Into the Stacks We Go

Same, Belle, same. Source: Caffeine and Cabernet

Okay, so, going into the last quarter of the school year, we (as in a class of college students) are off to the Archives of our university in an attempt to find something that can catch our interest for our latest writing assignment. We were also asked to brainstorm some potential research questions to try and help out our search. Honestly speaking though , I’m not excited nor am I really interested right off the bat. But, for the sake of trying to make this experience as painless as possible, I suppose that it would be interesting to know: how has/does my university express its views on environmental conservatism through changes to infrastructure?

Things like that, I guess, could be interesting, maybe not, cure-to-cancer interesting or Wes-Anderson’s-next-film-interesting (the Moonrise Kingdom guy), but interesting enough. But, if I can find some documents, then I’d hope to find out how the school has changed in its attitudes (promoting recycling, etc) and architecture (implementing things like solar panels).

Actually me during finals review. Source: Giphy

Having said that, as prep for our journey into the stacks, as a class we recently read Katherine E. Tirabassi’s “Journeying Into the Archives” and Lynée Lewis Gaillet’s “Archival Survival”, both excerpts exploring how one goes about nosing around an archive. However, where Tirabassi focuses on the nitty-gritty stuff, partially assuming that you are already the overwhelmed guy shown in the gif above, Gaillet talks more about your ‘Ten-Step-Pre-First-Step-Into-The-Archive Plan’.

And, because I’m the kind of person who wanders around campus a week before classes start to find my classrooms, I’m more inclined to stick to the latter’s advice though, because I’d rather have a plan going into a situation than trying to ‘wing it’ once I’m there. So, while I can’t dedicate hours to researching our uni’s archives, hopefully having several research questions that I can use to guide my search will help me out with my ‘pre-archive-prep plan’.