What do a 47-pound bucket of lard, a century-old University regent’s desk, a miniature model of Japan House and a famous journalist’s tobacco pipe have in common?
Nothing, aside from the fact that they all can be found in the University of Illinois Archives.
“Archives are places where … the raw data of history live, and our jobs are to help people find that data and bring it to life,” said University Archivist Joanne Kaczmarek, head of the archival programs. “Whether it’s working for a school project or really trying to get to the bottom of some issue.”
Walking to the northwest corner of the Main Library leads to a simple set of wooden doors. Once in the space, cheerful faces at sprawling desks greet visitors, eager to entertain patron requests.
Archives Program Officer Jameatris Rimkus recalled helping one person — who had spent a year searching — find a family member’s photo.
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“She was desperately trying to find a photo, and we did have a biographical file on it,” Rimkus said. “(There) was hardly anything in the file, but it had a photo. She finally found the photo.”
The Archives provide over 150 years’ worth of information to anyone for free. Over two dozen staff work at any given moment to help curate a collection totaling over 80 terabytes, 2.6 million digital files and 35,000 cubic feet of physical materials.
Need to know where Shel Silverstein lived as a student? How about if your great-grandfather was written up in The Daily Illini in 1920? The answers to all this and more can be found by simply walking in and asking a staff member for assistance.
“There was a digitized yearbook online, and someone wanted their image removed from it because they didn’t like their hairstyle in the photograph,” said Kyle Rimkus, digital programs and partnerships librarian.
The request, which came over 30 years after the yearbook’s initial publishing, eventually led to a review of the Archives’ policies around removals and was ultimately denied.
Stories such as these are commonplace in the archives, where information — including name, senior photograph, campus address, graduation year, major, RSO involvement, dissertation and student transcript, among others — can be found in some combination on nearly every alum since the University’s founding in 1867.
The Archives is split into three service points located throughout campus. The first is the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music in the Harding Band Building, which stores marching band history and artifacts, composer John Philip Sousa’s records and local music.
The second service point, located in the Horticulture Field Laboratory, is the Student Life and Culture Archives, also known as the Archives Research Center.
This location stores the “history and traditions of student life and culture at the University of Illinois through alumni and student papers,” per its website.
Also stored there are the full archives of the American Library Association and historical records of the Advertising Council, which promoted the iconic Smokey Bear Wildfire Prevention campaign.
The Main Library’s service point is the third and largest location. It houses artifacts from nearly every University president, paperbound student directories dating back to 1898, physical letters pertaining to the Manhattan Project, an entire room dedicated solely to materials from journalist James Reston and much more.
No matter how you choose to use it, the University Archives is here to stay, and its staff is here to help.
“There is a lot of information in the University Archives,” Jameatris Rimkus said. “We want it to be used. It is here to be used and to be accessed. And the staff is very happy to help you access it.”
