{"id":25501,"date":"2024-10-04T19:07:39","date_gmt":"2024-10-04T19:07:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/?p=25501"},"modified":"2024-10-04T19:12:48","modified_gmt":"2024-10-04T19:12:48","slug":"my-time-at-scarc-through-my-top-3-items","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/2024\/10\/04\/my-time-at-scarc-through-my-top-3-items\/","title":{"rendered":"My Time at SCARC Through My Top 3 Items"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When I applied to work at SCARC, I wasn\u2019t really sure what to expect. I knew from the job description what my duties would be, but I wasn\u2019t familiar with archives. I had a vague interest in history and record keeping, but I\u2019d never even taken a college course on history before. I figured my best bet was just to show up, do what I was told, and see if I enjoyed it enough to stay. Little did I know it would be one of the most impactful experiences of my life.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of my time at SCARC was spent on the more common duties \u2013 paging and shelving materials, digitizing them, aiding patrons. These were all interesting and satisfying in their own ways. My favorite part, though, was always preparing for classes. It was so interesting to see the materials requested for different topics, especially when it was an opportunity to see some of SCARC\u2019s archival materials and artifacts. To be clear, digitization is an important way of both preserving materials and making them more available to the public, which are crucial roles of an archive. I\u2019m proud of the digitization I\u2019ve done to improve learning and accessibility and I don\u2019t mean to undermine that. But there\u2019s really nothing like holding a literal piece of human history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the first artifacts that really captured me was Romeyn Hough\u2019s The American Woods<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>which was brought out for a class on horticulture in my first year. Hough developed a method of taking microscopically thin slices of woods in three directions, which he then mounted on pages. Seeing the slides was amazing. Hough worked in the 1880s onward, in a time when there were serious concerns about the future of American forests. To have a snapshot, a literal slice of time, is an amazing resource. As someone who majored in Environmental Sciences, one of the most important things we deal with is a shifting baseline \u2013 basically, people think that the environment they grew up with is \u201cnormal\u201d. Over time, we culturally forget how big trees used to grow, how many insects there used to be, things like that. It makes it difficult to do retrospective studies when there just isn\u2019t enough data on what the world was like. American Woods<\/em> stands out as a tangible example of what the trees of that time were like \u2013 not just pictures or descriptions, but the wood itself. <\/p>\n\n\n

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An ongoing project I\u2019m glad to have worked on is the transcription of letters from the Oregon State Yank Collection<\/a>. During WWII, recent OSU graduates Elaine Kollins Sewell and Kane Steagall decided to put out a newsletter for other OSU alumni in the military. The Yank Collection is comprised of more than a thousand letters written to Sewell with thanks, changes of address, and information. During my time working on this project, I\u2019ve run the gamut of experiences. I\u2019ve looked up authors, usually to confirm spelling for names, that had long, wonderful lives after the war. I\u2019ve looked up authors only to find that they died before they could go home. I\u2019ve read example of human resiliency, human callousness, and human prejudice. Above all, I\u2019ve been surprised at how relatable they are. I intellectually knew that they were normal people, just the same as anyone else, but my own education in history has focused on the grand \u2013 wars, social movements, important dates. I\u2019d never really sat down and read personal correspondence, and definitely not at this scale. Reading people apologizing for returning a letter so late (as I unfortunately find myself doing), or joking about being willing to live in California if they could only return from the war, or spelling out words like \u201cpu-lenty\u201d and \u201ccutey\u201d or even \u201cbitchy\u201d was a completely new experience for me, one that reminded me that I should never overlook humanity throughout time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I had to choose one artifact, though, it would undoubtedly be one of the cuneiform tablets from the Early Written Word Collection<\/a>, which I saw when they were brought out to be scanned for 3-D printing. It\u2019s hard to understate the impact seeing it had on me. One of the things that I\u2019ve always loved about history, the reason why I started working at SCARC despite not knowing what it would look like, is being able to see humanity shining through. The Yank was one poignant reminder, but there are overwhelming signs of people being people throughout time \u2013 fallible and flawed, but always striving to learn and to connect. It\u2019s why Antigone<\/em> is my favorite play to this day. Reading it and seeing the same questions and ideas that I have now written by someone who died thousands of years ago was proof of that concept. The cuneiform tablets are another. They\u2019re tax records, not nearly as philosophical as a play or poem, but they\u2019re physical evidence of people\u2019s ingenuity, their ability to innovate to the point of creating something entirely new – writing. Being in the presence of something over four thousand years old, something that has been seen and touched and valued by countless people over the millennia, was incredibly meaningful for me. Writing has been developed individually in multiple places, but the alphabet that I\u2019m using to write this down right now is part of that global heritage.  It\u2019s something I will never forget. I don\u2019t know what the equivalent for other people may be: seeing a religious relic, visiting the place where their grandparents grew up, reading their name in genealogical records. Whatever it is though, that appreciation for history and our connections to it was fully cemented when I saw those tablets.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not sure where I\u2019ll go from here \u2013 work, grad school, whatever else may come. My skills from SCARC may not be directly applicable. Still, though, I do know that I\u2019ll carry the knowledge and experiences from SCARC with me and be better for it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This post is contributed by Maxine Deibele. She was a student archivist at the Special Collections and Archives Research Center for nearly 3 years, including 1 year as Lead Student Archivist. She studied Environmental Sciences and Writing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I applied to work at SCARC, I wasn\u2019t really sure what to expect. I knew from the job description what my duties would be, but I wasn\u2019t familiar with archives. I had a vague interest in history and record keeping, but I\u2019d never even taken a college course on history before. I figured my […]<\/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-25501","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\/25501","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=25501"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25511,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25501\/revisions\/25511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}