How does the Archives & Special Collection, a vast collection of materials that could span 300 volleyball courts, continue to meet the demands of researchers and campus partners during the pandemic?
According to University Archivist Mary Ellen Ducey, the Archives staff handle reference interactions and research questions in novel ways. Since March 2020, when the Archives & Special Collections reading room switched to “By Appointment” only, Archives put into place a robust plan to mitigate in-person visits, while providing reference/research services to support faculty, staff, students, and the research community.
The Archives have pivoted to an asynchronous reference service, following up email requests with Zoom interviews to get more detailed information from the researcher. The staff do the legwork of searching diverse collections of correspondence and papers, which they use to make reproductions, sometimes taking pictures and making digital copies.
The number of requests for materials to assist researchers have remained at the same pace they were before the pandemic began. In January 2020, Archives staff were reaching 167 transactions in a 30-day period. In October of 2020, they had 158 research queries.
According to Ducey, the variety and complexity of research requests have not changed either. The Archives staff use diverse collections, located in Love Library and the Libraries Depository Retrieval Facility on East Campus, of correspondence, exhibit catalogs, university records and more to provide researchers what they request. A recent question related to the Rainbow Division’s liberation of a concentration camp had Ducey searching boxes and files, creating digital facsimiles and sharing them electronically.
In the past Archives staff provided one hour of reference to gather materials together before the researcher arrived at the Reading Room in Love Library and spent an average of three hours looking through materials. With the pandemic, that workload has switched onto the Archives staff with the search time in boxes, folders, and files up to three hours on average.
“It is more legwork for us, but we have a combined 60 years of experience and knowledge of the collection,” explained Josh Caster, archives manager, “which helps us find things more quickly.”
Caster also points to the ready reference resources already online that has helped them quickly answer questions and provide research including the Daily Nebraskan and other Nebraska newspapers, University Yearbooks, and the Nebraska U website.
“The more we add to the ready resources and bolster them for Nebraska faculty and students to use, the more time that gives the Archives to create new resources of esoteric materials,” said Caster.
The Archives continues to work on internal requests from University Communications, Alumni Association and other campus partners as well. The Archives can be contacted by phone at 402-472-2531 and email at archives@unl.edu. The reading rooms at Love Library and the LDRF are open by appointment only on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Visit their website for more details.