Campus Spotlight: Special Collections

Something I have realized as a college student is that on campus there are resources available to students that they don’t know about. At my school, Augustana College, there is a place in our library called Special Collections. Here there are different ‘collections’ like vertical files of flyers, emails, printouts, and photographs from history. They also have lots of books, scrapbooks, and manuscript collections. When I was there, we found the camera of a geologist named Fritiof Fryxell who was a student at Augustana College and later, a teacher there. 

The majority of what the collections have is the history of the college and the surrounding area of the Quad Cities.

In order to get more information on Special Collections I interviewed Micaela Terronez, the main librarian who is in charge of running Special Collections. She was a student at Augustana College with a major in Anthropology. After introducing what Special Collections is, she told me that: “To me, Special Collections isn’t Special Collections unless people are using them.” She thinks that if students don’t use this resource, then it is just a storage facility. In order to make this history accessible to students there is a reading room for students to sit and view the files and some are even put online. 

     _{The Special Collections Reading room, located on the first floor of the Thomas Tredway Library, Augustana College}

I then had her describe her job to me, and she said that she divides her responsibilities into five different sections:

The first job she said she has is instruction. Throughout the year, classes are invited to view collections specifically pulled out for them to look through. This is usually for students to explore ideas for topics on papers and projects or helping students start their research. The classes that do this aren’t just History classes either. Terronez has had several English and FYI classes come down to explore. She has even had Graphic Design students come down so they can explore different designs and structures of books and zines to help them think of how to design their own projects. 

After this, she then described the part of her job that deals with outreach. She did say that she doesn’t do this part much, but her assistant and student workers do this instead. They talk with other exhibits, connect with people on social media, and different student organizations to teach them how to donate materials to Special Collections. 

For Terronez, she deals with accepting what is donated, which leads us to our next part of her job called appraisal. Once Special Collections receives donations, she has to see if they actually fit or not. She needs to ask herself if the donation gives information about Augustana’s or the Quad Cities history, if yes, then it fits in the collections. An example she gave me was that if she receives a bunch of pictures of Augustana from the 1920’s, she sees that it showcases past student life, and that it fits in the collections. Donations not about these things can still be accepted though as well, they just have different criteria to go through. 

The next step is accession, where the donation is officially added to their collections. This starts with Terronez and the other workers creating a description for the item. They figure out who the collection belonged to, when it was originally created, and other information like this. In the case where they don’t know much about the owner of the collection, they do research to figure this out. One strategy she has is by looking through Augustana Observers, the school’s newspaper, to figure out what the person was involved in and what they majored in. Once the description is completed it is then put into a backlog while they work on finalizing the other collections to be ready to be viewed by others. To do this, they put the collections in protective materials, such as putting paper and photographs into acid free folders and envelopes to prevent them from yellowing and deteriorating. By doing this, they make sure the history is preserved and easy to read, so that way people can have access to it for years. 

_{Picture of where the collections are held}

Finally, her job includes supervision. She needs to watch over the collections assistant and student workers to make sure that things are running smoothly. She also supervises the projects that they work on and helps them when they need it. Connecting to that, I then asked her about what the student job was like. Terronez said that some of them work on daily tasks like reshelving books and boxes. The student workers are very familiar with the collections in order to find materials and then put them back when people are done using them. Additionally, in order to have students do jobs that are meaningful to them, Terronez tries to match their major to a certain task or job. An MJMC student worker works on communicating with the public to get more people to explore the collections. A computer science student worker has been working on reviewing files and transferring the information about them to a new database the collections has started to use. 

I then moved to asking about Special Collections and how students can use it. Most students who come to Special Collections are there to do research; whether that is exploring topics or actually doing the research. It also teaches the students how to find information in an archive like this and how to analyze primary sources. Students can also come down and look at artist books to spark interest or to figure out how to structure or bind a book for a project they are doing. Students in a specific organization can come down and look at information to simply just learn the history of the group they are a part of. Students who are curious about a topic about Augustana history will most likely be able to find it in the collections. 

She believes that it is important that colleges have Special Collections in order to protect our institutional memory. There are many different files with a lot of information on the college and the towns around it. Some colleges and universities have their own Special Collections but don’t allow undergraduates to use it. This blocks these students from the unique resources provided and makes it harder for them to do research with less materials. The fact that it is also on campus means that students can easily access it and be able to learn about many different things. Terronez also believes that Special Collections gives people the opportunity to look at multiple perspectives on topics. Students should look at multiple perspectives in order to get the full story. Augustana’s Special Collections has multiple perspective information on events like Covid-19. They also have a collection on each of the Augustana President’s that are made up from several different sources. Without these, whole pieces of a story would be lost, so these need to be preserved. 

To finish our conversation, I asked Terronez why she thought that this was a valuable resource to students. She believes that there is an extra value of being able to touch the information that you are looking at. It can give students more information on the material someone made it out of, how old it is, and can give the information more personality which can be beneficial for a person’s research. She also believes that with larger research projects, like racism in the United States, that Special Collections can help students localize information. Students can look at racism in the Quad Cities by looking at collections to help build context around a topic to help students not get lost in all the information that surrounds topics like this. Outside of research, Terronez thinks that students don’t have to have a project to work on in order to look at history in Special Collections. That students can take a break from their classwork and come down to just explore different items. Some students have found things that she has never seen herself, which to me shows that there are all sorts of surprising and interesting things to look at while in Special Collections. 

So, overall from our discussion it seems like Special Collections is a valuable resource to students on campus that holds a lot of different interesting history. So, whether you are from Augustana or not, you should go check out your school’s Special Collections and learn something new.