As a Simmons student, one of the requirements for the Library & Information Sciences program, regardless of where you fall on the dual-major spectrum, is a minimum 60-hour internship at an archival institution located either in or around Boston, Mass. I honestly didn’t know what to expect when I was assigned a post at the Cambridge Historical Commission: although I’ve been living in the Cambridge area for a little over a year, I have to admit that I don’t necessarily know much about the actual history of it beyond some superficial knowledge. I’m from Western New York! Cambridge, to me, was where Harvard and MIT had their campuses, the backdrop of The Handmaid’s Tale, and literally nothing beyond that. What could Cambridge possibly have in their local history archives that could interest me at all?
The answer? A whole lot.
The first project I’d been given once I settled into my internship was helping to sort through one of the last sets of off-site containers for the Galvin Collection. The William Lawrence Galvin Collection is made up of the papers and designs of William Galvin, a prominent Cambridge architect of the mid-twentieth century whose career had an indelible effect on the building of Cambridge proper. Galvin passed away in 1983 and his papers, which had been left to his two daughters, were included in the sale of his home and given to the CHC by the developers taking over the property. The CHC recovered interesting items from Galvin’s office, including the very well-kept advertising sign that is now hanging over an interior window in the CHC’s main office (and can be seen above), but many of his drawings had been stored in less than optimal conditions. When they were first offered to the CHC, many of them had been kept like this since the mid-1980s, after Galvin’s death:
Which, honestly? As an archivist – no, as a person, I have to say that this is definitely the opposite of ideal.
Much of the paperwork had already been sorted through by the time I came onto the project – Aliza Leventhal, a previous Simmons intern, and Emily Magagnosc, the Archives Assistant and one of my supervisors, did an amazing job organizing the blueprints and pencil drawings into different indexes, and making up a finding aid for the collection. Since the majority of the collection is now housed off-site, my part of the project was to work with the last two cartons of paperwork in the CHC office, adding them to the Non-Cambridge Roll Index and physically processing everything. All the papers – blueprints, pencil tracings, Photostats, and blue-line prints, among others – had to be divided up by property, re-rolled into individual sets, and then given a new label before being numbered and cataloged on the spreadsheet.
Sounds easy, right? I thought that, too, until I realized that combing through the containers of the Galvin Collection felt, at times, considerably less like this:
And a whole lot more like this:
Especially when I realized just how many spiders, dead and alive, had taken up residency inside the rolls and rolls of dusty, untouched blueprints. There was also the fact that while the spreadsheet I was using had columns listed for the roll number, address, property title, client, description, number of sheets in the role, and other assorted notes, that did not in any way mean that half this information was actually located on half the papers I was sorting through. Although I was assured several times not to worry, that there was a greater need for a general idea of what was in the boxes, rather than an incredible in-depth assessment, it was still frustrating to see all these familiar buildings – some several times over, on multiple rolls of blueprints – and have no real idea of how to fit everything together.
Emily M. and Emily Gonzalez, my other supervisor, took care of this problem by having me investigate some of the “nicer” drawings that we found in the collection, like this color perspective rendering of the Walden St. Veterans Rental Housing Project:
My research was not necessarily intense by any means, but it involved using all the resources available to me at the CHC, including their extensive collection of local property records, a wide assortment of maps of Cambridge, and Charles Sullivan, the Executive Director of the CHC and one of the people who literally wrote the book on “building Old Cambridge.” My research let me dig deep into a local history I honestly did not know much about – and hadn’t really thought about, before – and at the end of it, Emily M. and Emily G. had me post my findings on the CHC’s official Instagram account.
Throughout all this, I had also started working with Emily M. on updating the CHC’s library collection on LibraryThing – helping her search through Overcat for books in the physical collection and adding the titles, publishing information, call numbers, and tagging the appropriate subject headings on all of the books we could find. Emily G. then had me take a look at the Ellis & Andrews Collection. Chun Yu, another fellow SLIS student and former CHC intern, had already covered the Ellis & Andrews Real Estate Collection in a blog post of his own, and I wound up spending so much time on the Galvin Collection that I didn’t really have as much left over to devote to reorganizing the additional boxes of Ellis & Andrews correspondence. However, I have to say that what I did see while reorganizing the papers by date, rather than by street name, was an incredibly interesting look at the way real estate operations were run in the 1880s and 1890s. It’s hard to believe some of the prices that people were willing to pay for lodging – not to mention how much it cost for renters to use the earliest forms of electric light! – but amidst the postcards and telegrams and letters from potential clients looking for homes in the greater Cambridge area, I did manage to find at least one thing that I was not at all expecting: some really, really lovely headers on company stationary, from businesses all across the east coast that were sent to Ellis and Andrews at their firm, like the ones seen below:
At the end of it all, it’s hard to believe that three months have already passed since I started this internship in September, and that it’s rapidly coming to a close. The processing assignment I was given was a great opportunity to work with architectural drawings and blueprint materials, as well as conservation checks, cataloging, and learning how to better navigate the broadening world of social media access. Everything about my time here was nothing if not enjoyable and orienting; if I had any issues at all, it would be that I, personally, would have liked a little more instruction in reference assistance with the many people who approach the CHC daily looking for help with the historical worth of their homes, but considering what I got in return I honestly can’t complain. Overall this internship was a surprisingly good fit, with some truly excellent people at the helm of it, and I’m glad to be taking what I learned at the Cambridge Historical Commission forward with me into the future.
– Rachel Nicolosi, Simmons SLIS student and (soon-to-be former) archival intern
