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.
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.
April 21-27 is Preservation Week, seven days in which libraries, archives, and other institutions are encouraged to “highlight what we can do, individually and together, to preserve our personal and shared collections,” through events, activities, and resources on preservation.
To celebrate, we are reblogging this post from 2017 on preservation methods in the Cambridge Historical Commission archives and library.
Do you have personal collections, like old photographs, documents, scrapbooks, videos, flash drives? What would you like to see about preservation on this blog?
Celebrate American Archives Month with us at the Historical Commission!
This month we are offering a special tour of our archives, featuring an in-depth look at some of our many historical resources.
Join us this Wednesday, October 10 at 1 pm, OR Monday, October 22 at 6pm. Email egonzalez at cambridgema dot gov to reserve a spot. Tours will run around an hour.
Attendees of the tour will:
Get a behind-the-scenes look at the Commission’s archives and library space
Get an up-close look at a variety of historical resources, including: atlases, survey files, city directories, historic photographs, postcards, objects, and architectural drawings.
Learn how to research their house, building, or organization using the Commission’s files.
Receive helpful tips on preserving and caring for their own family papers and photographs.
Welcome back to our ongoing series featuring the staff members who do wonderful work here at the CHC! This post introduces our Archivist, Emily Gonzalez.
Emily showing one of her favorite items from our collections – Motor Boot Spats once made by the Cambridge Rubber Company
Where did you grow up?
My family moved quite a bit, but I mainly grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. The East Coast feels like my home now, but I’ll always be a Midwestern gal.
You haven’t lived until you’ve gone to the MN State Fair
Where did you go to school? What was your degree?
For undergrad I attended Lawrence University, a small school in Appleton, Wisconsin, and earned my BA in English Lit and Spanish. I did my graduate studies in Library Science and History at Simmons College here in Boston.
What are your interests or hobbies?
I love movies and documentaries, both old and new. I love visiting museums and historic sites, traveling, and trying out new restaurants. I just signed up to volunteer with Broken Tail Rescue, a local animal rescue organization, and I am super excited. About once a season I’ll force myself to run a road race (usually a 5k).
I love old photographs. This one is of my grandpa Les and his siblings on a farm in South Dakota.
I’m first-generation Cuban American, but I didn’t become fluent in Spanish until I was in college.
The summer after college I worked at a fast food kiosk inside of a zoo in St. Paul. It was called “Zooper Food.”
Thanks for the free corndogs, Zooper. Image courtesy of Google.
My fiancé and I have a tuxedo cat named June. She rules the household.
HRH
When did you start working at the CHC?
November 2015.
What do you like best about working at the CHC?
No one day is like the other. There are always new research requests, collections to process, reorganize or digitize, and cool archival discoveries. I also love learning about the ins and outs of historic preservation through my colleagues.
Do you have other professional pursuits?
I’m an active member of the Society of American Archivists and New England Archivists, and I’m on the Collections Committee at the Cambridge Historical Society.
Archivist fashion
Give us a glimpse into your daily work or a current project.
A “typical” day could involve answering a research request, checking in with volunteers on their latest projects, discussing ongoing projects with my colleagues Meta and Emily, writing up text for promotional materials, emailing with other city departments or organizations about outreach activities, chatting about next year’s Cambridge Open Archives event, or meeting about the next steps in our big digitization project (“C-DASH”).
Because I manage our archives operation here, I don’t really do a lot of collections processing, so it’s nice when I do get to scan some historic photographs or reorganize a collection. I’m lucky in that I have such amazing archives assistants and colleagues, and that the CHC had library science interns and archives volunteers working on our collections for so long before I came here.
What is your favorite photograph, artifact, or collection at CHC?
I love the old restaurant menus in the Cambridge Ephemera Collection. The Wursthaus menu from August 6, 1962, is probably my favorite. Look at the “Businessmen’s Luncheon” – what a deal! [Note: The Wursthaus was a restaurant located at 4 Boylston Street, now JFK, in Harvard Square]
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(Cambridge Ephemera Collection, CHC002).
I also love images that capture great facial expressions, like this one from our Cambridge Recreation Department Collection (CHC011).
What do you like best about living or working in Cambridge?
The quirky, intelligent community and how much love they have for the City’s history.
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 second staff post features Meta Partenheimer, Digitization Assistant.
Hi, my name is Meta, and I work at the Cambridge Historical Commission as a Digitization Assistant. Before beginning my work, I started at the CHC through an internship while taking a course at Simmons, and came back to volunteer over the winter break.
Meta with the survey files!
A quick snapshot of the stacks I took last fall during a tour at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
I grew up in a small town in east-central Illinois, and attended college at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While attaining my undergraduate degree in art history, I recognized that I loved spending time browsing the stacks and researching, and wanted to facilitate that experience for others.
After school, I moved to Oklahoma City where I worked for The American Pigeon Museum & Library, and the Oklahoma Historical Society. Working at these institutions helped me realize I wanted to become an archivist, and I decided to apply to the Master of Library and Information Science program at Simmons. Currently, I am halfway through my work towards an MLIS with an archives concentration. In addition to working at the CHC, I also intern at the John F. Kennedy Library.
A collection of racing homer photographs from The American Pigeon Museum.
My dream job would be professional beer tester—but I think more realistically I would love to work as an archivist with the Archives of American Art in Washington, DC. When I’m not archiving or catching up on homework, you can probably find me listening to a true-crime podcast, going to the gym, or catching up on my favorite British drama shows.
Fun facts about me:
My first paying job was detasseling corn the summer before I turned thirteen.
I have a cat named Winslow
Winslow at Christmastime on the farm in Illinois.
I am an avid fan of the Oklahoma City Thunder
My first OKC Thunder game vs. the Milwaukee Bucks.
One of the strangest things I’ve discovered during my archival career was with the Manuscripts department at OHS. One summer, we were charged with collecting and preserving items from the State Capitol Publishing Museum, which had been closed for a number of years. While recovering a drawer of documents, I came across a small mummified mouse which my colleagues and I dubbed “Frontier Mouse.”
Each drawer on this wall held a blank book of forms for orders, permits, and other paperwork. I found “Frontier Mouse” in the top row.
So far, my favorite archival find at the CHC is a collection of cyanotypes that were taken during the construction of the subway system in Boston, Cambridge, and surrounding areas.
Cyanotype titled “Kendall Sq. Station” from the Boston Elevated Railway (BERy) Collection, dated 28 March 1910.
Currently, I am working on digitizing our architectural survey files, processing collections, and creating posts on CHC social media.
What do you like best about living or working in Cambridge?
