Story of the NMC Archives, 1995-2001

In 1995, Ruth Ragué joined the library staff. Bringing order to the archives was a small part of her job description. Back then, the room was, in effect, an institutional attic -- crammed until there was hardly room to make one's way around amongst the minimally organized materials: file cabinets, fat binders, obsolete equipment, the odd piece of furniture, miscellaneous memorabilia that no one at the college could afford to refuse-plus the stacks and stacks of newspapers already yellowing and generating dust.

Ruth, with the help of volunteer retirees (Carole Marlatt, Harry Oliver, and Al Shumsky), set about cleaning up the mess. First was to find a home for the newspapers, which she did: with the Michigan Newspaper Project. All it took was innumerable phone calls and a trip with a loaded van to Lansing. With those out of the way, there was room to start organizing the still considerable amount of material that was left. First was some prioritizing. It was decided that since this was the NMC archive, first priority would be for college-related material. Since the library also saw as one of its functions a Michigan collection, regional historical material for which a more appropriate venue could not be found would be kept at least for the time being. Other material would be disposed of however possible (though getting rid of things like old 78 rpm recordings of opera arias is mighty difficult short of simply junking them, which some stuff discreetly was.)

One of the first projects was rescuing the oldest scrapbooks, which were deteriorating badly. The first decade's worth were photocopied on archival paper and mounted in archival scrapbooks. Another early task was sorting and roughly classifying the photographs and slides that had been stored there, identifying people and sites where possible-which it often wasn't. (If people would date the papers they generate and identify the subjects they photograph, life would be much easier for archivists.)

Concurrently the files were tackled. First were those that constituted what was termed "Internal Governance": from the earliest general faculty meetings through the various advisory and decision-making bodies up to 1990. Next came the Curriculum Committee files, of which very little had been preserved up to the1980's. Also organized were the various NCA self-studies and the preparatory material involved in them. A quickly established policy in dealing with files such as these was to purge them of duplicates, arrange them chronologically, and discard any supporting materials that were appended from sources outside the college. Up to now, no attempt has been made to weed out inconsequential material from such files. There is surely a lot, but-as long as space is available-those decisions can be left to some future archivist who will have a better perspective on what may be significant. Recently the task has been undertaken to inventory what is in the archives, get it cataloged, and produce an index map of the entire room for ease of information retrieval.