Now that the semester is winding down, take some time to check out the newest online exhibition from the University Archives – Greek Life at Western New England University!

We hope you enjoy learning about this aspect of the University’s history. And if you’d like to learn more, check out previous exhibitions from the Archives on our website!

Have you ever found yourself on the third floor of D’Amour Library and seen this sign next to an otherwise unmarked door?

Behind this locked door is the climate controlled storage space that houses the University Archives. A locked door can be intimidated, or even enticing, but rest assured it is only locked because the material within is one of a kind – you won’t find a million dollar item locked away in the storage room. But that’s not the say there isn’t valuable material to be found! The material in the Archives is valuable not because of its monetary value, but because it speaks to the University’s history, and can’t be found anywhere else.

Today, we’re going to give you a glimpse behind this locked door. You’ve all seen pieces of the collection on this blog (photographs, yearbooks, newspaper articles, etc.) but now you can see what their permanent home looks like!

The vast majority of the collection is safely organized in boxes or lined up neatly on the shelves. It’s an archivist’s dream to have an entire storage area look like the pictures below.

But archival collections are constantly growing and evolving. What once was organized and accessible can quickly become disorganized and inaccessible. One of the most concerning problems for archival collections are obsolete media formats (reel to reel film, beta max tapes, VHS, cassettes tapes, etc.) These materials sit on our shelves, and while they may look organized and ready to go, they’re really just sitting there until we can figure out what to do with them (converting to a digital format is ideal, but also expensive!)

Reel to reel film rolls, while they won’t last indefinitely, are stable enough and stored properly to await digitization. The University Archives has many reel to reel tapes of early football games.

Finally, as mentioned above, the vast majority of material is neatly organized into boxes. What about the rest? Some material is newly arrived, some is still awaiting processing, and some requires a little bit more (the dreaded unidentified box pictured below!)

We hope you enjoyed your peek inside Room 308!