Archives hold University’s history
September 29, 2004
All of the important issues facing the University today – from budget cuts to the Chief – are destined to end up in sheaves of paper in a dusty basement corner of the University Library.
That’s where the University Archives staff collects, stores and studies the relevant documents to the University’s history. Debora Pfeiffer, archival reference and operations specialist, said the archives have been doing so for more than 40 years.
“The archives were started by Maynard Brichford in 1963,” Pfeiffer said. “They include 21,324 cubic feet of office records, public records and personal papers from the University.”
Chris Prom, assistant University archivist, said the archives use a fairly stringent process to decide what documents they’ll store.
“The archivist profession has a routine of general procedures we call appraisal to assess the administrative, legal and archival or historical value of records,” Prom said. “We apply those procedures to specific files or groups of files.”
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Prom said the process begins when a University office contacts the archives about documents they no longer need. The archives inventory the documents, determining how long they need to be kept legally and which, if any, have historical value. According to Prom, only about five to 10 percent of the documents inventoried will be considered valuable and transferred to the physical archives.
“We don’t have a checklist of characteristics or anything,” he said. “We just look at, does it shed light on the University, its people or the office the document was from?”
The archives include Board of Trustees proceedings, old course catalogs, the president office’s correspondents and even old issues of the Daily Illini. The archives also store documents that aren’t necessarily University related.
“We have collection of personal papers, faculty member’s correspondents and research,” Prom said. “For example, we have a collection of papers from James Reston, a reporter for the New York Times.”
Prom said the variety of documents stored led to a variety of people utilizing the archives. Professors, students, University administrators and even members of the general public come to archives to use it for a wide array of purposes.
“Last week, I had someone writing a biography of a former psychology professor,” he said. “And alumni use it extensively to confirm course descriptions and verify that they took a class. It’s not just historical research.”
Winton Solberg, professor emeritus in history, agreed that the archives had many uses and said they were critical to his research.
“The archives are the repository of all the basic materials pertinent to how the University developed,” he said. “I’ve used it to write two volumes on how the University developed.”
Solberg recalled one of his favorite documents found in the archives.
“I found a letter from a lady to the dean saying she’d heard that fraternities encourage drinking, so she didn’t want any of them to come to this campus,” he said. “Well, do fraternities encourage drinking? Check the archives to find out.”
Solberg said, however, that the archives don’t tell the whole story.
“There are big questions that I’m trying to answer in my research and the archives give me the raw materials to do that,” he said. “You still have to apply some analytical skills to get the best answers, though.”