{"id":24787,"date":"2023-07-21T21:48:45","date_gmt":"2023-07-21T21:48:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/?p=24787"},"modified":"2023-07-21T21:48:45","modified_gmt":"2023-07-21T21:48:45","slug":"my-first-year-at-scarc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/2023\/07\/21\/my-first-year-at-scarc\/","title":{"rendered":"My First Year at SCARC"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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If you\u2019ve talked to me for at least ten minutes, you\u2019ve likely discovered that I am a Student Archivist at Special Collections and Archives Research Center. If you\u2019ve inexplicably managed to avoid that fate or you are a stranger stumbling upon this blog post, this is a bit of what I\u2019ve been up to this year at SCARC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I began working as a student archivist in early November 2022. My first priority was a special assignment, to write biographies about individuals in the News and Communications Services<\/a> collection. This project encompasses approximately two thousand biographies that will be used to create a more comprehensive finding aid for this collection. I\u2019ve enjoyed learning about the unique people who have been associated with Oregon State, such as Edward C. Allworth, a World War I veteran who was the long-time, beloved manager of the Memorial Union, or Rachel Bail Baumel, a journalist, playwright, and producer who traveled the globe in the mid-twentieth century. As of now, summer 2023, I have written several hundred biographies and still have many more stories to discover!\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t spend all my time writing biographies, though. I also perform other tasks, like assisting researchers in the Public Services Unit. This means that I help retrieve items that researchers use for their own work. I also help scan and digitize items to increase accessibility of SCARC materials. Of course, I\u2019m always curious about what it is that I\u2019m handling, so with every task I simply must take a few minutes to read the document I\u2019m working with. I\u2019ve seen chemical equations I don\u2019t understand in Linus Pauling\u2019s research notebooks<\/a>, heartbreaking reports about Japanese prisoners published by the War Relocation Authority<\/a>, and witty interactions between Oregon State students who came decades before me in the Women\u2019s Center Scrapbooks<\/a>. There\u2019s a special privilege in holding history in your hands.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My work here has inspired my academic work at the university. In winter 2023, I took a class called \u201cHistory Lab\u201d, wherein our small group traveled to repositories across the state to design a research project. SCARC was one of the archives we visited, and I was able to use an oral history in our collections for my research!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I look forward to my future work in SCARC, where I will have the opportunity to work in the Digital Productions Unit and continue working in the Public Services Unit. While I had a deep love for history long before being hired here, this job has given me the opportunity to translate this passion into tangible work, where I get to learn and practice historical storytelling every day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This post is contributed by Grace Knutsen. She is a student archivist at the Special Collections and Archives Research Center. She studies history, French, and German.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019ve talked to me for at least ten minutes, you\u2019ve likely discovered that I am a Student Archivist at Special Collections and Archives Research Center. If you\u2019ve inexplicably managed to avoid that fate or you are a stranger stumbling upon this blog post, this is a bit of what I\u2019ve been up to this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9435,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9435"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24787"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24789,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24787\/revisions\/24789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}