Honors Link

With majors in forest engineering and civil engineering, Honors College student Anna Stewart doesn’t exactly fit the stereotype of an archival researcher. But as a participant in an internship program co-sponsored by the HC and the OSU Special Collections & Archives Research Center (SCARC), she’s hoping her example can take that stereotype out of circulation.

SCARC, housed on the fifth floor of the Valley Library, is the home of OSU’s unique collections of historical manuscripts, photographs, and books and includes sections on the history of OSU, the history of science, natural resources, multiculturalism in Oregon, and collections of rare books. The center supports research and learning opportunities for faculty members, visiting scholars, undergraduates, and the public.

“We process the collections and make them available for scholarly research,” says Chris Petersen, senior faculty research assistant at SCARC and a former Honors College student. “We also do a lot of work with the web by creating digital collections and contextualizing them for presentation. We want to teach students how to use primary sources to conduct research in the archives.”

Anna’s student archivist position was created to both expose students to the resources available in the archives and support SCARC’s outreach programs to the general population.

“While I am a student archivist processing different materials, I also give workshop presentations to undergraduates in the Honors College so they have a way to gain some exposure to what the archives are and how they could potentially use them for their theses,” Anna says. “The Honors College position has let me work in both worlds.”

Anna is the first student to hold this position, and she has been given leeway to tailor her presentations to highlight the resources that she thinks students will find most valuable. She has spoken to UHC students in classes designed to help them begin their thesis process.

“The student archivist position was meant to formalize the long and successful relationship between our department and the Honors College,” Chris says. “It also provides that instructional piece that Anna has really pioneered. She gives the broader perspective for students who wouldn’t necessarily think of the archives as a place to conduct research for their thesis.”

Before becoming the student archivist, Anna previously worked as a student assistant with SCARC, spending the better part of a year sorting through unlabeled map collections, describing, cataloging, and creating digital versions of the materials. In the course of the project, she found 5,000 hand-colored velum forest timber tax maps, the painstaking, initial versions of the digital GIS maps that are used in her major field today.

“It was a piece of art to see all of the colors and details of the interacting layers,” Anna says. “It’s mind-blowing, because now engineering students can recognize the work that those surveyors went through to capture what we now can in such a short time.”

Two new students have already been hired for the position for the 2015-2016 academic year.

“It’s been a nice addition to the relationship between the Honors College and SCARC, and it’s an opportunity for donors to give in the future,” Chris says. “There is ambition to expand the position, and I think it will continue to grow.”

For her part, Anna says, “I hope students learn that the archives aren’t just a bunch of dusty books in cabinets and that there are actually a lot of interesting resources. I get to expose people to what’s here; I’ve certainly had my eyes opened.”