Originally published on October 31, 2015 (Episode 36)
Introduction
It’s Halloween at Historically Thinking—time for a spooky dive into the archives. These strange, wonderful places can be intimidating: lockers, pencils only, watchful archivists, and piles of mysterious documents. But they’re also filled with treasures for those who know how to navigate them.
Al sits down with Samantha Crisp, Special Collections Librarian at Augustana College’s Thomas Tredway Library, to talk about what really happens in archives, why they matter, and how to handle the old papers in your own attic. It’s part myth-busting, part practical guide—and all a love letter to the historian’s laboratory.
About the Guest
Samantha Crisp was at the time of recording the Special Collections Librarian at the Thomas Tredway Library, Augustana College. Since then she has returned to North Carolina, where she is now Public Services Archivist at the Center for Southeast North Carolina Archives and History, at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington Library. From 2017 to 2022 she was Director of the Outer Banks History Center, Manteo, NC.
For Further Investigation
David W. Carmichael, Organizing Archival Records (Bloomsbury, 2018)
Lois Hamill, Archives for the Lay Person: A Guide to Managing Cultural Collections (Rowman and Littlefield, 2012)
Antoinette Burton & Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Duke, 2006)
Arlette Farge, The Lure of the Archives (Yale, 2015)
💬 Listen & Discuss
What makes archives intimidating to first-timers? How can we balance the duty to preserve with the duty to share? Send to someone who loves the smell of archival dust in the morning. Or wishes they did, except for the asthma.
