What does an archivist do?
In the University Archives, we do a lot of different things. It depends on what area you happen to be in. We do reference requests; we answer questions for people. A lot of times they're alums, or students doing papers, or local community members, but they don't have to be connected to the university.

We have about 2 million university photographs, so we do a lot of reproductions for people. They might be decorating, so they want an old historic football picture, or they want Mirror Lake in the '20s, something like that.

We also do a lot of genealogy requests, such as for people who are interested in the history of their family, a certain person in their family who attended Ohio State.

We do a lot for the departments on campus; we receive between 400 and 500 boxes a year from campus, material that has some historical significance from their department, college, or unit. We work on getting that material ready to go into our stacks, and then if the department needs to look at it or if they are interested in what they did 20 years ago or something like that, we'll try to help them as much as we can.

Where does the material usually come from?
Everywhere on campus. It comes from athletics and from the colleges. We just got 12 boxes of material from the College of the Arts. The Multicultural Center recently sent us material. Right before the Ohio Union was being demolished, they had several archives parties, if you will, where all the various people in the union would bring things to the ballroom, and we would go through it and determine if it was stuff that should come over here. We also get material from the president's office, material from the academic misconduct office, from student organizations, so it's a huge range of people.

What are some of the interesting things in the archives?
There are some fun things we always pull out when people come to visit. We have the first registrar's book. It was handwritten the very first day of class, and it's basically the transcript of the students-what classes they took, how well they did, and that kind of thing. So that's always a great thing to show people, because there was such a wide variety of students. We have the original scarlet and gray ribbons, from when the school colors were determined. We have a program from the Men's Glee Cub and the first public singing of "Carmen Ohio."

What do you mean by the original scarlet and gray ribbons?
We did not have colors when the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College opened in 1873. In 1878, when we became the Ohio State University, a group of students went downtown to a department store to choose the ribbon colors for the university. They wanted ribbons to wrap around the diplomas of the graduating class. The first colors they came up with were orange and black. After learning that those were Princeton's colors, they went back to the store and chose scarlet and gray. The ribbons we have were framed with the story about this and came from one of the students who chose the colors.

Were all these items stored in the archives back then, or were they things people saved because they were significant?
The archives didn't actually start until 1965, so historical material at the university was gathered in various locations. Then, when the archives were established, it sort of migrated here. But some things have been donated to us over time. For instance, with one of the scrapbooks, somebody was going through, I think, their great-aunt's house after she died. They came across it and thought, "Wow, this is really interesting, I wonder if anybody at the university would like it." So they contacted us.

Most of the items are from the university, rather than individuals?
Right, but we do get donations. A lot of times people are downsizing, they're cleaning out their attic and going through their relatives' material, and they contact us. Sometimes, people contact the Alumni Association. So we get the information and contact the people and say, "Yes, we'd be thrilled to have the pennant from the 1960-whatever Rose Bowl," or that kind of thing.

Usually people are so excited that somebody's interested in the material. And it's great to pull out for students, or people coming to do tours. People will be able to see what happened on campus from a student's perspective [in the scrapbooks], which is so rare. It's so difficult to get that because with most students, once they leave, things disappear and they don't necessarily keep them.

It must be fun to look through things.
It is, it definitely is.

How are you involved with "Objects of Wonder," the upcoming exhibit of Ohio State treasures at the Columbus Museum of Art?
The whole idea for the exhibit came from the museum. They contacted various people throughout the university, and the University Archives was one of those, so I started working with them. They asked us to come up with a list of things we might consider based on their description of what they wanted the exhibit to be like. We've met various different times since last fall to talk about refining the list and adding things, once they had seen material from all the other collections. So it's been an ongoing process, working with them trying to find things that will fit well into the exhibit.

And I just found out that admission for the exhibit will be free for all Ohio State students, faculty, and staff with a valid Ohio State ID. I think that'll be great, in terms of trying to get as many people as possible to go see it.

What kinds of items are being borrowed from the archives for the exhibits?
They plan to borrow some football programs; they're going to borrow Jesse Owens' gold medals, two of them that we have. They're going to borrow a student scrapbook from the 1940s, and potentially also one from 1913-16 . We have a few Farm Week posters from the '30s that they're interested in borrowing, to sort of to tie into the university's background as an agricultural school. They're going to borrow a football uniform from 1938. It's a pretty wide variety of things.

Are they still picking things out, or have they finalized their selection?
I think they're still working a few things out, because the exhibition is from so many different collections on campus. It'll be hard for them to know for sure, until they get things into the museum. The last time they were here last week, they looked at some of the dishware that we have: dinner plates and glasses and some other fun collector-type items. They're not sure if they're going to use them, but they're thinking they might be good for space fillers or something like that. So I think it's somewhat still a work in progress.

Describe a typical day at the archives.
I don't know that there's a specifically typical day. We always check our online reference. This morning, I had somebody who wanted to know if we had an obituary on a former faculty member. I had a researcher who was coming in at 11 o'clock, so I had to get material ready for him. He's an alum, a member of Phi Kappa Phi, and they're working on putting their house on the National Register of Historic Places, so we are trying to pull as much as we can from their collection as possible. When he got here, I set him up in our reference room and got him going and looking at all the different things being put together.

Then, I've been working on finishing up the 12 boxes that came from the College of the Arts, getting those ready to go back in our stacks so that they're ready for researchers. The other thing I've been working on today is, we have some people from West Virginia University coming to talk to us about how we keep our records and how we decide when things are destroyed or kept.

So it's a combination of a lot of different things. We have four undergraduate students who work for us, so sometimes they'll have questions about the projects they are working on. Or somebody might call from a different department on campus and need something that they've transferred over here.

Can you decide what to keep and what to turn down, or do you have to take everything the university sends you?
There's a policy at the university called the records retention schedule, and that determines what should come to archives and what should be discarded after a certain number of years. To give you an example, financial records legally only need to be kept between four and six years, depending on the type of document. After that amount of time, the department or the college is free to discard it. We try to follow the schedule as closely as possible; we have a very large storage space, but we don't have unlimited storage, of course.

So you're not running out of room?
We kind of are right now. Rare Books and Manuscripts is also in our building, due to the renovation of the Main Library. Once they return to the Main Library a year from now, we will have some more space.

How do you preserve the photos you have?
Our photos are in a special room that is kept at 60 degrees and very low humidity. And they're all in acid-free folders and special archive sleeves and that kind of thing. We make sure that they're in good condition as much as possible.

How did you end up working at the archives?
I went to graduate school at the University of Maryland and got my master's in library science, concentrating in archives. I basically applied anywhere that had a job opening, to be completely honest. I applied here at Ohio State and went through the interview process and everything, and got the job. I've been here ever since, since 1998. I was thrilled because it was a permanent position. Most first archives positions are two-year grant-funded positions that you do for a little bit and then you go find something else. But this was a regular staff position, so I didn't have to look for something else after two years.

How did you get interested in this field?
I was a history major as an undergraduate. I did some research in an archives, and I always thought that might be something to do with a history degree. Of course, my parents were saying, "What are you going to do with a history degree?" I knew I didn't want to become a full-scale, traditional faculty member, since I wanted something more hands-on. Then in graduate school I worked in the university archives, and I thought, if I could choose, I would love to work in a university setting. So that's why it was so exciting to get this job.

Considering the size of Ohio State, it must keep you busy.
Oh, yeah. And we're lucky because we have three staff members besides myself who work specifically in University Archives. At a lot of small colleges, there's maybe only one staff member who does everything. I think we are especially busy because of the size and the popularity of the university. People from everywhere are asking questions.

You've mentioned several kinds of people who use the archives. Are there any others, like authors?
We do get some people who are writing books.

You wrote your own book, too.
Yes, Rai Goerler and I wrote The Ohio State University Trivia Book.

We have the Jesse Owens collection, and that's certainly been used quite a bit by people writing children's books, or people writing a full biography on him. We recently had a newspaper reporter who's looking at doing a book on Woody Hayes. Football is always a popular topic.

We also have people who are writing dissertations. There was somebody who was interested in the African-American experience on campus. I think they're in Virginia, so they must be contacting a couple different universities throughout the country. They asked what kind of material we have, and that kind of thing.

We get students, for sure, writing a paper. I think there's a history of art class where they have to write something about artwork on campus. And so they'll come in and see what we've got.

Like I said, genealogy is huge. Those people don't have to be connected to Ohio State at all; the people that they're looking for attended or taught here, or they think they did.

We also work with the media. If somebody dies, or they're doing a story on something, they'll come and look for information or photos.

We also work with commercial publishers. The writer might be doing a chemistry textbook, and an Ohio State professor years ago came up with a formula or something like that. They'll want a picture for the textbook. They used to take pictures of all the faculty members, so we have a lot of those.

We also get people who are Buckeye fans and want pictures of certain players or games to hang up in their rec rooms or in their offices.

Do you sell those or give them away?
We do charge basically what it costs us to produce them. So we don't make a boatload of money on them, but we recover our costs. If you've been to a lot of the restaurants around campus and seen older pictures of the stadium or something like that, they probably got them from us. Or if there's a retirement party, especially for an Ohio State person who's retiring after a long time, people will come and try to find pictures of them from the time when they first started [at Ohio State]. Or they want Father's Day presents or Christmas presents. Some people are looking for a photo to go with their diploma. So it's a wide variety of people.

Could you comment on the importance of archives and their use?
I think that archives are the official memory-in our case, the memory of Ohio State. The national archives are the official memory of the national government. And archives do a lot of things; they preserve that memory, but they also hold us accountable for what has happened. You can't make it up, because archives will show you what happened. Certainly, state archives or national archives preserve your place as a citizen, because they have birth records and land records and that kind of thing. And they're also just a place to have a lot of fun.

We believe our role is to preserve the history of a university. That includes a lot of different things, from the oldest papers we have, from 1870, to brand-new digital photographs that we're trying to preserve. We're trying to keep them all, as much as we can, so that a hundred years from now when Ohio State celebrates another big anniversary, we can show where we've been and how we got to where we are.

Interview by ANDREW SHARP.