This piece is written by Kiera Eriksen-McAuliffe, a former NYU Special Collections Student Employee who graduated from NYU in the spring of 2021. Kiera is now a Master’s Student at Columbia University in the MA program in European History, Politics, and Society. She is also a research assistant on a biography of Cold War U.S. Diplomat Eleanor Lansing Dulles.

Upon entering the Tamiment Library and Archives in my first year of college, as recommended by my history professor, I was taken aback by this strange format for a library. I was writing an essay on female Irish immigrants to America and my professor had sent me a link to the finding aid for the Archives of Irish America Oral History Collection and told me that I should listen to interviews with real women who had come to America in search of a better life. I had never been in a reading room like this before, nor spoken to an archivist, nor interacted with any kind of non-circulating materials. I am not sure if I knew at that point that there was such a thing. Completely out of my element, I signed in, placed my belongings in a locker and waited at an AV table for the CDs, listened to several recordings, and then signed out and left. This exchange was something of a wake-up call for me. I knew at that point that I wanted to become a historian, but this experience showed me that I had a lot more to learn than I had previously thought.

I am eternally grateful to my professor for that recommendation so long ago because I would not be asked to look at archival sources again until the final year of my undergraduate career. In many of my history classes, we looked at primary source documents that my professors themselves had fished out of an archive for their own research, or that were freely available online. I understand why they chose this method as opposed to having us find materials ourselves. Learning to use archives is a skill, and it was not one that many of us had been taught. You have to learn how to navigate finding aids, how to effectively articulate what you are looking for to archivists, how to skim documents looking for important titles or keywords, and my least favorite, how to read elegant 19th-century handwriting. It is a skill that takes up valuable class time to teach when one might deem learning to do historical analysis of these documents more important. I don’t necessarily agree with this sentiment as I don’t think that any historian can do one without the other. I did feel, through no fault of my own or of my professors necessarily, that archival research skills were missing from my formal education.

I began my work in Special Collections in the fall of my third year of college, and I was as enthralled by working behind the scenes as I had been that first day in the Tamiment Library two years ago. I could not stop myself from peeking into many boxes that came in to see what treasures they might hold. If I didn’t know it before, my work here assured me that I wanted to spend the rest of my life interacting with these documents in one way or another. My work at Special Collections taught me indirectly what it meant to do research in an archive. I learned about what researchers were interested in through the often strange and seemingly disconnected arrays of boxes they requested. I learned how people made historical connections between incongruous documents, and how, often in historical research, you can follow a thread until you end up researching something totally different from your main topic.

Both through special collections and through work in my classes I learned that a lot of historical research takes place on a micro-level, which was vital in helping me choose topics for research papers in class. Prior to working at Special Collections I would frequently propose a topic to a professor and go through several rounds of “That topic is a several volume book, be more specific” before I reached something satisfactory. The semester before I began my work here, one of my courses assigned the book The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, which tells the true story of a miller named Menocchio who was put on trial for heresy by the Catholic Church at the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. I know now that this book was integral to historiography. Its in-depth focus on an individual commoner’s story, based on a series of court documents, was a type of history that had not yet been widely done, called microhistory. 

This book informed the way that I looked at and interacted with materials in my job at Special Collections. I could imagine writing an entire thesis on a single folder found in the archives, when before I could hardly imagine writing about anything on a smaller scale than an individual’s entire life. Even though it was not my job to discover new and fascinating documents, I kept my eye out for them and frequently paused to read a little, if for no reason other than my own interest and enjoyment. I had no idea how rich and full of information these places were before I began spending so much time here. Consequently, I learned that history was a series of moments and events made up of thousands of individual parts, and much of studying history was the collection and analysis of these parts. I learned that to be a historian was to be a detective, piecing together a puzzle of past people and events. Archives contain puzzle pieces, and archivists are responsible for preserving them, just in case they can contribute to future discoveries that change the way we view the past. 

It would be an exaggeration to say that I felt ready when it came time to write my senior thesis. I don’t think anything can prepare an aspiring historian for their first major research project, but I cannot imagine where I would have been without my work at Special collections. Though I was not totally secure in my analytical and writing skills, I was comforted by the fact that I knew how to navigate an archive and interact with archivists. All of this was even more important given the fact that most libraries were operating remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Scanning finding aids and trying to determine what might be valuable with little context other than a sentence or two describing an entire folder was hard enough, even after having worked with finding aids. I learned how to clearly articulate my project and what I needed in my emails requesting materials because having to try to interpret what a researcher wanted scanned taught me what kind of information would be helpful to provide. 

My work on my thesis helped me in my job in the archives as well. I understood the importance of every bit of information and often found myself ensuring that even blank parts of a page were not cut off. I would ask myself, what if the shape of the edge of the page, or a rip in the paper, or a spare pen mark is the key to a major historical discovery? As rare as that was, I knew how important it was for the researcher to receive as much information as was possible, and I was determined to provide it. 

I have requested materials from NYU Special Collections for my own projects three times now, as well as from various other archives. In my new job as a research assistant, knowing that Special Collections had documents pertaining to the topic allowed me to uncover items that my employer had not even considered. In all of my future research projects, my familiarity with NYU’s materials will be able to provide a jumping-off point for my research, and my work there has already and will continue to prove invaluable in my development as a researcher.