Paige Harris: Guardian of Artifacts
Poets Corner is Paige Harris Favorite part of the Wardman Library, and where her first big exhibition will soon be displayed. It’s also just a few feet away from the elevator that goes down to the special collections where Harris has been charged with organizing. We sit on two of the soft chairs that are right in front of the big windows overlooking campus; as if we were two old friends catching up. The library isn’t busy since it’s a Friday afternoon. We talk softly so as not to disrupt the few other patrons but loud enough over the gentle hum of the air conditioning. If you’ve had the pleasure of meeting our new special collections librarian this semester, she’s probably told you about her passion for learning. Harris loves “learning new facts and telling other people new facts.”
The special collection is in the basement of the library which can only be accessed through the elevator in the Faculty Alcove (walk straight through the library, take a left after the circulation desk and then take another left at Poet’s Corner). When you have traversed through the maze of the library, Harris has taken up the task of organizing and caring for all of the items that live in the basement, which includes a taxidermy of John Greenleaf Whittier’s pet squirrel, Friday. He sits next to John Greenleaf Whittier’s desk surrounded by sad poems that Whittier wrote when his beloved pet died. “Special collections are anything that is not circulated”, explains Harris, “which means that students can’t check them out or take them off the shelves themselves.”
Harris’ passion for things of the past is not new. One of her earliest memories involves finding a “dinosaur” bone in a sandbox, when she was around five years old.
“I was like ‘We gotta send it to the Natural History Museum. They need to know about this find!’”, she laughs, “I remember being so certain because I had read all these books about what it’s like to be an archaeologist. And I was like this is just like that! ‘’
Harris is always excited to explore and discover but her intentions when working with older items, specifically things that once belonged to people of the past, is to preserve them and honor their previous owners.
During her undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego, Harris received a Bachelors in Anthropology. “I worked with human bones and early human evolution.” From there she planned on taking a career path as an exhibition curator. “I was headed towards sort of the back end of a museum management which is keeping track of artifacts and exhibits and all the paperwork that hides behind the back of the museum doors. In a lot of ways a special collection is kind of like a mini museum! Just less well known.”
Before coming to take over the Whittier special collections, Harris did get the chance to work with one of the largest archives of LGBT materials in the US. “ I was with USC’s ‘ONE archives’”, she says, “They are an archive and museum [that] focuses mostly on photography although they have a lot of other mixed media. I mostly worked on cataloging and digitizing their collections rather than developing exhibits.” Harris spoke about how impactful it was to be around so much queer history while working at the ONE archive. “So many people made art in so many different ways, and all of it was representational of a specific person’s queer experience.”
She also worked with the La Historia, an El Monte historical society, where Harris says she “helped to re-design their main ‘history of El Monte.’” She says, “ That was a timeline of the city from the Native American settlements through Spanish presence, becoming a part of the US, early agriculture, all the way until the present day and diverse lives of the immigrants who live there today.”
Now she’s at Whittier College, and she is excited to open up the special collections to students to get them involved in the school’s legacy. “I started in May, so I haven’t been around the students for long.” Her first exhibition will run from Oct. 5th through Oct. 13. The exhibition features miniature books, which Harris indicated with two fingers showcasing that the books are about an inch or two big. The exhibition will also have a craft that goes alongside it. Students will be given the opportunity to create their own tiny book which they can then take home or leave it in the collection. In this way, they have the opportunity to contribute to Whittier’s history. “Then in the future some other archivist will be like, ‘Hey! These students made these little books all about what it was about to be a student in Whittier at this time’”, Harris says excitedly, “or a person in L.A., or whatever they choose to write about.”
Harris hopes to continue to explore the humanity in the items of that past with a future exhibition of love letters that she found in the special collections. “It’s a couple of letters written between a husband and wife couple during the Second World War. They lived in Whittier prior to the husband’s deployment to the Pacific Theater,” she says, “I have thousands of letters. I mean they wrote each other virtually everyday–for three or four years.” Harris relates these letters to the texts that we send our significant others in today’s age. Little updates about our life and the things we find important that we want to share with others. “Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes they’re a little saucy, sometimes it’s just like ‘Man the food here sucks!” Harris hopes to eventually put an exhibition together using these letters to show what it was like to live in Whittier during WWII.
Harris is working towards making the special collections a welcoming space where students may come to use the items that are found in the special collections. Harris is always open to answering any questions anyone may ask. “Librarians love to talk to people. We are people people. It’s literally our job”, she says cheerfully, “so don’t be afraid that you’re bothering us.”
The collection is open to all students from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. every Tuesday. However, it is a food and drink free space, in order to avoid accidentally damaging anything that is in the collections.
Students may go down and look at everything in the Whittier Collections even if they don’t plan to use the items to do research. They are also welcome to use the space as a study area. Harris emphasizes that she wants people to take advantage of library resources and the special collections. “I know that libraries can be intimidating places for certain groups of people who feel like this isn’t the place for them or they don’t belong or there’s hidden rules that nobody told them. Our library is not like that. Our library is for everyone.”
The Terrifyingly Tiny Books collection will be in Poets Corner from Wednesday October 5th until Friday October 13th. All students are encouraged to go and say hello and welcome to our very own Guardian of Artifacts. “I think a lot of people look at an archive and it feels pretty remote… It doesn’t feel like it belongs to us”, she says thoughtfully, “But once you start digging through the papers they’re all people’s stories.” Relics of these people include, class projects, books people have read or written their names in. Things you and I still do. Harris continues, “For me, preserving those histories is about honoring these people.”
The special collections will also be having an open house on Wednesday, Oct. 16 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.. The zines that students donate to the special collections will be on display for everyone to see and students are of course encouraged to see the rest of the collections and light refreshments will be provided. Students should RSVP with Harris through her email at pharris@whittier.edu. “Come visit me! I’ll be in [the special collections] and I love showing it off. I promise the archive isn’t haunted.”
Photo Courtesy of LinkedIn
