the administration. It’s very interesting to see what changes and what stays the same, and I was a little surprised to see that the admin opted to not call the cops to campus as an act of “good faith.” It makes me curious what would then become of the protests, and if they called the cops eventually. I don’t have questions about the item so specifically as I do about the context, and what unfolded before and after this statement.

    I also found it immensely interesting that attached to this statement was a survey for students regarding the protests and a strike, with specific mentions of the S.D.S. and “Ad Hoc Committee to End Political Suppression.” They then denote that this is an INDEPENDENT STUDENT SURVEY.

    Obviously it’s in the archive because it’s an official statement, although a student survey is attached. It has me wondering about how campus unrest will be documented and archived in the digital age. Obviously there is lots of ephemera that is still produced; pins, pamphlets, posters, etc. However this official statement I now would have received in my email. How will it live in future archives? Will it?

    I figure that this ended up in the archives because school’s have record keepers, and when this statement was put out a copy of it was taken by the record keeper and filed away for future archiving. The thing is, I don’t know if that’s really true. Is that what currently happens? As someone who’s spent a lot of time at protests, I find the process of “active archiving” incredibly interesting and I’m curious what the line is there and what best practices are. When does something get filed away for the archive? Who stores it and why? Is there a way to take an active role as archivists or should we just keep personal collections until enough time has passed that a college or museum deems it worthy?

    What I’m most excited about in regards to archives is precisely answering these questions and playing an active role in the “making” and preservation of history. I already grab and document and squirrel away things that I see as important, and I would be thrilled to be able to do so as a profession.

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  16. Kate Lingley Avatar
    Kate Lingley

    I found myself drawn to the Queens College Seal Designs, a set of hand-drawn submissions from a 1937 contest to choose the next school seal. What caught my eye was the submission by A. Landrock featuring a wise owl. The detail in the bird’s eyes and the branch upon which it is perched is unique, harkening back to an age of pencil-to-paper imagination, when Adobe Photoshop was still a far distant future invention. The artist must have used a compass to create the perfect circles, a ruler for symmetry, and possibly multiple different pens with different thicknesses. While the first drawing has torches and books in the background, the second seal features a crown and also a sword that looks like it is being carried on the owl’s back. Fierce. I think this should have been the first choice! I wonder if this artist was a student, if so, whether they were an arts student, and what their inspiration for the drawing was.
    This collection of art submissions might have been stored together in a folder or book (there are tape residue marks on the edges indicating it might have been attached to a scrapbook page, for example). To see it on this website, the archivist had to remove the tape and any other dust or debris from the verso side. It looks like it has been scanned on a flatbed scanner, although it might also be an image captured by a digital camera. The image metadata reveals that it was scanned at a high resolution – possibly 300 DPI (3005 x 2994) in a RGB color space; a clear image, but quite small (995 kb). The digital version of the item would then have been uploaded to the website along with the other metadata and access points. I would have liked to see the back of the paper as well; in case there were any notes or other clues about it. Even to see if the ink bled through the page.
    I am excited about the process of digitization and description, to observe an item deeply and determine how to most efficiently communicate its form and function. To find a balance in the right amount of information. And, to enable more accessibility for an archive’s contents.

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  17. Zane K. Avatar
    Zane K.

    I found myself looking at the “Life at Queen’s College Photographs” collection, because most of what I do for work is either working directly with film and analog photography or related to it. I could understand why most of the photographs were in the collection, a lot of shots that could be used for advertisement, or showed people doing important things on campus, but not all. I ended up choosing one of the photos that did not fall into the previous categories.

    Link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.33096179

    Through work I’ve gotten to see a lot of interactions between artists and institutions, both museums and archives, choosing if they want to acquire work and have come to understand why institutions cannot just take everything people want to give them, for the most part. Acquiring things costs money, the time people need to work with it costs money and as well as the effort to store something properly so that it does not deteriorate. So I always wonder how something came to be chosen for an archive, since for many places a lot of items do not get chosen. In this case I would guess that since the photographer had over 60 other items in the collection, their photographs of the school were given as a collection, and since almost every other image in the collection either is used as an advertisement shot, or could be, that the photographer just happened to decide to print a few of the other shots they took on campus. The process of how to decide what frames of film to actually print is also a really interesting thing that falls a bit outside of this conversation.

    In terms of the process of archiving the image, and where an archivist would have interacted with it, I will base on my own experiences since one of the many things I do is digitize art for reproduction, publishing, or record. The archivist would first receive the work, then go about recording all the pertinent information to make a record as set by the institution. Then you go about digitizing the object, for smaller photos like this there are two main ways it’s done, either scanned (in one of a few methods), or photographed with a digital camera. It’s difficult to tell, but I would assume this is photographed, mainly because the top right corner is bent up, which tells me it probably wasn’t being pressed by a scanner. The archivist would then put the object in the box where it belongs and keep a record of where that is. The only times they would then interact with it would generally be if the object needs to be checked on either for wellness reasons or if someone requested looking at it. Those are my guesses about the process.

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  18. Kate Lingley Avatar
    Kate Lingley

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.31916370

    I found myself drawn to the Queens College Seal Designs, a set of hand-drawn submissions from a 1937 contest to choose the next school seal. What caught my eye was the submission by A. Landrock featuring a wise owl. The detail in the bird’s eyes and the branch upon which it is perched is unique, harkening back to an age of pencil-to-paper imagination, when Adobe Photoshop was still a far distant future invention. The artist must have used a compass to create the perfect circles, a ruler for symmetry, and possibly multiple different pens with different thicknesses. While the first drawing has torches and books in the background, the second seal features a crown and a sword that looks like it is being carried on the owl’s back. Fierce. I think this should have been the first choice! I wonder if this artist was a student, if so, whether they were an arts student, and what their inspiration for the drawing was. I also wonder what the owl, the crown, the sword mean to Landrock. Crests and seals are a fascinating insight into symbolism from a certain time and place.
    This collection of art submissions might have been stored together in a folder or book (there are tape residue marks on the edges indicating it might have been attached to a scrapbook page, for example). To see it on this website, the archivist had to remove the tape and any other dust or debris from the verso side. It looks like it has been scanned on a flatbed scanner, although it might also be an image captured by a digital camera. The image metadata reveals that it was scanned at a high resolution – possibly 300 DPI (3005 x 2994) in a RGB color space; a clear image, but quite small (995 kb). The digital version of the item would then have been uploaded to the website along with the other metadata and access points. I would have liked to see the back of the paper as well; in case there were any notes or other clues about it. Even to see if the ink bled through the page.
    I am excited about the process of digitization and description, to observe an item deeply and determine how to most efficiently communicate its form and function. To find a balance in the right amount of information. And, to enable more accessibility for an archive’s contents.

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  19. Ash Moore Avatar
    Ash Moore

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.39218071

    This particular item (a bumper sticker calling for a boycott of British goods until Ireland became independent) struck me with a strange sense of familiarity given its resemblance to modern calls to boycott Israeli goods for the sake of Palestine. What particularly struck me was how familiar this item feels despite being for a totally unrelated struggle at a completely separate point in history. It occurs to me that I know very little of the activist history around the Troubles. In this wonderful sense of empathy and kinship with people from the past, I am curious if they would have called their campaign a success. Were they satisfied, did they feel they made headway? As is often the case, fragmentary primary sources like this always make me want to research the topic more.

    As for why this is in the Queens College Activism and Social Change collection, it seems inevitable that such a piece of activist history would wind up in that collection. The struggle for Irish independence had a marked pull among American Catholics of conscience, especially those of Irish ancestry. It is as important a movement to the history of US citizen activism as the anti-Apartheid campaign.

    As for the chain of custody, I must imagine that (given the available information on the entry) that a private citizen of the Maryland/DC/Northern Virginia area must have at one point procured this. It’s not entirely clear from the JSTOR page when and how this piece then changed hands from the private owner to the Queens College archive, but the intent in its donation was clear: To mark the American side of the Irish independence movement as a component of the wider struggle for justice of subject peoples abroad. Then, thankfully, an archivist must have taken the time to digitize and upload this piece. While I would like to see the collection in person and examine its contents more now, this odd moment of connection would not have been possible without the digitization of this small, ephemeral piece of history.

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  20. Sal Kimura Avatar
    Sal Kimura

    I wanted to write about exploring some of the Andrew Greller scrapbooks. https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28485378

    I encounter quite a few scrapbooks in my job, and they’re always these inconvenient affairs that researchers frequently do not find much use for when it comes to their research pursuit. What I like about these scrapbooks is how sentimental they are. I’ve been accustomed to many of the scrapbooks I come across only, or most dominantly, containing newspaper clippings, but I get a sentimental feeling from the assemblage of pages that I flipped through that were situated amongst the ephemera of Greller’s academic career. The signatures on the first page of the first scrapbook (linked above) were what drew me in. It had me thinking about how the ephemera added an element of sentimentality and personality that went beyond academic merit, but a desire to document all these other facets of how work fits into meaning making in life. Greller as a member of Queens College faculty, doesn’t strike me as someone who was seeing his work as just his work, but a major part of his life. I was touched by how he saved all these convention passes, a library card, and IDs. On one of the early pages of Scrapbook 1, there’s a clipping that also features a huge full color ad for frosting. This detail tickled me because it shows the ordinary context of the clippings.
    I would want to know if Greller thought of himself the way archivists do when saving and documenting these clippings and ephemera from his life. Was he sentimental while putting these pages together? How far into the future was he thinking when putting these pages together, and did he think about the future of the scrapbook he was making at all?
    I have kept a diary that has also functioned as a scrapbook since I was a child, and it was so hard not to see every scrap of paper I accumulated as something worth saving. The arrangements of how I contextualized them on the page also was heavily considered. Whenever I put these things together, I thought of the shape of some future version of me encountering these pages again, and I wonder if the same existed for Greller. I wonder if he felt accomplished and proud, with a dose of nostalgia.
    I can’t imagine too much intervention was needed for these scrapbooks beyond processing them as individual pages taken from what seems to be a two ring binder. It gives the quality of a family scrapbook.
    I wonder about the archivists tasked to describe and contextualize these scrapbooks. I assume there must have been an element of investigation in piecing together the themes and timelines of the different pieces and why they were put together on each page. This part of the work, I feel, can be seen as something answered in tandem with the processing archivist and the researchers interacting with it. The meaning in the gaps and the questions that lead to a constellation of others excites me, and I get a sense of who Greller was without even needing to read anything he himself might have written or said in these scrapbooks.

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  21. Tiffany Praimnath Avatar
    Tiffany Praimnath

    While looking through JSTOR’s community collections, the Gothic Architecture Collection stood out to me most, as it is something I enjoy personally. I have seen my fair share of gothic architecture, as I use to be a docent at Coe Hall Mansion and Museum at Planting Fields Arboretum, a mansion filled with gothic and Tudor Revival-Elizabethan themes, interior design and architecture. Looking at the Gothic Architecture Collection, I thought it was a beautiful collection, and I appreciate the many different types of gothic architecture that were included, such as Amiens Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Abbey Church of Saint Pierre, the Saint-Sauveur Cathedral, etc… One image within the collection that stood out to me was the detail view of north transept window interior transept of the Amiens Notre-Dame Cathedral : https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.24373405?searchUri=%2Fsite%2Fqueenscollegearchives%2Fgothic-architecture-collection%2F%3Fso%3Ditem_title_str_asc%26searchkey%3D1757038175541%26pagemark%3DeyJwYWdlIjoxOSwic3RhcnQiOjQ1MCwidG90YWwiOjEwMjh9%26doi%3D10.2307%252Fcommunity.24373405&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A9ef964dc3e84fe1c73c861436d43d7a2&searchkey=1757038175541
    This is an image of one of the main windows within the Amiens Notre-Dame Cathedral, and this image of the window in particular stood out to me most because of how detailed the image presents, and how clear the intricate details of the stained glass windows appear. My questions around this particular digital object is why do we not have more knowledge behind the design of the windows? I would like to see detailed descriptions of what exactly is the history of the very image being depicted on the glass and it’s artist. I genuinely am having trouble understanding why Queens would want to make a gothic architecture online digital collection featuring Western European country’s places of worship. My guess would be is because Queens college does have a study abroad program, perhaps the photographers of the pictures included in the collection were Queens college study abroad history or photography major students, I know we were told not to assume, but there is minimal information for me to research the exact reason.

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  22. claire Avatar
    claire

    I have worked in PR for a long time so I’m always curious about the evolution of branding over time, especially as different graphic and visual trends change through the decades. So I was really drawn to the 1937 college seal submissions, as they really show what would have been considered to be within the parameters of acceptable for college seals in the late 1930s. There are similarities to all of the designs but you can also see how each submission reflected its creator as well. I was particularly drawn to this submission (https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.31916370) because of the ways in which it both conforms to and deviates from the seal formula. It’s circular, with roman numerals, and reflects a nod to classicism. But the owl is striking and different. I like that it forgoes a latin motto and instead relies on visual cues of the owl being associated with wisdom. It’s also just kind of a fierce looking owl!
    Archivists had to acquire the collection, though it isn’t clear from the description if these seal designs were donated or simply discovered among other Queens records, and process it in order to describe, organize, and digitize it. I wish I knew more about submission process and how the archivists know that these seals are from submissions to be considered as the official seal.

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