archivist - The Cambridge Historical Commission Blog

We’re hiring!

Posted on September 30, 2021 by cambridgehistoricalcommission

The Commission seeks a full-time Archivist to organize and maintain its public archive and create in-person and online programming that promotes the archive and highlights Cambridge history. The archive is founded on an architectural inventory containing survey forms, photographs, and documentation on all 13,000± buildings in the city that is currently being digitized. Other collections include both historic and contemporary materials, such as atlases, papers and manuscripts, books, objects, and ephemera. The photograph collection is estimated to contain more than 60,000 images in all forms. These unique resources are used daily by staff, residents, researchers, and building professionals. The Archivist will oversee the Digital Projects Archivist, who also coordinates the Commission’s social media presence, and supervise relevant interns and volunteers.

Click here to view the full job posting and application instructions.

National Preparedness Month

Posted on September 28, 2019August 17, 2020 by Brittany F.

September is National Preparedness Month so we at the CHC want to share some crucial information on emergency management and disaster planning in archival and office spaces. This year’s theme is “Prepared, Not Scared,” which highlights how active planning can facilitate ease in emergency situations.

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FEMA’s National Preparedness Month 2019 logo

A disaster plan is the foundation for a confident and successful disaster response. It has many elements that factor in the health and safety of all parties. In an archive, these include the patrons, staff, as well as the collections; human safety is always the paramount concern. Archivists have been trained in merging broader disaster plans with unique archival factors. An archival repository’s disaster plan’s various components include: an updated emergency information sheet of internal and external contacts, a communication plan, a list of delegated disaster response team members, collection salvage priorities, recovery supplies, as well as pertinent forms and inventories.

It is important to keep in mind that a disaster plan is a living document that must be updated regularly. An outdated list of bygone local help and recovery vendors is unhelpful in the here-and-now and especially tomorrow. Don’t forget that disasters and emergencies are not pre-planned; you will never know if or when you will be faced with a situation but you can guarantee your level of preparedness.

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Graphic from Cambridge Fire Department’s E.P.A.C. webpage

This preparedness is part of a larger cycle of emergency management. The first step to consider is Mitigation, which is the time when you perform risk assessment of what is most likely to happen. With that in mind, you can develop prevention practices, such as fire, water, mold, and pest prevention (the big 4 in archives). From there, archiving Preparedness becomes a long and laborious process. However, taking the time to consider plans and procedures and performing drills can help save lives and minimize damage. When you know what to do in a given situation and who to call, your Response and Recovery are much more efficient and successful.

1997 flood at the Records Centre of the Archives of Ontario. Image credit: Archives of Ontario found in “Markings: Your Archives Interchange” Vol 27 No 4, Winter 2007.

In the event of a disaster consider: Who do you call? What volunteer assistance or professional conservators are available to you? Who should you build relationships with? Who are your local emergency responders? What is the state of your insurance and financial status? How will you ensure safety of people and collections? Which items should be prioritized? How can you reinstate normal activities?

Archives are faced with many possible forms of disaster and they are particularly susceptible to irreversible damage.

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Official military personnel file damaged from National Personnel Records Center fire on July 12, 1973. Image credit: National Archives photo found in Lawrence, Kerry. “Archives Recalls Fire That Claimed Millions of Military Personnel Files.” National Archives News, July 23, 2018.

Along with institutional external concerns, such as flooding and fire, archival holdings face agents of deterioration, like pests, mold, UV rays, and pollutants. Archival holdings generally consist of unpublished unique records of human activities. Sometimes there is only a singular copy of evidence for an event or action. Due to this historic and irreplaceable tendency, once a record is lost, it may not be able to be replaced. Therefore, archives must dedicate time and effort to planning and training. You would be surprised at what can be saved or recovered when archives have evaluations and triage plans in place. There are many successful salvage options; knowing which works best in a given situation is a huge time-saving benefit. Archivists utilize many resources in this decision-making process, such as the National Park Service’s “Conserve O Grams”

conserveogram National Park Service Conserve O Gram logo

We at the CHC archives are constantly contemplating our disaster planning and response. Awareness is a key component to formulating strong preparedness in any situation in any place. Therefore, we are doing our part in distributing information about ways in which you can personally become more prepared. Check out the national and local resources we’ve compiled below:

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FEMA’s 2019 weekly themes

All this month FEMA is showcasing weekly themes to make the preparedness process easy to tackle. Check out their social media presence as well as their website to learn how you can become more prepared for any emergencies thrown your way: check them out here

In Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA), the Boston Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management, and Cambridge’s E.P.A.C. (Emergency Preparedness and Coordination)offer fantastic resources for how you can achieve your own level of preparedness. Learn about: insurance and financial planning, which natural disasters you are most susceptible to and how to sign up for area alerts, how to communicate with your family and Community Emergency Response Teams, and where to take classes on lifesaving skills. You can also learn about how to get your kids involved with #YouthPrep on Twitter.

#BeReady

#PreparedNotScared

#PrepareNow

Cambridge Open Archives Recap

Posted on July 12, 2019May 14, 2020 by cambridgehistoricalcommission

Thank you to all who attended this year’s Cambridge Open Archives! From June 24-28, eight different archives and collecting repositories opened their doors to the public, showcasing collections items and sharing the stories behind objects, documents, and photographs. This year’s Open Archives theme was Politics and Activism in Cambridge (and Beyond).

Below, take a look at some of the photos taken by a few of this year’s participating archives and attendees. If you have photos from the event, feel free to share them with us! chcarchives@cambridgema.gov.

Thank you to all of the archives and archives fans! We’ll see you next year.

00100lPORTRAIT_00100_BURST20190627151833797_COVER — Cambridge Historical Society

IMG_20190625_145840 — Cambridge Historical Society

Cambridge Open Archives

Posted on June 29, 2018May 14, 2020 by cambridgehistoricalcommission

This year marked the 10th anniversary of Open Archives, and for over 2 weeks in June, 15 libraries and archives in Cambridge opened their doors to the public to show off selected items from their collections – all for free.

Folks who were unable to attend Open Archives might wonder: what is Open Archives, and what does it mean?

Cambridge Open Archives, sometimes called the Cambridge archives crawl, is a free event in which members of the public are invited behind the scenes at various Cambridge archives, libraries, and collecting institutions. It is a fun way to promote the unique collections of our city’s wonderful archives, while also raising awareness of historic materials, larger historic themes, and preservation.

Open Archives is also based on the belief that archives and collections should be free and open to everyone. The idea that information be free and accessible, that you can find out about a community’s history, or simply explore the holdings of a unique archive, is often still seen as a radical idea. We always hope that after Open Archives is over, attendees go back and make research appointments with some of the sites they visited.

Several cities around the country also participate in similar programs, including much larger events like the Archives Bazaar in Austin, Texas and Los Angeles.

Photo courtesy of Mount Auburn Cemetery

Photo courtesy of Saul Tannenbaum, Cambridge Day

Photo courtesy of Harvard Art Museums

(Above: Previous Open Archives events)

Cambridge Open Archives was started in Cambridge in 2010 by the former Cambridge Historical Society Executive Director, Gavin Kleespies (now Director of Programs at the Massachusetts Historical Society). Here’s what Kleespies has to say about the early days of Open Archives:

When it started, I had just moved back to Cambridge from Chicago and [was] in the process of getting re-acclimated. CHS was an institution that had a low public profile so I was going around the city and introducing myself and the Historical Society to organizations and community leaders. As a part of this, I met with Jim Shea and Anita Israel at the Longfellow House and Bree Harvey and Meg Winslow at Mount Auburn Cemetery. In both cases they invited me into their archives and pulled amazing examples from their collections. I thought, the Cambridge Historical Society has a great collection, but very few people use it and many people aren’t even sure it is available to them. Longfellow House and Mount Auburn have huge visitation numbers and are known across the country, but many people are unaware of the great archival collections they hold. It just struck me that there are these three great collections, that people would be really excited about if they saw them, but they just don’t come in contact with them. Then I thought, well, we’re basically all on the same street [Brattle], let’s just have a tour.

The first year was a lot of fun, so I started reaching out. I think CHC was added in the second year, but that was a little odd, since it was just on its own and was not walking distance to CHS, Longfellow or Mount Auburn. So I worked with Kit [Rawlins] and Charlie [Sullivan] and we came up with a group of city departments that had collections and were close to CHC. After that we put together a group to help plan the tour each year. Working with Alyssa [Pacy], Kit, Charlie and a group of other folks, we reached out to Harvard, MIT, churches and masons etc. I think at its largest, we had 13 institutions participating one year.

After the first year or so, Cambridge Open Archives began to be planned around a specific theme. Some of those themes have included “Adventures in Gastronomy,” which highlighted cooking and food themed collections, such as the Julia Child collection at the Schlesinger Library; “Cambridge in the 1860s”; “Spaces: Profane and Sacred”; “Living and Dying in Cambridge”; and “New Acquisitions & Old Treasures.”

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Asked about one of his favorite past Open Archives themes, Kleespies talked about the MIT Lewis Music Library’s take on “Adventures in Gastronomy.” Kleespies was very interested in seeing how the Music Library would incorporate gastronomy into their collection presentations — food and music? But according to Kleespies, the Music Library’s archivist took the creative route and set up a whole “dinner table” complete with candles, tablecloth, and a full menu featuring different musical compositions, including the German Vegetable Orchestra.

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Since 2015, the staff here at the Cambridge Historical Commission have served as the coordinators of Cambridge Open Archives. This year, the Open Archives theme was “Archivists’/Curators’ Choice.” Staff from participating archives were encouraged to choose collections items that they loved or that possessed special meaning; that fit a certain theme within that specific archive or museum; or some of the more unique, bizarre, or interesting materials in their collections.

If you attended any of the Cambridge Open Archives repositories this year, feel free to comment on this blog with your thoughts, or send us any pictures you may have taken.

We hope you enjoyed this quick history of Open Archives, and hope to see you at next year’s event!

The Archivists’ Corner: Get to know your CHC archives staff

Posted on May 23, 2017May 14, 2020 by cambridgehistoricalcommission

This month, we are highlighting our fabulous archives staff here at the CHC. Our part-time archives assistants, interns and volunteers do it all — from processing collections and writing finding aids, to cataloging the research library, taking care of fragile objects and collections materials, and promoting it all on social media.

Our first staff post features Emily Magagnosc, Archives Assistant.

Emily grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs. Her mom is a librarian and her grandma volunteered in her local public library, so clearly Emily was destined to go into libraries. She went to undergrad at Smith College in Northampton, MA, and while there she worked in the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Museum and Library, which was the best job she’d ever had and led her to apply to the Graduate School of Library Science at Simmons College. She just finished her first year there and is very excited about all of her classes.

Emily lives with three roommates and three cats in Brighton. The most interesting thing she has found on the job is a collection of recorded (written) confessions from the early days of the church in Northampton. When she is not archiving, she is watching Parks and Recreation on repeat, listening to loud punk music, knitting, doing inappropriate embroidery, reading, and petting her cat, Russell.

Emily is working on cataloging the research library at the CHC. She also recently designed posters for the 2017 Cambridge Open Archives, writes blog and Instagram posts, and gets overly excited about the cool stuff in the archive. Her dream job is working in a women’s history collection like the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith or the Schlesinger Library at Harvard.

P0662 — A print from the William Galvin Collection, one of many architectural drawings and designs that Emily cataloged and photographed over the past several months.