This past weekend, the University of Illinois Archives’ Student Life and Culture Archival Program hosted the third National Archives Conference for Fraternities and Sororities. The conference is designed to provide archival training and support to headquarters staff and volunteers who oversee their organization’s archives.
Meg Miner, university archivist and special collections librarian at Illinois Wesleyan University, spoke about “Preserving Digital Objects with Restricted Resources.” The Indiana State Museum’s head conservator Gaby Kienitz talked to us about artifact storage preservation and led us in two hands-on activities making museum mounts for important artifacts. In our case the important artifacts were a ring with googly eyes and a Hello Kitty pinback button. Angela Waarala, digital collections project manager at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, gave advice and lessons learned about digitizing fraternity and sorority magazines. Noraleen Young, Kappa Alpha Theta archivist and archival consultant for Past to Present, led the archives basics and collections management sessions. Christa Deacy-Quinn, collection manager at U of I’s Spurlock Museum, provided us with expert instructions on packing exhibits, a task we usually do when we take items to convention for a display. Several of the attendees also took part in panel discussions about projects we have done in the recent past. Retired University of Illinois associate dean of students Willard Broom and Ashley Dye, director of fraternity and sorority affairs, spoke at the Saturday night dinner. As an aside, Ashley, a Pi Beta Phi, serves on her fraternity’s National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) delegation.
One of the best parts of the conference, aside from all the valuable information, is the chance to meet so many kindred spirits. The attendees were a mix of staff members and volunteers. The majority work for their own organizations. Noraleen Young was hired as a consulting archivist for Kappa Alpha Theta. She was later invited to become an alumna initiate and now she proudly wears her Theta badge. Nanci Gasiel, a Sigma Kappa, has the distinction of working for a men’s fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon.
It was fun learning that Phi Kappa Psi’s Archivist Timothy Tangen was bitten by the fraternity history bug as a newly initiated member. He and his mentor, Phi Psi Historian (and master tweeter) Mike McCoy, who spoke at Timothy’s initiation banquet, have attended all three conferences. I found another Syracuse alumna, Kristen Putch, Phi Sigma Sigma, among the attendees. We were seated together at dinner and we talked about our love for the history of Syracuse University. The attendees exchanged stories, ideas, historical tidbits about our own organization’s history. Phi Gamma Delta’s award winning, all volunteers paying their own way and lodging, Archives Weekend is likely to be copied by a good many other groups.
There were also representatives of some relatively young fraternity groups. They are lucky in so many ways; they can document the organization’s history so much better because most founders are still living and technology allows for so many different ways of preserving those stories.
The conference takes place every two years and I encourage any fraternity and sorority groups who haven’t attended to send an e-mail to contact Ellen Swain, archivist for Student Life and Culture, at eswain@illinois.edu, to be put on the mailing list for the next conference.
© Fran Becque, www.fraternityhistory.com, 2014. All rights reserved. If you enjoyed this post, please sign up for updates. Also follow me on twitter @GLOHistory and Pinterest www.pinterest.com/glohistory/
Great article. Thanks!