NIU Archiving Its Darkest Hour-- Part 2

Continuing with the story.

It seems sad that this would be necessary at college campuses. However, I remember being at Northern my freshman year back in 1970 and going through the Kent State Riots. No students were killed, but quite a few injured and arrested. That was also a frightening time and I remember thinking that I was witnessing the end of the United States.

We took a trip to Dekalb five days later and were amazed by how many business signs all over campus and along Lincoln Highway were showing support.


From the article:

At Virginia Tech, librarians are still working on cataloging almost 100,000 items from the shooting rampage last year in which 33 students were killed. At Texas A & M hundreds of boxes of items have been collected from the unfortunate bonfire collapse that killed 12 students.

According to Cindy Ditzler, these artifacts "are an important record of how the community grieved and may be of future use to writers or researchers." They've gathered items left on campus and also collecting postings from Facebook, YouTube, text messages, e-mails, and instant messages. Online items are especially hard to collect as they are often erased and lost.

Hopefully everything will be gathered by summer and cataloged in a year.


COLLECTING

Carpenters, groundskeepers and archivists gathered the on-campus items in a three hour period one March morning. Breakable items were wrapped in tissue; stuffed animals went into a freezer to prevent mold. Candles were placed in plastic bags with silica gel packets.

The sixteen -foot long sections of canvas signed by students, alumni, townspeople, families and friends were digitally photographed, rolled in layers with acid free tissue paper, wrapped in muslin cloth and stored in archival tubes. Liz and I signed one during our visit, and it was bitterly cold that day. Someone had left Sharpies out. We were on the eighth one, and there was very little space to sign even then. I don't know how many they ended up with, but this was a nice way to express your feelings.


More to Come. --RoadDog