25 responses to “Spring 2026 welcome post”

1. 

   Danielle Schussel

   January 25, 2026 at 9:31 pm

   In looking at the QC Seal Designs and logos, I was amazed to learn that Queens College was established in 1937, the same year that planning for the first World’s Fair in NYC commenced. Hence, Queens College’s inaugural logo or seal has direct references to the 1939 World’s Fair, taking place in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. This is in the collection given its historical significance both in Queens College and worldwide. I imagine an archivist interacted with this item both physically (taking a picture or even a scan and uploading it) as well as virtually (reviewing the material to make sure it looked appropriate and had adequate description. They also needed to link what was in the database with JSTOR so this item could be available to subscribers.

   As a side note, I was unable to access the QC community collection on JSTOR with a Queens College account. I needed to log in through the New York Public LIbrary. I wonder if all the city public libraries subscribe to this collection on JSTOR and if all QC students have a public library card. I also wonder how well this collection is advertised. I suspect many students probably don’t even know this exists or where to look for/access it.

   I am most excited to learn about archival description and collection management and preservation. I feel they are equally important and necessary components that support each other, thank you!

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   1. 

      Danielle Schussel

      February 3, 2026 at 11:22 am

      https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.31976240

      Reply
2. 

   Merlin

   January 28, 2026 at 8:23 pm

   The item I chose is from the Queens College Seal Designs and Logos, specifically the Sample Seals by Ethel Hibschman. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.31916368) I was wondering a few things about this item; Was Ethel a student or faculty? Was she paid to do this? Were any of these seals ever adopted? There are different dates for each of the three seals, although for two of them the month slot is labeled with a “0”, which I’ve never seen before. There are three different writing utensils used, so I wonder how long she worked on this and how often she returned to it. It is in the QC archive because it is directly related to the history of QC as an institution, and the whole of the collection tells a story of the progression of Queens College and their public facing symbol.

   The interactions that took place in order to be accessible are acquisition, processing/prescribing metadata, placement in the physical collection, scanning, and digital metadata. I think the part I’m most excited about is acquisition and processing, because I am curious about fitting a single item and connecting it to a larger idea.

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   1. 

      Jagdeep Raina

      January 29, 2026 at 12:51 pm

      I agree with you Merlin! I am also excited to learn more about how to succinctly fit an obscure/personal item into a larger collection to tell a story. This made me think a lot about what Caitlin said yesterday: how meaning for archivists comes from the whole, not from the item.. the whole, not the part. Archivists keep objects for a reason and imbue those objects with meaning.. so exciting!

      Reply
3. 

   Jagdeep Raina

   January 29, 2026 at 12:47 pm

   The item I chose comes from the Activism and Social Change Collection.
   I chose these Anti-Apartheid and Lettuce Boycott pins, and the link to view this item is here:

   https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.32438141?searchUri=%2Fsite%2Fqueenscollegearchives%2Factivism1960s%2F%3Fso%3Ditem_title_str_asc&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A75573d04e3e34a78d61afb363a4dc795

   There was something incredibly powerful about seeing these pins referencing a protest that happened nearly fourty years ago. The Cesar Chavez buttons in particular spoke to me about the deepening crisis against farmworkers today and how little has changed: in particular how corporate globalization has led to an epidemic of farmer suicides across the global south and the kinds of global farmer struggles that are happening now. The pins also made me think about various other crises happening in the world: the war on Gaza, the humanitarian crisis in Iran, the list goes on! To view these pins is such a humbling reminder of the need to document the material objects that speak to the history social and political movements so we can learn from these precious objects to help us be foregrounded in our present moment.

   I am curious –from viewing these items– to learn more about the social and political movements that shaped the political ideologies of Queens College students. I want to learn more about the history of activism that queens college students (and faculty too?!) were engaged with from the past.

   I’m curious about how the arcxhivist interacted with this one item. Was it an item that was given to them through a former student who was an activist during their QC days? Were there also any letters or handmade posters or photographs of the anti-apartheid and boycott lettuce movements that were also created alongside the pins? Were there students in the 1980s who came from rural farming backgrounds that were speaking up against the exploitation that was happening to farmworkers? The part of the archiving process I am the most excited about is honestly all of it: learning how to catalog, how to process and prescribe various kinds of metadata.. how to create best practices for preservation, how to write a finding aid, how to succinctly learn ways to arrange material.. honestly I am inspired to learn all of it.

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4. 

   Grace Menninger

   January 29, 2026 at 2:28 pm

   I found a collection of used and unused seals for the university, including the Atlas holding the Corona Park globe that is used frequently on school merch and diplomas. I would like to draw focus to this owl seal design in particular. https://www-jstor-org.queens.ezproxy.cuny.edu/stable/community.31916370?seq=1 illustrated by A. Landrock. No additional information is given about Landrock. I wonder if the seal illustrations were part of a contest for students. A note is added on the resource that this owl design was “Proposed design for the Queens College seal which was not selected.” The work is dated 1937, which is the year the College was founded, therefore I assume a contest was held to select designs for the school’s seal. The artwork appears to have been scanned and uploaded into the college’s archive. It is alongside other hand illustrated designs that were not selected and the aforementioned Atlas design which was selected that are all dated to 1937. These design choices would become instrumental to the visual identity and branding of QC. I picked this one because I thought the owl in the illustration was cute and befits a college’s seal as the owl is a symbol of wisdom in antiquity.

   As for all the places an archivist interfaced with this, it likely was selected by a curator, then a conservator likely inspected this piece as it’s hand drawn and has what looks like glue or tape on the edges of the paper. The conservator would have to ensure this would be able to be stored safely and may have had to clean some of the glue from the paper. After the conservator was done, it went to an archives technician who scanned and digitized the material, then created a finding aid and metadata about it, which is what we can see in the description on JSTOR.

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5. 

   Malikah Boyd

   January 30, 2026 at 10:46 am

   I chose the Civil Rights Movement collection because the 1960s is one of my favorite decades, and the image that grabbed my attention was a color print of a KKK rally (https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28617513). This surprised me because when dealing with images from the Civil Rights Movement, the images tend to mostly be in b&w. According to Stratman (2021), there is speculation these images mainly present in b&w to create the illusion that this era is much further in the past than it actually is. Like, a PSYOP to influence the masses to think that segregation and racism ended so long ago, although it is still alive and well in this country.

   While there are other color images in this collection, few of them are distinctly symbolic of the Civil Rights Movement and could be emblematic of any random event during this time. So, a question that rose in my mind as an art historian who also engages in a bit of amateur iPhone photography (lol) is why are the KKK images in color, as opposed to the others? Was this intentional by the photographer to have an impactful or dramatic effect on the viewer or was this coincidental? Additionally, I wondered if QC has the negatives and if they have the rights to reproduce any of the images in the collection considering that the data of the photo I chose suggests that the intellectual rights of the image is unclear?

   I think QC has this collection of photos due to the deep-rooted history that the college has with activism and social justice initiatives from the past and present (https://psc-cuny.org/clarion/2014/may/queens-college-and-civil-rights-alumni-reflect-activism-50-years-ago/). Lastly, I think some of the archival interaction points for these photos include the initial acquisition and appraisal process (the process I am most excited about because I think this is grounds to create change in institutions with problematic/sketchy acquisition and collection practices), then the collection, processing, and conservation process, and then the digitization process.

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   1. 

      Merlin

      February 3, 2026 at 7:14 pm

      This photo was so chilling!!! I feel like many photos of the civil rights movement are in black and white in an effort to distance ourselves from it, so this photo being in color feels like a more accurate depiction. I liked your point about iPhone photography, and it also makes me think of who would be at a klan rally AND documenting it, which seems risky.

      Reply
6. 

   Joellen Williamson

   January 31, 2026 at 4:28 pm

   I chose the CUNY Covid-19 Alert from the Queens Memory COVID-19 Project, https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.29152911. The date it memorializes is 3.16.2020. I liked that it is a digital alert.

   Questions this item conjures: How many people received it on 3.16.20? How did this alert affect people’s lives? How many people deleted it and never thought of it again?

   Inclusion in Queens College Special Collections: I think it’s a significant message to include in the Queens College collection, because the alert must have affected a lot of people! Thousands probably received this message and had to restructure their lives, not just for a day, but for months and years!

   Places an archivist interacted with this item: An archivist might have seen this alert as a submission to the collection or added it themselves. They probably kept it in a file and then pulled it out when organizing this collection. They had to make an individual page for the item and connect it to the index/content page.

   What excites me about archiving: I am interested in learning more about the process 🙂

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7. 

   Noah Furman

   February 1, 2026 at 5:49 pm

   The item I selected while looking through the collections was a scan of community demands made in 1980 regarding the SEEK program from the Activism and Social Change Collection (https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.37765567).

   I was really interested in this document, as I didn’t know very much about the history of the SEEK program at Queens College and the controversy surrounding the way that it was operated. As someone who participated in student movements at my school during undergrad, there was little interest, and perhaps active disinterest, in preserving this type of history. This leads me to questions of who chose to preserve this and was there resistance? Either way, I’m glad to see this as a part of the collection. I also am curious if these demands were met, partially met, or ignored. I briefly did some google searches, but wasn’t able to get an answer.

   In terms of the interactions, that is part of my uncertainty. I wonder whether this was donated by a student that participated in creating these demands or if Queens College was already in possession of this document. Regardless, I imagine that an archivist processed the physical document, scanned it, added metadata, and then added it as part of the Activism collection. I am not completely certain of the order of the steps in this process.

   I am most excited to learn the process in the archives, from beginning to end. I have some experience in various stages, but want to learn how it should go in order and best methods.

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8. 

   Max Waingart

   February 1, 2026 at 8:52 pm

   I chose this particular entry in the academic Senate minutes section of the database because well I didn’t know it existed. Not only was I entirely unaware of the existence of this database but I also as I read through the information had no idea that the academic Senate dealt with all of these issues. I didn’t know it was such a formalized process and I didn’t know they dealt with such serious topics. I would love to have known what particular things were going on at the college to prompt the Senate to discuss these particular issues. I’m sure this is in the archive because of the importance of understanding how the Senate voted on these particular issues and amendments to understand the modern structure of our Institution. One of the sections of the particular document I looked at which was the academic Senate minutes 1971-05-20 was the section about the majority report from the campus life committee in which they argued over the phrasing of a particular section concerning Campus Life. These particular debates I didn’t know happened and I also didn’t know they were as binding as this appears to be. I would love to ask the archivist if the Senate meetings still have the ability to change as much as they appear to in these older documents. I would also like to know who kept these records of the specific discussion during each Senate meeting. is there some type of stenographer presents or is an archivist the one who left these detailed accounts. If they didn’t write it down they certainly preserved the person who typed it as it appears to be typed on a typewriter. Then it was later scanned for this digital archive and categorized by date. I’m honestly most interested in the digitizing of artifacts as it’s incredibly difficult to wipe the digital footprint of anything out. I believe in this current Justin call the age of information data preservation is not at the Forefront in the way that it should be.https://www-jstor-org.queens.ezproxy.cuny.edu/stable/community.38587755?searchUri=%2Fsite%2Fqueenscollegearchives%2FAcademicSenate%2F%3Fso%3Ditem_title_str_asc&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Ac306db6841adddafdf50d73e87fa1572&seq=1

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9. 

   Mary Billyou

   February 2, 2026 at 9:05 pm

   I found this flier in the Anti-War/Peace Movement, circa 1967–75 : https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.35516190

   I liked how it was designed and had lots of questions & answers about the War in Viet Nam. I was interested to learn immediately of the connection between the United States & France & the continuum of one colonial power into another. The flier has lots of information & newspaper citations too!

   I wonder who Harvey Silver was – I’d like to look at the entire box of ephemera where this flier came from. Was Harvey Silver a student at Queens College? I noticed there was a snapshot or two of anti-war demonstrations on campus, along with other events like music performances. I wonder who was in the Student Mobilization Committee on 17 E. 17th St.

   An archivist would have to scan this item, place it in an acid-free box, and possibly put it in a glacine envelope. The archivist found a date for this item, which is interesting – 1967. My favorite part of the archiving process is I love finding cool things to fill out a more textured understanding of a moment in history. I love ephemera in particular. I’m looking for materials from exactly this time in New York. I also really appreciate how it’s organized so I can find it and how it is cared for by the archivists.

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10. 

    Kalen Milian

    February 3, 2026 at 1:09 pm

    I chose Alexis Ward’s Lockdown Art (https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.29108749) from the Queens College COVID-19 Collection. What really caught my eye about these works was the striking lineart and use of traditional Puerto Rican comfort foods as subjects. As someone who is also Puerto Rican, I can definitely relate to using cooking as a way to comfort myself and others during difficult times. I think Ward’s work is in the Queens College archives because they’re a senior studio art major at Queens College, but also because it’s a document relating to Puerto Rican culture and a record of the pandemic. I noticed while browsing the JSTOR page for this work that it was categorized as being from Flushing, Queens, so these posters might have been hung near the Queens College campus.

    There really isn’t a particular part of archiving that I’m most excited to learn about. All of it sounds really interesting and fun, and I’m very excited to hear more!

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11. 

    Lee Beaudrot

    February 3, 2026 at 2:03 pm

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.34291264
    I reviewed the 1987-1988 Gay & Lesbian Union Journal from the GLASA collection. It’s a neat source because it’s a composition book essentially functioning like a combination blog/group chat for the organization’s members, so you see both operational discussions and little personal interactions that show the members’ personalities and dynamics. This journal is from the very early days of the union so most of it is arguing about getting things together and actually “doing something”. I think what fascinated me the most was just following what members were up to and seeing what they liked to write about. Differences in handwriting, doodling, annotating each other’s messages, etc. It’s very human, if that makes sense?
    I’d imagine that archivists had to interact with source:
    1) When it was first added to Queen’s College’s collection, most likely given directly to them from the club or a member who had them
    2) To appraise it and decide whether or not to keep it
    3) To catalog it as part of the GLASA collection
    4) To log it in the library system so that it’s searchable
    5) To scan and digitize it, as well as add metadata so that it’s available online
    6) To organize the JSTOR page so that it is clearly part of the GLASA collection and grouped with the other journals.
    My biggest question at the moment is about the acquisition process. Who had these journals before they were archived? Was it the club or an individual? I’m also curious if any of the contributing members still live in the city.

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    1. 

       Sophie Bedecarre Ernst

       February 4, 2026 at 4:00 pm

       I loved looking at these! The notebooks functioned almost like a guest book, and it’s unfortunate how unlikely it is that something like this would be maintained today. The notebooks from the later years were especially funny and demanding juicy gossip.

       Reply
12. 

    Renn Firebaugh

    February 3, 2026 at 7:33 pm

    I decided to look through the Queens College House Plans collection because, at first, I though it was going be literal architectural plans of QC buildings. Turns out that house plans were “single-gender associations similar to fraternities and sororities, but less exclusive,” which I’ve never heard of. I ended up reading through this self-made newspaper published by Crown House: https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.41573358

    I have so many questions about this item. This is vol. 1 no. 1 but is the only one in the collection; was there ever another issue? On page 1 the house president laments the conduct of the general members at their last meeting; what did those members do? There is a column dedicated to people who owe money, primarily for pins. There isn’t a pin for Crown House in the collection, so I’m curious what those looked like. There’s not a lot in the House Plans collection in general, so I wonder how this singular house serial ended up preserved, and if any other houses published something similar that didn’t end up in the collection.

    I imagine an archivist interacted this item first physically, inspecting it, maybe cleaning it, removing the staples, possibly placing it in a new housing. Then it needed to be scanned, uploaded to the collection and described with metadata. I’m sure there were may other touch points along the way that I missed, so I’m excited to learn the whole process from start to finish! Right now I’m most interested in preservation and description, but maybe that will change as I gain more experience.

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13. 

    Barbara Paulus

    February 3, 2026 at 9:11 pm

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28487195
    I was initially drawn to this photograph for the way it is composed: the four children all looking down and the one standing up but looking in down as well are all parallel to the boat in the water. I’m not sure what they are looking at, I assume fish or another animal in the water.

    The context of the photograph surprised me because I did not know that Queens College students went to Prince Edward County, Virginia to volunteer as teachers. This photograph is not evidence of that teaching but of life in Prince Edward County for children there. The children are in Prince Edward Lake because of segregation that prevented them from visiting State Parks in Virginia. The photograph is in the Queens College archives because it was take by a QC student during this visit to Virginia. It serves as a document of what else was going on during their trip to teach and during segregated Virginia.

    I imagine that the archivist encountered this photograph either in an envelope or box with other photographs from this visit. Because of the significance of the trip, I am assuming it was already sorted into a box and did not need to be separated from other photographs this person might have taken. The date is also on the photograph which might have helped with sorting the box of photographs. For it to be uploaded here, the archivist would have then scanned the photograph to make a digital copy of it. I don’t think they retouched it at all because it looks like there is a thin piece of dust in the top left corner of the photograph. In terms of archiving, I’m curious to learn more about when images undergo retouching. I also enjoy sorting through material and piecing it all together so am wondering about how an archivist determines the ordering of images in a digital or physical archive if there are no dates. What story or narrative are they trying to construct and why? For whom?

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14. 

    Joyce Chan

    February 3, 2026 at 10:49 pm

    Photograph: “Activist art for the End Sweatshops Campaign”
    Life at Queens College Photographs
    >> https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.29709206 <<

    I thought this photograph was interesting because it highlights student activism on campus, documents a social-political moment in time, and documents a temporal work/action. The content on the t-shirts mentions local and international injustices in sweatshops, production, and corporate consumerism – Tiger Woods and Nike's partnership, workers in Haiti and El Salvador, women workers, and the Gap. I'm wondering who "Kathy" was.

    I was trying to figure out the time period of the photograph because the JStor item entry date is listed as "36859." The writing and t-shirt style can be from any post-industrial time period, but since Tiger Woods was mentioned, the photograph was more recent. Some research shows that during the late 1990's – early 2000's, there were a lot of protests and media scrutiny about labor practices and workers rights – including a major Student Anti-Sweatshop Labor Movement protests across the US. I'm assuming that students at Queens College participated, alongside schools like Brown University, NYU, SUNY Albany, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Michigan, University of Arizona, and many more.

    Questions: I'm wondering if there was a way to credit the creators of the t-shirts. What was the length of time this work/action was on display? Is the type of camera and film used to take the photo important? Are there differences used in description when noting event documentation vs. object vs. concept?

    An archivist would have had to handle the original negative and original photograph, label, file, and store both of them. They might have had to conduct research since the "End Sweatshops Campaign" is specifically part of the item title. The archivist would also had to scan (possibly a few different sizes for web display), adjust exposure, upload to CMS, write metadata, tag (including linking the item with "related media, text, images"), generate a url, and test the entry display on different devices.

    I'm new to the archival process and am interested in learning starting from the beginning and best practices. How object, temporal works, and overarching themes/concepts are preserved is interesting.

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15. 

    Lauren Bradford

    February 3, 2026 at 10:56 pm

    I chose this selection of Students for a Democratic Society Fliers from the Activism and Social Change Collection – https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.29234740

    These posters interested me because they are protest materials, created by QC students, and I think raise interesting ethical questions around the archival process. These are important items in the QC archive, as preserving the history of an institution can include preserving materials that were created in opposition to said institution.

    This reminded me of topics we are discussing in my community archives and libraries class, specifically the topic of consent when archiving certain materials. Who were these students? Did they consent to these materials being archived and housed by QC? How does QC engage with these materials now, and is that in alignment with how the creators of these materials may want them represented? Might certain materials be better housed in community/non-institutional locations and stewarded by those directly involved with the cause? These fliers look like they were meant to be widely distributed on campus, but I think still raise interesting ethical questions!

    In 1969, these SDS fliers may have been originally tacked to walls, handed to students, strewn on the floor, or distributed to students and faculty via a myriad of other methods. For the archivist, these fliers could have been collected in 1969 with posterity in mind, found decades later in storage, or donated to the archive with other personal effects.

    With these fliers in particular, I’m very interested in the discovery and the research process! When archiving materials like this, how do you go about doing due diligence to the creators/subject matter? Who were these students, and how do archivists at QC, or any other institution, engage with archival materials that challenge the institution?

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16. 

    Anastasiia Denysenko

    February 3, 2026 at 11:00 pm

    In Life at Queens College Photographs collection, I found this interesting photograph of a computer course from 1978: https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.35945614. What surprised me the most is that I probably have never seen before the machine that the student is using, and I am curious to know what it is.

    The item is in Queens College Special Collections and Archives because it depicts student life and computer courses in the 1970s. The photograph was made by Eugene Luttenberg, who also seems to have shot a lot of candid photos, advertisements, and just documentation of the daily activities on Queens College campus around the 1970s-90s. I would love to know more about the photograph’s creator and his functions within the life of Queens College, and I am also curious about the larger context of how computer classes were done in the 70s and how it differs from the way they are taught now. Additionally, it is interesting to know more about old computer labs and also what happened to the equipment from those.

    I am wondering if there was any formal appraisal for the collection within which we can find this photograph, or if it was transferred as part of institutional records. An archivist probably processed the collection and undertook all the necessary preservation actions. Additionally, an archivist worked holistically on digitization, which, in addition to capturing the image and post-processing, included rights research, creating item-level descriptive metadata, devising a file naming convention, and making materials available on JSTOR.

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17. 

    Abbie Pardales

    February 4, 2026 at 3:25 am

    I was struck by two different collections as a Greek-American with roots in NYC (the “Greek News” a series of bilingual periodicals and “Vincent Giordano Photographs”). I settled on looking at the photographs because they left me with more questions.

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.32395744

    This picture grabbed me specifically. I am very interested in quotidian tasks, my favorite representational art (painting, sculpture, film, etc.) often has as its subject people doing things they do regularly. Even if they are not everyday affairs, I feel these actions begin to shape our bodies as much as they shape the sense of meaning we have about life.

    Many of the basic questions I have are answered in the item details, the description of the collection itself, and contributes to the information I already know about the subject. I know this is an image of a Jewish community in the small Greek city of Ioannina on Rosh Hashanah taken in 2006. I am wondering how big this community is, how often they meet, whether the photographer is an outsider or not? I wonder whether this community was chosen as a subject because it is one of the most significant in Greece or whether there are many just like this one? I wonder if this collection is included because there is a significant Greek-American community in Queens (Astoria)? If you had told me this was a picture taken at my church in Michigan I would not be surprised and this lead me to wonder how similar/different my Greek Orthodox christian community’s practices are to those of this Jewish community in Greece? The hands shown in the picture all seem to belong to older women, is there a social element leading to the women all gathering together, is it coincidental, or are they posing?

    I wonder about the photographer, if he is Greek or Jewish or from New York (Queens?). I assume this image was donated by the artist or a family member after his death as its repository is the Queens College Special Collections and Archives. My undergraduate degree is in Anthropology and so I am very interested in his role as documentarian, ethnographer, storyteller, probably an outsider. He has so much power to shape a narrative about this community and its members which makes me interested and concerned with the story he was trying to tell (even inadvertently). The archive has its own story to tell about him and what he found important or interesting historically or artistically or in any other sense.

    It is written that Giordano was working on a multi-media project at the time he passed away documenting Romaniote Jewish communities in New York and Greece. Therefore it is possible there was an archivist working on that project as well, but the first likely interaction this photograph had with an archivist was the appraisal process. Since this photo is part of a collection and several series of photographs taken by the same author (and likely given by one party), an archivist first encountered this photo as one part of an already coherent whole. It was one photograph among hundreds, probably already organized in some way in a box or an album or on a reel. Appraisal was probably done on the level of the whole collection. This process is very interesting to me because I wonder how many things the archivists who make these decisions have to pass on and how they make those decisions. How much do they weigh practical concerns of space, time, and resources, with the intellectual, historical, cultural concerns? And which ones win out most of the time?

    After the collection was accepted, these photos were catalogued, given descriptions, given physical locations, possibly new housing, and this probably took a team of people. Sometime during or after this process, the photos were scanned and the digital files were given their own descriptions and uploaded to JSTOR. I think this aspect of archival work is more exciting to me as something I want to do. I would like to pore over the photographs, think about the best way to describe and categorize and care for the materials and the nitty-gritty of actually doing it. Appraisal for me seems interesting theoretically but I think I would have a hard time saying no.

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18. 

    Crystal Irizarry

    February 4, 2026 at 8:56 am

    I chose a photograph from the Andrew Greller Scrapbook 1 – specifically #3 out of thirteen from the group of photos. I always tend to gravitate toward old photographs, since it’s great to see the moments people deem significant enough to capture or, more frequently, what they end up taking a picture of in the heat of the moment. Since Greller is a former professor at Queens College with numerous accolades, these photos give those who view them the chance to reflect on his life and work.

    I think I would have liked to see a little description accompanying each individual photo. Some questions that crossed my mind while looking at the one I chose: What was happening in this photo? What were they looking at/taking pictures of? What kind of nature excursion was it? Was there any information in the physical scrapbook that might have been left out? Like, who were some of the people in the photo? After doing some digging, the papers were given to the college by Andrew Greller himself. I wonder if he had any other involvement with the making of the collection aside from gifting the papers and scrapbooks. An archivist at the time would’ve needed to date the photograph(s), organize it within the collection, add metadata (such as keywords and tags for hopefully easy retrieval), scan the image, and move the physical scrapbook to a temperature-controlled room to preserve it.

    I’m most interested in learning about preservation techniques across all forms, as well as how pieces are appraised and selected for a collection!
    (https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28485514)

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19. 

    Mars

    February 4, 2026 at 10:39 am

    I chose one of the [Andrew Greller scrapbooks](https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28485379) on account of the preservation challenges it likely posed, since it includes not just typed text but adhered photographs, newspaper clippings, text in pencil, postcards, handwritten letters, and a napkin. It was also sweet to see Dr. Greller’s career as professor at Queens College laid out in correspondence from students and faculty, illustrating his personal impact on others.

    I would guess this is in Queens College SCA because it was authored by Andrew Greller, a professor of biology and environmental activist at QC from 1967 to 1998. It connects Queens College to larger environmentalist and land conservation efforts at the time and demonstrates Dr. Greller’s impact on conservation both locally (i.e. 1982 article on p. 1 quoting Greller on why Queens parks should not be sprayed with chemicals to kill gypsy caterpillars) and internationally (evidenced by papers from Sri Lanka trip).

    Questions I have about this item:
    – How were the photographs physically removed? Why take photos of some instead of scanning them completely flat?
    – How do you optimally store scrapbooks with mixed materials?
    – Are there copyright issues around scrapbooks? It seems complicated since they’re made of pieces with varied authorship, like newspaper clippings, photographs, and pamphlets.

    Points of interaction for archivist:
    Acquisition from Andrew Greller
    Digitization (removing newspaper clippings to scan both sides; removing photographs to scan individually for collection)
    Storage (placing scrapbook in controlled environment for long term preservation)
    Description (summarizing contents of scrapbook; indexing under subjects covered by QCSCA; attributing title, creator, dates, source, file name, SSID; linking object to related texts and media in SCA; including copyright information)
    Creation of metadata
    Creation of entry in SCA database/making publicly accessible on JSTOR and through QC

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20. 

    Sophie Bedecarre Ernst

    February 4, 2026 at 3:47 pm

    I chose the “Ridgewood Manifesto” for my item of interest, located in the Activism and Social Change Collection. Linked here: https://tinyurl.com/2k9yrpbm

    The opening lines of the manifesto – “there comes a time when the upkeep of an apartment becomes so nauseating that one can do no more than place his body on the line” – made me laugh and sparked my initial interest in the item.

    I am curious about the origins and trajectory of this item: Who was the manifesto submitted to? Was this copy saved and submitted by Gatti, or part of some Queens College records from the 60s? Were their demands met? What became of the Newark Community Union Project?

    I did a bit of quick desktop research about Arthur Gatti, one of the authors, and found a short summary of a Queens College oral history project he was involved in. I learned that he is a poet, activist, and Queens College alum. The description also mentions his friend and comrade Mario Savio, to whom the quote above is attributed to in the manifesto. I appreciated that Gatti and his manifesto co-authors maintained a sense of humor while addressing serious concerns about their housing and sharing a list of demands. It seems to me that the inclusion of this item in the QC archives is important for a number of reasons, including the documentation it provides for campus activism at the time and Gatti’s personal history as a notable alum, in addition to his friendship with Savio.

    I am most excited about the context-gathering aspect of the archiving process, finding items like this that can help contextualize, expand, and situate existing items in a collection about a person or group. I know this is super broad and possibly would be better described by a term I’m not aware of yet…

    Reply
21. 

    Sophie Bedecarre Ernst

    February 4, 2026 at 3:58 pm

    Looks like I didn’t paste in my list of interaction points: The archivist would have needed to locate this paper either in materials submitted by Gatti or saved by QC, scan the page, possibly transcribe it, record the item’s description and metadata, upload and save it to the archive, and select the collection(s) to situate it in.

    Reply