Taylor Roth  0:00  

Can you say your name and like what your position here is at the library. 

 

Alison Reynolds  0:08  

I'm Alison Reynolds. I'm the Research Services and Instruction Archivist.

 

Taylor Roth  0:25  

How did you get into working here at the archives?

 

Alison Reynolds  0:29  

Well, I started here in 2018, initially doing a little bit of everything, and then and around 2020 transitioned into doing the research services and instruction parts are mostly I teach workshops without primary sources for classes visiting a lot of English classes. And I help people with research in the reading room.

 

Taylor Roth  0:53  

How has your schooling affected your interest in archives?

 

Alison Reynolds  0:59  

Well, in undergrad, I was an English major, English and History double major. I didn't really know what I was going to do with that. And then I got a master's in English and still didn't really know what I was going to do with that. So I realized that I had an interest in libraries and decided to go and get another master's in Library Science, so I could become an official library archivist. And while I was in grad school, learned about archives, had never done any work with them, really never visited them as a student, but took a couple classes and thought, hey, this is what I want to do. Worked some jobs as a graduate student in the archives for grad school. And that was kind of the beginning of what led me to where I am.

 

Taylor Roth  1:45  

Do you think that archives should be available to a wider audience?

 

Alison Reynolds  2:14  

Absolutely, I think almost every archivist you talk to now be on the side of access. I always talk about this myth of the gatekeeper because probably 40-50, maybe 30 years ago, there was this gatekeeper mentality that you can't use the archives unless you have a reason. Some places would not allow undergraduate students to use it at all, or you had to have a letter saying, this is why I need to access these things. And now we have this open door policy, we make our things available. Anybody, from anywhere can come here and look at our collections in person. I know a lot of people are using things online or expect resources to be online, which of course, it takes a lot of time and effort, because we can't possibly digitize everything that we have, but we are working now on a digital repository. A brand new one just went live. We're working on digitizing more things to add to it to make it more accessible to people from a distance or people who can't visit, travel here, people from other countries, so 100% think all of these things should be accessible to as many people who want to use them.

 

Taylor Roth  3:43  

So how long have you been working at the GT archives?

 

Alison Reynolds  3:47  

I've been at Georgia Tech for five years, and four years somewhere else. I'm coming up on almost 10 years doing this. 

 

Taylor Roth  3:56  

What does your day-to-day look like here?

 

Alison Reynolds  4:00  

During the off-season of that, usually summers and end of the semester, I do more curatorial work where I buy things for the Rare Books and Science Fiction collection, think about promoting collections online, programs, social media. We have a rolling reference questions that come in. So I'm monitoring that, people email us and want to know. Sometimes the strangest things, like this week, someone asked about a recording Ray Charles did on a campus radio station, in 1954 and things that you don't even know about. So, there's a lot of variety, which I like.

 

Taylor Roth  7:11  

So are there any exciting developments in the archives going right now?

 

Alison Reynolds  7:17  

I think our digital repository is really exciting. It's been years in the making. There's so much behind the scenes wor., I think people don't realize in terms of even just the kinds of metadata, descriptions that you give things because you're doing a search online, and you're not going to find it unless somebody has put in a lot of work thinking about how to describe that, how to put that in the database, so it will show up in your search results, how to scan that and make it full text searchable, all of that work. So it's really exciting to me that that's live now and that it has combined what used to be three different websites you had to go to into one. So you can just search that one place and find what we have.

 

Taylor Roth  7:58  

So as you've gone back through this repository, have you found a favorite artifact of yours?

 

Alison Reynolds  8:43  

One collection that we have that I think is a little more obscure and unexpected is from someone in the late 1800s, early 1900s, named Louis Boris Magid, who wanted to create a silk industry in Atlanta. And he had traveled to Japan and China, and brought back these sample pattern books. Some of it are illustrated, I think there's the fabric pattern samples. There's all kinds of what we call lantern slides, and they will have illustrations of silk farmers in Asia or the some of them are even like cross-cuts of silkworms and things. And it's just very cool because it's not like anything we have. It's an interesting time period, and it's a little bit outside of our Western culture. We don't have as much Asian-related material. So I think that's a really neat, hidden collection that we have.

 

Taylor Roth  9:39  

So why do you think it's valuable for Georgia Tech specifically, to maintain an archive?

 

Alison Reynolds  9:44  

We want to preserve our history, so we know where we've been, but also, alumni are very excited about Georgia Tech history. I mean, that's one of our big audiences. People who had school here, had a relative who went to school here, the Alumni Association, always contacting us about questions and things. So we need to have that information be available. Even President Cabrera contacts us sometimes asking questions about, "Is there something going on? Is there anything that happened in the history of Georgia Tech that we can show these people or connect to this?" So it's just really important to have a record of everything that we've done, and even policy related decisions. You know, when USG was looking at tenure for faculty, and we had some faculty come in and want to look at, decades ago, what conversations were happening amongst faculty related to tenure, with USG related to tenure, so it's a historical, but also some legal or professional implications of why we need to document these things, too.

 

Taylor Roth  10:45  

So why did you choose to work at Georgia Tech?

 

Alison Reynolds  11:03  

Honestly, I was working on a grant-funded project that was ending. So I was applying to a lot of jobs. I had interviewed at four different places all around the same time. I did get the first offer from Georgia Tech. But it was also at the top of my list of where I wanted to be. It's not because it was the first offer. I really wanted to be at a high research institution. That was really important to me, place with a good reputation that would have good resources, and kind of be pushing the envelope a little bit in what libraries, archives do. So many smaller institutions, maybe have one person doing everything, and we are understaffed with eight people in our department, but it would be so much worse to have one or two people. And we have been growing over the past couple of years, I think we will continue to grow, so I think it was the growth and the reputation, resources, and just being at a high-achieving institution was what made me want to work at Georgia Tech.

 

Taylor Roth  12:07  

As you continue to work at Georgia Tech, have you found like a favorite characteristic of the community that's made you like want to continue working here and explore the Georgia Tech community?

 

Alison Reynolds  12:18  

Yeah, I think there's really two parts to that. The first is just the work environment is a lot more laid back than where I worked before. More flexibility in your work schedule and hours and also just more freedom to explore what interests you. I've kind of been able to take a position and shift it to exactly what I think my strengths are and what my interests are, make my own goals, as long as I can get them to fit within the institute goal framework. And that's the first part. And the second part, it feels cliche, but the people here are great. Every student I've worked with has been great. All the students are just so smart, so high-achieving and generally just very polite, very respectful. And I just I really like working with all the people, all the students.

 

Taylor Roth 

Is there an item in the archives that you think the GT community would be very surprised by that we still have?

 

Alison Reynolds 

I feel like we have a rare book collection that I feel like not as many people are familiar with, because we really do have very rare books like Isaac Newton's Principia, the first edition of that where there are really only about 276 known copies in the whole world. It's not just a little closet full of all books. I mean, we have evolved, we have those books as early as 1498, a huge volume Atlas set that is really worth over a million dollars appraised. So it's a legitimate rare book collection that I think people just don't know about because we don't have faculty here that really study it very much. But when I do tell people about it, they get really excited.

 

Taylor Roth 

So I'm going to shift towards like how our project interacts with the archives and such. So I'm going to show you a clip of what we have so far.

 

Taylor Roth  0:00  

So how does this model capture real life interaction with the artifacts, in your opinion?

 

Alison Reynolds  0:16  

I think it's really neat that it lets people see a 3D model of the item because we have photographs for some of those online but you can only see one part of the image. So that's really neat that you can take it, you can turn it around, you can see all the signatures on some of the items, I think that's really neat and adds a different dimension that would just be very hard to replicate in a flat image database.

 

Taylor Roth  0:43  

Do you think the goal of a virtual museum like this should be to mimic real life interaction?

 

Alison Reynolds  0:55  

That's an interesting question. The benefit to that is being able to pick it up and take it or hold it and shift it or hold it virtually, rotate it, which even if you're in an actual museum, you wouldn't be able to do, so I would say no, not in the sense of a physical museum where you would have to walk around and maybe couldn't see underneath an exhibit. I like the format, because it's something people are used to, you walk in and you immediately think "I'm in a museum, I understand that these are historical artifacts of some kind," versus if it was just a pile on the floor on a shelf or something. So I think it's a good balance between both.

 

Taylor Roth  1:41  

How do you think this museum will impact the Georgia Tech Community?

 

Alison Reynolds  1:47  

I hope it adds a place online where people can learn about these items that they wouldn't learn about otherwise. I mean, anything we can do to take our collections and share them in as many places as possible, to make them accessible to different places online, I think it's great, so I hope it just expands the audience for these materials in a way that we can't support in the archives officially right now.

 

Taylor Roth  2:13  

What do you think about technological integrations in museums overall? 

 

Alison Reynolds  2:19  

I think it's a great idea. You know, again, just expanding on the access part, we have so many things that if you can't travel here, you won't be able to see. If we don't have the resources to digitize them or do an exhibit or something you just wouldn't know about them. So I think in any museum, I've seen Google, I think you can travel to famous museums around the world and walk around them. I think any of that is good for the museum, good for educating people around the world.

 

Taylor Roth

How do you think this would impact the original museums, archives and artifacts?

 

Alison Reynolds

I think it would just be an addition to what they already have, you know, I don't think that it's going to prevent people from going in person. If you're traveling or if you're local, I think you're still going to want to go in person, because it's a whole experience. It's not just the artifacts, it's the building, it's the artwork and the exhibits, the people, you know, just the whole atmosphere of a museum is not the same as what's virtual, so I don't think virtual would ever really replace. And actually, museums, I wouldn't say they're in competition, but I do think it's just an extra complement, maybe K-12 teachers could add it into their curriculum if they couldn't plan a field trip or if you're in Europe or something. This just makes it more accessible.

 

Taylor Roth 

What stories kept in the archives would you be interested in being shared outside of kind of what we showed you?

 

Alison Reynolds 

We've done a lot lately trying to uncover histories of a lot of underrepresented students on campus, like some of the early African American students, some of the early women students. And I know you focus more on artifacts now, but even just maybe some documents that complement artifacts that you have just to give it a little bit more context, or let people read a little bit going along with the artifacts. So I would say that maybe a little diversity of students' stories, more artifacts, but also a handful of documents supporting. I'm just thinking like Pride Alliance, we have a lot of their artifacts, banners, and some posters and some clothing, things like that along with documents, we have an interesting story.

 

Taylor Roth  

What elements of the archives could make it feel like a complete picture, like you are really in this museum?

 

Alison Reynolds 

Okay. I was thinking maybe some photographs, things around along the walls, if you're in a museum, you're going to have art, you're gonna have photographs, timelines. Then just even having one or two photographs, something along the wall that makes you feel like you're immersed in that story. I can see that'd be helping you tweak your imagination a little bit, just like you're not looking at what's the one individual item but that you're looking at something that's part of a larger story that you can contextualize.

 

Taylor Roth  

Is there anything you want to add about your experience or specific items in the archives?

 

Alison Reynolds 

I'm glad that I've been part of this past couple of years. We had a different archivist. She left in 2021, so I'm glad that I had to take over and I met with a couple of students last year, looking at items they might want to use. And I think some of them ended up in in this current exhibit as it stands. So I'm happy to be part of it and consult if you need to know what we have. If you need any other documents, images, anything like that, I think it's great. I hope it goes on for a while and gets supported so that it can be a long term thing for people to get online.

 

Taylor Roth 

That's great to hear. So that's everything I have. Thank you for letting us interview you. Hope you enjoy talking about it as well.

 

Alison Reynolds 

Absolutely.