Beyond learning about and becoming acquainted with the many wonderful people and resources that the library has to offer, I’ve also begun to learn more about the Frost library’s philosophy. I had already known that Frost library was much more than a warehouse for books, and that it was a location for mild socializing and studying, but I had not realized how much the services it provides students diverge from what I had assumed a stereotypical library would. The scope of the library’s focus isn’t simply limited to books and their importance, but is expanded to incorporate learning and the imparting knowledge through any medium a student finds useful to their education. This is expressed most emphatically though library staff who devote their time towards becoming experts in a vast array of fields, and research and publication techniques for the sake of students who might be in need of that assistance.
Archives are not something I’ve had the pleasure of exploring as much as I would have liked to throughout the year, but through this fellowship I’ve slowly become more acquainted with the criteria for the things that are stored within them and the kind of work the people working in the archives do. While talking to some of the archivist, I’ve developed a greater appreciation for how they are able to gather important historical documents within the archives and manipulate them to be useful for almost any historical project related to the college. I also hadn’t considered the politics and strategy that goes into the work archivist do. Until recently, I hadn’t thought about the power of deciding what documents are preserved and which ones are not. The archives are quite literally the greatest remedy to institutional memory that a college can have.