On the fifth floor of Alden Library, the Mahn Center is home to part of Ohio University’s vast archival collection. Split among categories such as University Archives, rare books, documentary photography and manuscripts, the archives contain millions of pieces.
Upon walking into the center, a display case sits to the left, full of various items from the collections. It currently features bricks from old dorms and dance cards used in the 50s, among other items. A computer sits in the middle of the room for filling out a material request form; this form can also be found online.
Greta Suiter, manuscripts archivist, said ideally, people will look at the descriptions of materials online before filling out a request form to help narrow down the location of the material.
The more specific the request is, the more time it saves everyone involved, according to Bill Kimok, the university archivist and records manager. It allows staff to pull the materials quickly as opposed to searching through large amounts of pieces.
Some materials can be accessed online, completely bypassing the need to be pulled from the shelves. However, Suiter said only about 1% of the physical collection has been digitized.
Erin Wilson, the digital imaging specialist and lab manager, said she spends her days working on digitizing collection materials. The most obvious aspect of digitization is scanning. However, Wilson said she spends much more time working with metadata, or descriptions, than on the actual image capturing.
“We want to describe the things that we digitize so that people can easily find them,” Wilson said.
These descriptions play a valuable role in combination with the image capturing.
Wilson said it’s important to make these materials widely available since most are only available to see on site.
There are also some materials which simply cannot be viewed without digitization or some transformations, such as film negatives, which need to be enlarged and their tones and colors inverted.
Wilson and others in the department capture images on the same equipment used by many top institutions, including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. There are various setups needed for different items; they use a cradle to capture book pages and a lightbox to view film negatives.
Kimok said students often feel intimidated using the archives that are not yet digitized.
“We don't want students to feel that way about (the archives),” Kimok said. “We invite them in where they can handle the materials that we have.”
One such artifact is a 13th-century Bible, handwritten in Latin.
“Try to touch something like this in a museum,” Kimok said.
In the reading room, a table was covered in various items left from a class visit the previous day, including photographs of past campus flooding and images of student protests against the Vietnam War on College Green.
There were several copies of the past student publication, Green Goat, which Kimock describes as an “interesting humor magazine.” A felt banner with embroidered names of men from OU who lost their lives during World War II lay on the table next to the baseball score book from 1970, the year Ohio went to the college world series.
“The baseball players love it,” Kimok said.
Sophia McCauley, a senior studying English literature, culture and writing, and a student intern in the archives, is sorting through a collection herself, getting hands-on experience with the materials.
“(It’s important because) the more you know about the past, the more you can write the future,” McCauley said.
Arden Wells, a sophomore studying classics, is one of McCauley’s fellow interns.
“Knowing the past, especially the past in an area that you're living in and interacting with, is so important,” Wells said. “It completely dictates the present and the future.”
The Mahn Center is open Monday through Friday, 9am to 12pm and 1pm to 4pm. The reading room is available for use during those hours by appointment.
“We really like to get stuff out and, as I say, give it some air,” Kimok said.
