Writing History

One of this summer's projects is to come up with a history of the library here at Roberts Wesleyan College and Northeastern Seminary. Somehow I assumed that people who have been working here for decades would just know it off the top of their heads. Silly me.

I asked the person who serves as archivist if he could throw something together so that we could put it on our website. After a year or so, I realized that his plate is too full for this relatively low level project and that if I want a history, I need to schedule time with him to hammer it out. He brought ancient books to our meeting, handwritten reports and accession books and histories. No one has ever tackled this project. It will have to be constructed from scratch.

OK. I can deal with that. I will work with him to pull information together. I create a table so we can match dates with events and people. But hunting through the rhetoric for clues about book collections proves elusive. Our hours produce a scant bare bones skeleton. We have way more questions than answers. Even the documents seem to be in conflict.

Gradually the scope of this project hits me. This is a dissertation! This requires wading through primary documents written for purposes other than ours for clues and references. It will take some time and patience. The archivist, having outlined the need, turns it over to me with a smile. No wonder he had not responded.

But I am interested enough to keep wading. While I am scarcely of a historian bent, this particular project is intriguing. Be the first to pull it together! Besides, once I have the framework and some narrative, I can run it past the experts who will be able to spot the discrepancies and gaps.

So here I sit ensconced in notebooks and yearbooks and documentation, sleuthing out details and tracking down statistics. Not what I envisioned for this summer, but, hey, at least its interesting.