Some people do question that. They say, "Well, what do you do down here? What is this old stuff used for? What is the value to anyone?" Invariably we receive things after everything's said and done. But the important thing is, we are the institutional memory.

If someone wants to know why a course was created, I can look it up and find the paperwork. It's not easy to have material for one topic all in one place, so you have to have well-trained people like me and Professor De Krey who know you need to look at X and X, and that might lead to Y, to get the answer you want.

We're a resource for people. Many faculty members are using the archives for their coursework. Professor of English David Wee has students write in the period of the times. He may say, "Write me something about 1957 — write in their idioms and tell me what life was like." So students come here to find out what life was like in 1957.

People in Northfield also use us. Every year the middle school students involved in the SCOPE project come here to do research on the life and times of O.E. Rolvaag or on what life was like on the hill during World War II. So we're constantly helping people.

I'm surprised at the amount of e-mail I get. The Internet has created a whole new avenue of archival work for us. We do a lot of genealogy work for people. They will call and say, "Well, I think my great-grandpa went there." But they don't know which program he attended.

St. Olaf started as a preparatory high school. It was St. Olaf's School, so from 1875 through 1917, we had an academy. Well, the records for the academy are very poor compared to the college records. And simultaneously running from 1886 till now, of course, we've offered college coursework. We also had a school for the deaf and dumb, as it was called back then, from 1907 to 1910. We had four years of seminary here in the 1880s when the Norwegian Lutheran church split. We had a school of music. You didn't have to be enrolled in St. Olaf College to be in the school of music. So people from town would be running up here to take music courses.

I tried to track all of this when I started my enrollment database. There are not good records. Who were these people in the seminary? You may have been on the hill, but were you in the college? Were you in an actual St. Olaf program?

Joan Olson had incredible foresight in the early 1990s to index the Manitou Messenger, the student newspaper. First, she did it on index cards, and then she and Craig Rice, who's the associate director for information systems at the college, worked together to put it online. I've been working in this field a long time, and that was years ahead of its time. I believe we are the only college in the United States that has abstracted every article in the student newspaper since its inception, which was 1887.

The Messenger database is one of the best tools for knowing about student life in the early days. Since the archives weren't set up until 1969, if you wanted to know about student life in 1930, sometimes the only information we have is Messenger articles. Students working on the newspaper now need to realize how important it is to strive for accuracy. They have to report well, because each article becomes the record of the college — even if it's not the official record. It could haunt you!

We have nine aisles in that room. It used to be the Periodicals room for the library years ago It has old library stacks, and on the shelves we have acid-free boxes. Inside, all the artifacts and documents are kept in acid-free folders or acid-free tissue paper. The temperature and humidity are always controlled. The humidity should be around 43 percent. The temperature should be at 61 or 62 degrees, and it fluctuates depending on the weather outside.

We have all the presidents' papers and also papers from the founder, the Rev. B.J. Muus. The presidents' papers and the deans' papers are important for institutional memory. We have about 120 boxes of papers from President Lars Boe, who served from 1918 until his death in 1942. It's incredible the amount of things he kept, everything from the history of potatoes to correspondence with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover.

We have a lot of interesting paperwork on the development of the college. But as you go deeper into the collection, you find alumni and student material, which Joan Olson collected. We have many student scrapbooks going back as far as the late 1890s. It tells you what life was like on campus. We have many faculty and alumni publications, and yearbooks galore.

It's so exciting to open a box and say: "What's in here? What is in our collection?" Gary and I find things all the time.

It should be standard, and it is archiving policy that departments every year turn over their records and keep us up to date on what they're doing. Some disciplines will send all their coursework and syllabi over. Several disciplines, like history and romance languages, will send over specific student papers that won distinction awards. So we have a collection of student papers going back to the 1930s, and they're all indexed.

Last year I sent out a message to students asking them to donate items for their class or create a time capsule, but there wasn't much tangible result. But the student workers I have, especially as they work here year to year, become very aware of what they should donate.

Some students do perceive that they should be thinking now about their part in history. The other day, someone dropped off a T-shirt for me. Or students tell their roommates to donate something. The word is out that we're looking for objects. Generally, students in their early 20s are not really interested in preserving or interpreting history. They're too young to appreciate the implications of what their life is now. Eighty years from now, people are going to say, "Well, what was it like at the turn of the century?" I think they need time. It hits us when we're about 40 or 50.

When I came in, it was kind of an odd situation. Gary De Krey was chair of the history department and was also college archivist. The former archivist, Joan Olson, had been here 30 years, and everything was catalogued under her system. She had used a lot of card indexes but not electronic record keeping.

I was so frustrated the first few weeks. I didn't have that institutional memory that Joan has. I would spend literally hours wandering around the stacks going, "Where is that one folder, that one page?" So then I started creating devices. Instead of having the whole aisle on the reference card, I started labeling every shelf and every box being input into the system. So as we got more specific, I can find it. The time I spend on research has been drastically cut.

Given my expertise in databasing, my first goal was to move to electronic recordkeeping and create "finding aids" that would be easily accessible. We have to be on the cutting edge in order to provide quick access to our collections. For instance, I'm using top-of-the-line scanning software to scan actual documents and books.

We don't have a museum per se, so if we want to display any sort of history of the college, we do it electronically.

Lynsey Struthers, the web manager at St. Olaf, has helped us redesign the whole web site, and we'll be launching that this summer (www.stolaf.edu/library/archives). You don't necessarily have to come to the archives to understand the college's history or to do some research. We won't put everything online, but there are some important documents there to read. You might want to see the original articles of incorporation. What do they look like? Who signed them? What does it say about St. Olaf?

For new collections that have come in, I've created an online tracking system. If you're looking for something that you've recently donated, you could go online and look up that department. You may not know the accession number, but you might say: "Well, I know Jimmy Carter was here in 1992, and we sent a file over." Instead of having me dig for it, you could just type in "Jimmy Carter" and it would tell you exactly what box the information is in and what shelf it's on

.

Gary and I are always cognizant of being in the real time and documenting events. Take Sept. 11th. It took us all by surprise, and obviously there were many emotions on campus. So you start collecting pieces. I have the president's address on a CD. We decided this fall that we needed to have our own CD collection of all the chapel talks.

The archives are a repository for many things that have happened. We don't know yet what importance we should assign to them. But I do know a given chapel talk is important to someone, so we keep all these talks. I don't want someone 50 years from now to say, "Oh, Jeff threw that way. He shouldn't have." So if we have space and if we think there's any importance to it, we keep it.

Most institutions have an archive in one form or another. But the investment that St. Olaf has given to the archives puts us on the cutting edge. We're fortunate to have the resources — whether it be departmental funding or alumni support — to be scanning documents and creating digital streaming video. Most state schools and small liberal arts campuses simply don't have the funding, so archiving falls under the direction of the librarian. And it's kind of ignored.

I'm extremely fortunate that I have this opportunity to be a paid detective for what I do. Recently, for example, we determined that a desk in the Norwegian classroom upstairs was the actual desk where the articles of incorporation were signed on Nov. 6, 1874. So imagine that the attorney, O.F. Perkins and five other gentlemen are in Perkins' office in downtown Northfield signing the document to form little St. Olaf's School that would open in January 1875. But this desk has been sitting there for so many years and neglected.

President Thomforde, when he came aboard, said: "Do something with that desk. I'll help fund it." So we got a professional furniture curator, a conservationist, to come in — and his daughter happened to be an Ole so we got a good deal. While we were taking the desk out, one of the facilities people said: "Hey, do you want to see President Thorbjorn Mohn's desk?" He was the first president. He died in 1899. I said we've been looking for it for two years. Turns out it was in storage on Hwy. 19.

Thirty feet up in the rafters, under a tarp, is this desk. Our furniture conservationist said: "This is one of a kind. This is a real treasure. It's quite valuable, more valuable than the desk I'm taking out of the library." So while he's pulling up the tarp, Gary and I, being investigative archivists, start discovering other treasures that have been safekept by the college in a remote location. We come back with two pickups full of material. Now my hallway's full again.

I have the luxury of being able to have the time to do that. I do love my work. I would do it for free if I had enough money.