BY CAROLINE J. WHITE, OUTREACH ARCHIVIST & PUBLIC SERVICES COORDINATOR
If you’ve met any of the archivists in the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center (SCUA), you know how much we enjoy sharing what we do. During the academic year, many classes visit SCUA to learn about archives: what they are, how to use them, and why they matter. In the 2024-2025 academic year alone, SCUA staff hosted some 90 sessions for more than 1,300 students from UMass Amherst and other schools. By the time summer rolls around, we are ready for a break, but archives are never quiet! SCUA’s reading room fills up with scholars who will spend their summer doing research in our collections, and SCUA staff are there to welcome and support them. And the group visits continue: the summer of 2025 brought some of SCUA’s key partners through our doors for an assortment of special events.
In July, the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) conference took place at UMass Amherst, and SCUA hosted a side event. “Archives for Justice, Education, and Action: Up Close with the Popular Education Collections in SCUA” complemented a conference session featuring elmira Nazombe, whose papers documenting her work in popular education are part of SCUA’s collections. Attendees learned about ways SCUA staff use archives to teach and inspire, and they explored selections from several collections on hand.
Later that month, the Porter-Phelps-Huntington House Museum held their summer teaching institute for K-12 educators. A weeklong program, “Teaching Local History: Diverse Stories at the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum” brought a dozen area teachers to SCUA for two half-days, which they spent engaging with the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Family Papers and creating classroom materials and lesson plans drawing on them. SCUA staff provided an introduction to archives and the PPH collections, then guided the teachers through ways to think about and use archives in a classroom setting, primary source analysis methods, and handling practices.
In August, the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends held their annual conference on campus. The records of the New England Quakers have been part of SCUA’s collections since 2016, and SCUA hosted a special session for attendees to get to know us, hear about ways the Quaker collections are used by researchers and in classes, and explore selections from the array of Quaker collections in our care. During this standing-room-only event, attendees asked keen questions and shared their own experiences and expertise with Quaker history. SCUA truly found ourselves among Friends!
SCUA closed out the summer with visitors from right on campus. Students from the Juniper Young Writers Institute, one of UMass’s pre-college summer programs, visited SCUA to explore ways archives can inspire and be used in connection with creative work. After reading aloud a short 1961 speech by W. E. B. Du Bois on being an artist in America, they explored materials from the Du Bois Papers—including items from the pageant “The Star of Ethiopia” and some poetry and short stories—as well as from the Broadside Press Collection and the Jodi Picoult Papers. SCUA staff were inspired by the enthusiasm of these high schoolers, and we expect that inspiration will carry us through another very full year of class visits!
