Wondering what an archivist does? In this post, Pamela Padilla, the library’s Shirley Klein Rare Book and Manuscripts Graduate Fellow, provides a sneak peek of her work processing the Alexander Kouguell Papers. Kouguell, a world-class cellist, taught at Queens College for over 68 years and sadly passed away on October 2, 2022. He donated his papers to the Queens College Library just a couple of months ago, in August 2022.
Most librarians will agree that archival science is an important branch of library work, but despite the deference there is often the question of what exactly an archivist does. There are many aspects to an archivists’ profession such as reference work, collections care, and management of new/existing material, but today I will be focusing on processing—an invaluable part of collections care.
Photo 1. Kouguell’s Elementary Photo deframing and tools.
This was the case with the Alexander Kouguell collection, which required extensive processing. Not every collection has these processing demands, but the Alexander Kouguell Collection is diverse not only in its content but its mediums. Music manuscripts required rehousing, documents required de-framing, and photographs required sleeving. Several scrapbooks had to be vacuumed to mitigate any risk of mold, and their contents were well worth saving.
Photo 2. Alexander Kouguell, Florence Kouguell, and a man assumed to be Florence’s brother eating ice cream cones in Paris, France.
Dr. Kouguell’s career as a professor at Queens College began in the 1940’s and lasted over 60 years, with an additional 10 as an adjunct lecturer. His collection offers its viewer a snapshot of his life, from his honeymoon photos to his participation in Queens Colleges faculty orchestra throughout his tenure, but his extensive career as a cellist also offers a cultural snapshot of NYC throughout half a century. The preservation of his life and history serve as a reminder of the impact that can be made by a singular person.
It’s usually the case that people unfamiliar with the profession may ask “Why rehouse anything? Aren’t the folders/envelopes/plastic slips that these materials come in enough?” and our answer to that is that they usually aren’t. Photographic negatives, photographs themselves, or oversized papers aren’t typically argued against when discussing rehousing, but even paper requires special care. Paper isn’t what it used to be and hasn’t been since the mid 19th century—its lower quality leads to an inevitable yellowing and breakdown due to acid hydrolysis, or the breaking down of the cellulose that keeps the paper together. This process threatens paper and its contents.
Photo 3. Deframing and picture processing of Alexander Kouguell’s pictures. Photo 4. Pamela Padilla using the Nilfisk® Museum Vacuum Cleaner with HEPA Filter to vacuum any potential mold.
The processing of collection often begins before the first object is rehoused. That is, it begins with the acquisition. An archivist ensures that their institution has an appropriate level of copyright and intellectual control through of a deed of gift. By ensuring the proper acquisition of a collection from a donor through a mutually agreed upon deed of gift (assuming the donor is one outside of the institution), an archivist has begun the processing of this collection.
Photo 5. Head of Special Collections and Archives Annie Tummino with Alexander Kouguell in his studio, summer 2022.
The processing of an archival collection takes time, patience, and (surprisingly enough) a bit of elbow grease. It’s how we rehouse our materials to maximize their longevity and how institutions ensure they have the intellectual control needed to make collections accessible.
Pamela Padilla is a second-year candidate in the Dual Degree program in Library Science and History (MLS/MA), pursuing a Certificate in Archives and Preservation of Cultural Materials. Padilla is one of three graduate students participating in the Archives Fellowship Program at Queens College Library over the 2022-2023 academic year. Fellows carry out real-world projects in Special Collections and Archives, receiving stipends, mentorship, and professional development opportunities.
This past September, the anticipation for the CUNY x Kith collaboration was through the roof.
Kith apparel, a “multifunctional lifestyle brand for men, women, and kids, as well as a progressive retail establishment,” partnered with CUNY to create a range of shirts, hats, jackets, and sweatshirts emblazoned with Queens College and Brooklyn College insignia. Alumnus Jerry Seinfeld even modeled the wares in a high-profile publicity campaign before the drop, garnering attention from all corners of the internet.
The clothing is undoubtedly cool—but look closer! There’s more about Queens College history displayed on these items than first glance would reveal.
Kith & Russell Athletic for CUNY Queens College, Jacket Kith & Russell Athletic for CUNY Queens College, Cardigan
Representatives from Kith visited the Special Collections and Archives at Queens College looking for inspiration for the CUNY line in fall 2021. Archives aren’t only for your research papers (though they are great for that), they can be places of creativity, too.
The Kith collaboration is an excellent example of how expansive archives can be, and how they can serve all kinds of people and needs. The patches on the jacket above were sourced directly from a printed program for a 1952 Varsity Sports dinner honoring the athletes, preserved in the archive’s Student Publications Collection.
The artist of the original drawings, Earl Rubin, crowded the cover with lively illustrations evoking the teams that represented Queens College athletics that year. Inside, each page celebrated a different sport and cohort (the Women’s Basketball team was once…the Hoopsterettes!). Looking to evince a retro vibe for its letterman jacket, Kith used this material to throwback to an authentic mid-century look with a 21st century spin.
Queens Page Knight, Varsity Athletics dinner program
Queens Page Knight, Varsity Athletics table of contentsQueens College Women’s Basketball, Hoopsterettes
The Student Publications Collection is an unbeatable record of student experience on Queens College campus, stretching back to the founding of the college in 1937 through to 2014. In it, you’ll find copies of dozens of student magazines and newspapers, detailing the events, opinions, and interests of Queens College students in their own voices for almost 80 years.
Stop by the archival storage room on the third floor of the library—the jacket, born from the archives, is now part of the Queens College archives and on view!
Think you could use some inspiration? The Student Publications Collection is open for research and browsing; contact the Special Collections and Archives at qc.archives@qc.cuny.edu to make an appointment to view any of the materials.
The exhibit Under Construction: 85 Years of Building Futures at Queens College illustrates the evolution of the college’s buildings, grounds, and leadership from the early days to the present. The exhibition celebrates the college’s history of providing opportunities for so many students over the decades while recognizing that we are continually “under construction” to meet the demands of the future. The exhibit premiers on October 12th in conjunction with the celebration of the 85th anniversary of Queens College.
Model of the Queens College grounds, circa 1937
Highlights of the exhibit include a never-before-displayed 1915 photo album documenting the Parental School (the predecessor institution to Queens College); a refurbished model of the grounds circa 1937; maps, images, and printed ephemera that document the campus and its activities throughout the decades; and even groundbreaking shovels.
The exhibit takes place across three satellite locations and will be on view through the end of the fall 2022 semester.
See the exhibit:
Barham Rotunda at the Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library
Charles Tanenbaum Room 300i
Music Library in the Aaron Copland School of Music building
A collaboration between the Department of Special Collections and Archives and the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies provided students a special opportunity to gain real-world experience in the library’s archives during the summer 2022 term.
Students review materials in the Barbara Rosenthal Collection.
Danica Stompor reviews materials in the “Ephemera” subseries of Rosenthal materials.
In the course, “Library Science 790.3 Advanced Archival Practice,” students developed advanced proficiency in archival appraisal, arrangement, and access through embedded fieldwork. Under the supervision of course instructor Caitlin Colban-Waldron and with the assistance of Head of Special Collections and Archives Annie Tummino, students engaged in a hands-on project from beginning to completion, processing portions of the archival collection of artist Barbara Rosenthal. The class was held in the Charles J. Tanenbaum Room, funded by the Pine Tree Foundation of New York for use as a special collections classroom.
Barbara Rosenthal Photo by Rhys Votano
Barbara Rosenthal, a QC alumnus and multi-media artist, whose donated work and materials served as the basis for all practical coursework, was an invaluable resource to the students as both a unique and compelling subject and as a rich source of information and context for the materials themselves. By the end of the term, students completed processing work on specific sections of the larger collection and will be able to translate coursework into tangible skills and outcomes for inclusion in their professional résumés.
The course is one of several initiatives developed by the Department of Special Collections and Archives to fulfill its strategic mission of “training the next generation of archivists.” Barbara Rosenthal’s collection is an exciting new addition to the archives, encompassing a lifetime of record-keeping, notes, drafts, versions, and materials for every project in many media, plus household, family, and moment-to-moment life-recording and professional correspondences.
By Lori Wallach, Adjunct Archivist and Queens Memory Outreach Coordinator
One of the primary functions of a college archive is to preserve and make accessible a record of the school’s past – its institutional history. At Special Collections and Archives (SCA), we do this through a variety of collections, such as those containing yearbooks; student publications; administrative records of numerous departments, schools, and programs; and items donated by individual faculty members and alumni. Of course, our Photograph Collection, which we are in the process of digitizing, provides an especially rich documentation of the college from its very earliest days.
Over the past several years, we’ve made a concerted effort to expand another type of institutional history – our oral history collection. Through our ongoing Queens Memory partnership with the Queens Public Library, we’re able to preserve both audio and video recordings and make them easily accessible to the public. These oral history interviews provide a fascinating firsthand look into the college’s history in the words and voices of those who lived and shaped it.
In 2019, we embarked on the Retired Faculty & Staff Oral History Project, an ambitious plan with two goals: 1) to actively pursue interviews with retired QC faculty, staff and administrators, and 2) to comb through our collections and solicit donations of earlier interviews that can be formatted for online access. Dr. Dean Savage, retired professor of sociology, has been instrumental in helping us locate many of his fellow QC retirees.
An important addition to our oral history collection is a set of interviews conducted in one of Dr. Bobby Wintermute’s history classes in 2013, to commemorate Queens College’s 75th anniversary. Dr. Wintermute donated the recordings and supporting documentation to SCA, and to date, we’ve processed and made accessible nine interviews, with several more to go. We were particularly delighted to find recordings with former QC President Saul Cohen and longtime history professor Dr. Martin Pine, both of whom have since passed on.
In this clip, former QC President Saul Cohen explains how he appealed directly to then-Governor Mario Cuomo for funding to construct a new building for the Aaron Copland School of Music.
Another component of our oral history collection comes from SCA’s larger SEEK History Project, which documents the history of QC’s Percy Ellis Sutton SEEK Program from its inception in 1966. Over 15 interviews associated with the SEEK program have been conducted, and eight are fully processed, including those of former director Dr. Bill Sales, counselors Alan Townsend and Waldo Jeff, and faculty member Dr. Jessica Harris, all of whom were with the program in its earliest years. SCA recently selected two QC grad students to process additional SEEK interviews this summer. The students will be paid stipends from the department’s foundation funds.
Please do explore our full oral history collection! Catalog records for each interview, with links to the audio/video and transcripts, are located in our online archives database. If you are interested in volunteering to conduct an interview, would like to nominate someone to be interviewed, or have a previously recorded oral history to donate, please email us at qc.archives@qc.cuny.edu.
On April 12, the Queens College Libraries hosted Dr. Peter Archer for an on-campus visit. We are happy to announce that Dr. Archer is organizing his personal papers for donation to the archives, including research documents, photographs, and mementos from his lengthy career as a musician, educator, and academic.
Peter Archer, a band teacher for more than 30 years at Middle School 74 in Bayside, Queens, served as a consultant on the movie, which has Jamie Foxx voicing Joe Gardner, a middle-aged teacher and musician. Archer, 58, helped pinpoint everything from the aesthetic of a middle school band classroom to the emotional tug of balancing a passion for music and a love of teaching.
Here at Queens College, Dr. Archer is known as an alum with a Bachelor of Music degree in Music Performance and a Master of Science degree in Music Education. While working on his doctorate for Boston University, Archer also spent many long days at the Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library archives conducting research for his dissertation, The History of The Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College: 1938-2010, which is available in the Music Library’s reference collection.
Dr. Archer’s papers will join the collections of other prestigious ACSM faculty and alumni, including K. Robert Schwarz, Karol Rathaus, and Leo Kraft. We are thrilled that Dr. Archer is willing to add his own papers to our growing repository of valuable research materials!
In September 2020, the Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library’s Department of Special Collections and Archives launched a partnership with JSTOR to share digitized primary sources on their Open Community Collections platform (more on the launch). Since the launch, the Queens College collection has grown from 700 accessible items to nearly 3,000.
In this video, Annie Tummino, Head of Special Collections and Archives, discusses collections featured on JSTOR, and how they are used by researchers, students, faculty, and the Queens College community.
Head of Special Collections and Archives Annie Tummino discusses sharing digitized materials on JSTOR Open Community Collections.
In celebration of Women’s History Month, we share one of the most-requested items from QC’s Special Collections and Archives department: the 1942 yearbook photo of graduating senior Marie Daly. In the photo, her hair is set carefully and a string of pearls rests around her neck. She looks determined, gazing out of the frame. Around her on the page are a sea of white faces; at the time, few Black students were enrolled at the college.
Marie Maynard Daly Yearbook
In 1942’s yearbook (only the second ever graduating class at QC!), each senior portrait included an accompanying paragraph describing every student. Some were cheeky, some were resolute, some were optimistic. Marie Daly’s paragraph, though, was certain:
“A Queens College Scholar and one of those elite persons on the Dean’s list, MARIE DALY has an enviable record. She is a Chemistry major and a member of the Chemical Society. In her chosen career as a laboratory technician, she bears the mark of one likely to succeed.”
Marie Maynard Daly was a biochemist and the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate in chemistry in the United States. One of three children, she was born in Queens on April 6, 1921. She started her groundbreaking educational career at Queens College as an undergraduate from 1938-1942, then earned a graduate degree in chemistry from New York University in 1944, and, finally, completed her PhD in chemistry in 1947 at Columbia University.
Daly’s professional life took her to many places: she was an instructor at Howard University, an American Cancer Society fellow at the Rockefeller Institute, a researcher and professor at Columbia and then Yeshiva University (where she retired from in 1986), and served at places like the American Heart Association and Health Research Council of New York. Her work primarily focused on the chemistry of a cell’s nucleus and how our health can be impacted at that tiny, cellular level. She did important research on the effects of cigarette smoke on the workings of lungs, sugar on the health of arteries, and discovered how cholesterol contributes to heart attacks and oxygen blockages in the circulatory system.
In 1988, she started a scholarship for minority students at Queens College who want to study science at Queens College and named it after her parents, Ivan and Helen, who instilled a love of learning in her from a young age–her father had once taken chemistry courses at Cornell University and her mother was a passionate reader. You can still apply for that scholarship today!
Marie Maynard Daly Portrait
Marie Maynard Daly’s story continues to inspire researchers, students, and science lovers. SCA has received requests for more information about her from everyone from high school students to the American Chemical Society to both highlight her contributions to biochemistry and celebrates her status as a trailblazer for women and people of color alike. This senior portrait, taken at the very beginning of her exceptional career, speaks to the women who may be finding their way in the science field at Queens College even now. We’re proud to have her as an alumnus.
In celebration of Black History Month, this month we share an item from our digital shelves: an oral history with Soribel Genao.
Soribel Genao is Associate Professor of Educational Leadership in the Department of Educational and Community Programs at Queens College. The interview was conducted by Obden Mondésir on September 15, 2020. It touches on many subjects, including Genao’s upbringing in Manhattan and Brooklyn, her career at Queens College, and the COVID-19 pandemic. In this featured clip, she discusses the development of the Black and Latinx Faculty/Staff Association (BLFSA) at Queens College.
And we were on a Zoom call for two hours, just dissecting and understanding who we were, but the most beautiful part was, here we are on Zoom having the Black and brown faces of Queens College connect for the very first time in a very formal way.
Considered “the founder of modern philosophy,” René Descartes is famous for the declaration, “I think, therefore I am.” (While this formulation is famous in Latin as “Cogito, ergo sum,” it was originally written in French as “Je pense, donc je suis.”)
The SCA has Descartes’s Meditationes de Prima Philosophia. This book, as the title indicates, was first published in Latin in Paris in 1641, then updated and published again in Amsterdam in 1642. The item that the SCA has, also in Latin, was published in Amsterdam in 1685.
Descartes made his famous argument in his first book, Discours de la Methode, which he published in 1637 and he reiterated and expounded on it in his Meditationes, his most popular book today, according to Descartes scholar Kurt Smith.
Descartes died of a respiratory infection in 1650. His books were banned by the church in 1663. The item at the SCA was published in 1685 and, despite his early death, despite the banning, he continues to be read and discussed. Contemporary interpretations of his philosophy continue to be published in various academic journals and The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism, a collection of fifty essays from “an international group of leading scholars of early modern philosophy,” was published in 2019.
The SCA copy is part of the collection that came from the old Klapper Library. It does not have the original binding but the textblock is in good condition.
