This is another in a continuing series of articles profiling Ithaca College staff and faculty.
By Mary Lash
On the second floor of the Ithaca College Library is a forbidding-looking fenced enclosure packed with files, boxes, and books. Those who haven't delved into College history may not know that "the cage" protects archival materials or that Bridget Bower can help them find the information they want.
As College archivist, Bower appraises, preserves, describes, arranges, and provides access to the institution's historical records. The collection includes publications, such as back issues of the Ithacan, yearbooks, and catalogs; scrapbooks; newspaper clippings; photos; materials related to sports at the College (Jim Butterfield's playbooks, for example); a few miscellaneous rare books; and administrative materials, such as records, committee minutes, and reports. In all, the materials account for about 5 percent of the documents created on campus.
It's
not like you can simply walk in and start looking around, however. Administrative
materials are closed to users for at least 30 years after their production
(80 years in the case of personnel records), and access to records more
than 30 years old is possible only by permission of the office of origin.
With rare exceptions, documents must be used in the library, but copies
may be made at the client's expense.
Members of the campus community and the general public use the archives for a variety of reasons, Bower says. A student who wrote an article for the Ithacan may have lost her copy. Relatives often want photos from an alumnus's College days. Staff and faculty may call in search of historical information.
Most archival materials are not listed in the library's on-line catalog, and people should begin their search by talking to Bower. "I'm really not interested in their business; I'm just interested in helping them find the information that they want to find," she says. Records of users are confidential. "Under sub-poena I could tell you who's been looking at the Ithacan, but that's what it would take," she said.
Bower devotes some of her time to serving at the library reference desk and to teaching classes on request. Offering each student in the class an individual interview, she emphasizes "demystifying" archival research and conveying the principle that archival information is "diffuse" and must usually be collected from a number of documents.
Because of space limitations, Bower must be selective in acquiring documents. In adding to the archives, she considers the collection a reflection of the institution and its structure, and she focuses on collections rather than individual items. Although people often envision archives in terms of individual documents, she stresses that "it's the putting of everything into context that I think is most important." She hopes to do more toward documenting student life, especially during Ithaca's early years. "I like preserving history," she says. "It's good for us to have a sense of where the institution has been historically."
Bower began her career as an archivist almost imperceptibly, when she was a freshman engineering major at Swarthmore College. She worked at the Friends Historical Library during the summer and enjoyed it. "Somewhere in there," she recalls, "I discovered I hated engineering." By her junior year she was taking a course in archives management. She decided to earn a master's degree in church history at Earlham College, where she both maintained archives and taught in the library. She came to Ithaca as the College's first archivist in 1988 and later completed her master's in library science at Syracuse University.
Bower and her husband, Barry Robinson, are active in the Perry City Friends. For the last two years the couple have lived with their two cats in a pre-1850 plank house in Trumbull's Corners.