As I walked up the stairs to the third floor of the library, I had no idea what I was I getting myself into. I knew our CTW class was meeting in the back corner of the library, in some room called  “the archives”.  An archive is a “a collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of people”. We had learned about archival research and all the amazing artifacts we might be able to find in the archives in the weeks leading up to our journey into the unknown . As I rounded the last flight of stairs to the third floor, I was full of anticipation. I could not wait to see what an actual archive was like.

As I entered the archive, I instantly noticed the large amount of books and magazines and objects scattered about the room. There seemed to be an abundance of resources filling the entire room. There were books shelves covering every wall filled with books of all ages.  The archive was truly unlike anywhere else I had ever been.

Not only was the archive filled with artifacts, but the artifacts it contained were extremely interesting. The archive curator laid out all sorts of artifacts pertaining to Santa Clara University and its interesting history. For example, I found this great article about the addition of female students to the university:

This artifact, an article from The Santa Clara dating back to the 1960’s, was extremely interesting to me and became the main focus of my archival research paper. I found the old student newspaper articles to be fascinating because they were first hand accounts of campus life from this time period. No other source could truly captivate the feeling and atmosphere of the campus the same way a student written piece from the time period could. The archive was an interesting and engaging way to do research that ended up yielding some intriguing and significant sources.