Case Statement: Christina Bleyer, PhD, Director of Special Collections and Archives, Watkinson Library, Trinity College, Hartford, CT
I currently serve as the Director of Special Collections and Archives at Trinity College. Our collection is unique because it is a combination of The Watkinson Library that was given to Trinity in 1949. The Watkinson was David Watkinson’s Library and contains rare books, manuscripts and archival collections that have always been open for public research. David Watkinson established this library so that everyone in Hartford could have access to these special collections. Though housed at Trinity now, The Watkinson continues to be a public serving library and archives. Trinity also had its own collection of rare books before the Watkinson came to Trinity. In addition, the college archives is a part of this collection. The entire collection, Watkinson Library, Trinity rare books and college archives is colloquially referred to as “The Watkinson.”
Prior to being the Director of The Watkinson, I served as the head of special collections and archives at The Benson Latin American Collection. This collection was an excellent mix of rare books, manuscripts, oral histories, art, textiles etc. We collected human rights documentation post-custodially so as not to take materials from where they are created and used by communities while still ensuring they are accessible to the public. The Benson has a very diverse collection both in terms of the communities whose history it preserves as well as the types of materials it collects to tell these stories and the ways that it goes about collecting. I am not sure that I will ever forget when a Latino student in a class I was teaching at the Benson was looking through the Gloria Anzaldua Papers and saw that she went to the same high school as his mother. Seeing his family and his history reflected back to him in and through that collection was a powerful experience and made him feel like he matters and his experiences matter. It seems to me that public history organizations benefit by improving representation within collections because it makes these collections relevant and more accessible to a diverse group of people. When more people are touched by history and see themselves represented by these collections, the depth and breadth of scholarship increases and we all benefit from learning more about others.
My goal is to devise a strategy for diversifying the Watkinson both in terms of the people it represents in its collections as well as the types of materials we collect. Traditionally, The Watkinson collects mostly rare books and most of the people represented in the archives are wealthy white men. So far I have been successful in setting up an oral history portal for women in the first coed class to tell their stories. I have also set up an oral history project to collect stories from Latinx community members in Hartford. Trinity did not have online finding aids or any kind of long term digital preservation system in place and I have also implemented this. However, all of this is proving a bit difficult to accomplish and sustain when I also inherited a college archives that is not processed, a very small staff and board members who think we need to shun anything digital that is not a rare book. So, I am looking for ways and suggestions to communicate the need for these changes to our stakeholders so that I can hopefully continue to diversity this collection with more staff and more support from the community.