In Process is a blog series that highlights the activities and experiences of current archival studies students in the Los Angeles area. Check in every two weeks, for grad students’ insights and fresh perspectives on new and emerging trends, issues, and events in the field.

By Noah Geraci

University Ave., 2006. Photo by Peyri Herrera, licensed under Creative Commons BY-ND 2.0.

I care about places and their histories more than I care about many things. If we are close friends, I’ll want to walk with you in the neighborhood where I grew up and narrate the changes I have witnessed in my lifetime: the condo complex that sits where the bowling alley used to be, the loud, sprawling patio of the sports bar that used to be a windowless gay bar, marked on the exterior only by a painting of a wolf, the fancy restaurant with condos on top that used to be the weirdest, best junk store. I’ll hope that you’ll want to do the same, to show me where you are from. This is partly how I came to archives: wanting to learn the secrets of places.

One of the first places I started looking for these kinds of secrets, as a teenager, was in the local history room of the San Diego Public Library. By looking through the historic newspaper collections, I was able to get a better grasp on the tensions surrounding race, sexuality and class that had shaped North Park, where I’m from. So when I began to consider MLIS programs years later, one of my first daydreams was of working as a local history librarian in a public library. Read more

In Process is a blog series that highlights the activities and experiences of current archival studies students in the Los Angeles area. Check in every two weeks, for grad students’ insights and fresh perspectives on new and emerging trends, issues, and events in the field. This week, we are featuring a post by a new professional, Lisa Bechtold. 

By Lisa Bechtold Since graduating two years ago, I have spent much of my time thinking about the challenges of archival practice and looking for more effective ways to access primary materials. Digital Libraries offer greater access than ever before by connecting us to resources all around the world. With this advantage, comes a new set of challenges. How can we engage with this myriad of information in order to meaningfully analyze and comprehend it for historical research?

Finding Aids and Digital Libraries are traditionally based in textual content and rely on the keyword search as a point of access- a method that will most certainly continue to be a cornerstone of archival research. Yet, we should recognize its limitations in order to more thoroughly exploit our material history.

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In Process is a blog series that highlights the activities and experiences of current archival studies students in the Los Angeles area. Check in every two weeks, for grad students’ insights and fresh perspectives on new and emerging trends, issues, and events in the field.

By Noah Geraci

If we broaden our conception of a "mental health record," it can include traces like this graffiti on a former Camarillo State Hospital window.

Before returning to school, I spent several years working in disability and mental health services– my last job before starting my MLIS program was as a counselor for a community mental health agency in San Francisco. Combined with a personal interest in mental illness and disability rights, as well as academic interests in trauma, memory and marginalized histories, these experiences have led me to researching and writing about records of mental illness and mental healthcare in archives. How do we think about them? How are they currently arranged and described and accessed (or not accessed)? How might we do those things differently if we prioritized the autonomy and dignity of the people represented by them? For those who have passed, how might we, to borrow a phrase from Verne Harris, begin to take responsibility before their ghosts? What might we learn from community archives, human rights archives, and trauma and affect theory?

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