Q&Archives: Living and Expanding the Mission with Archives at the Wildlife Conservation Society
An interview with Maddie Thompson and Sana Masood at Wildlife Conservation Society
Archives take on many forms and roles within the places that keep them. By nature, they provide us with a historical record and context, all while holding the power to inform and steer our response to information learned about the past. This week’s Q&Archive interview explores these ideas with Maddie Thompson and Sana Masood at the Wildlife Conservation Society. The organization leverages archives to protect and manage the world’s largest network of urban wildlife parks, including spaces like the Bronx Zoo, Prospect Park Zoo, and Queens Zoo right here in NYC, among others. Read on for the full take!
Urban Archive: Tell us a bit about the Wildlife Conservation Society!
The Wildlife Conservation Society’s mission is to save wildlife and wild places worldwide. WCS manages the world’s largest network of urban wildlife parks, including the Bronx Zoo, Central Park Zoo, Prospect Park Zoo, Queens Zoo, and the New York Aquarium. Additionally, WCS operates a Global Conservation Program in nearly 60 nations and in all of the world’s oceans. The organization was founded in 1895 as the New York Zoological Society and changed its name to the Wildlife Conservation Society in 1993 to better reflect its global mission.
Urban Archive: Tell us about the WCS Archives collection. Can you share some of the highlights?
We are the institutional archives for WCS, and our holdings reflect WCS’s work in our NYC zoos and aquarium as well as our Global Conservation Program. Our collections include business files, field notes, photos and film, illustrations and artworks, and souvenirs, and other ephemera. We have the largest zoo-based archives in the US, and because WCS counted wildlife conservation among its founding objectives in 1895, our archives have been a valuable resource for people who are interested not only in the history of zoos and aquariums but also the history of wildlife conservation.
Among our highlights are the copious records kept by the Bronx Zoo’s first director, William Hornaday, who was also a major figure in the development of the wildlife conservation movement in the US; collections created by WCS’s Department of Tropical Research, which conducted ecological expeditions during the mid-twentieth century; and over 120 years of zoo and aquarium ephemera, some of which we’ve digitized and made available here.
Urban Archive: Historically, what role have archives played in living and expanding the WCS mission?
In the Archives, we take to heart the role we play in carrying out both WCS’s mission to save wildlife and wild places and also its core values. Through our work to collect and preserve WCS’s history, we ensure that information developed by WCS — whether it’s documented in a letter, drawing, or database — can be accessible for current and future users. This access is critical from several standpoints, from daily business operations to scientific research. It’s also critical in understanding how the organization and the very nature of wildlife conservation have changed over time as we continue to work toward a better future for all inhabitants of our planet.
Urban Archive: Technology can open up collections in fun and exciting ways. What does this look like for your archives?
In addition to our constant born-digital preservation work — which, with apologies to digital archivists, is maybe not always so fun and exciting! — we have also digitized a few of our collections, and we operate a blog, a Twitter account, and an Instagram account. These methods of making our collections more accessible to users have been so important to us. They’ve allowed us to connect not only to researchers but to descendants of people who worked for WCS, and even to people who have simply grown up visiting one of our NYC wildlife parks during their lives. We love interacting with these folks and learning from them.
Urban Archive: Our first project together explored how the early Bronx Zoo embodied WCS’s founding goals and how the evolution of these goals continue to shape the park. How has our platform helped you tell this story and share your collections with people who may not otherwise cross paths with archival material in their day-to-day lives?
Urban Archive has helped us to tell the story of a place and time — the Bronx Zoo in its early years. It allows users to travel back in time. It also allows users to travel to a place during our current moment in history when traveling to places has taken on new layers of complexity.
The Bronx Zoo has been reopened since July, and we’re excited for all users — whether they’re navigating the tour from within the zoo or from their homes — to experience the history of this place.
Urban Archive: Looking to the future, are there any aspects of our collaboration that you’re particularly excited about?
This tour opens up several future paths that we’d love to explore. There are so many other angles of the Bronx Zoo’s history that could be told in additional tours — the stories of particular animals, for instance. We also want to consider creating tours for WCS’s four other NYC wildlife parks. And one final idea: we’d love to incorporate visitor voices into a historical tour and hope that our first Urban Archive tour will be a good jumping-off point for that work.
To explore Wildlife Conservation Society Archives on Urban Archive, tap here. You can also catch up on previous Q&Archive conversations by clicking on a link below:
- How the Brooklyn Public Library Approaches Curating Collections and Digital Initiatives
- Capturing a Community-Based Archive with Queens Public Library
- The Future of Records at the NYC Department of Sanitation
- Strategies of Preservation with Village Preservation
- Telling Old Stories in New Ways with the Forward
- “Building Stories” with the Museum at Eldridge Street
- Mapping Archives with the Museum of the City of New York
- Activating Archives with The Metropolitan Museum of Art’
- Shaping the City with the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development
Thanks again for reading and see you next time!
