by Elena Hoffenberg
Caitlin Birch combines her academic training as a historian and professional archival expertise in digital forms as the Digital Collections and Oral History Archivist at Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College. Birch completed her MLIS and MA in History at Simmons College in 2014. Previously, she worked at archives in the Boston area on digital projects spanning from encoding finding aids and digitizing photographic collections to converting metadata and managing complex multimedia projects.
Rauner Special Collections Library is situated on Dartmouth’s campus in Hanover, New Hampshire. In addition to receiving records of individuals associated with the College, it collects materials relating to printing, New Hampshire, Anglo-American literature, science and medicine, and theater. It is also home to the Dartmouth College Archives, which collects and maintains its permanent records. The library acquired the Stefansson Collection on Polar Exploration in 1952, which attracts researchers from around the world. Hundreds of people visit the library each year to see a first edition of Joseph Smith’s The Book of Mormon. “It advertises itself at this point,” Birch shares, attracting visitors daily during the summer.
As historian and an archivist, Birch has an awareness of how different yet intertwined these fields are. Her training as a historian prepared her to “speak that language” when working with the academics who conduct research at the Rauner Special Collections Library. She has also spoken to groups on campus to showcase how born-digital materials and methods such as web indexing can be useful in research in the social sciences.
Undergraduates comprise a significant number of users for Rauner Library, a result of the emphasis on primary source research in teaching curriculum. The College Archivist Peter Carini and Head of Special Collections Jay Satterfield identified incorporating research into the curriculum as a priority. In Birch’s words, it was “pointless to collect materials unless they’re being used.” Since then, Dartmouth has become a leader in teaching with primary sources. Each summer, the library hosts an active learning institute on this topic, bringing together archivists from across the country to broaden the impact of this work to other campuses.
This engagement with students is central to Birch’s role as Oral History Archivist. As the director of the college’s oral history program, she works with undergraduate students to introduce them to the theory and practice of oral history, while also supervising the oral history collecting they conduct and providing archival expertise to ensure that the interviews are preserved and made accessible.
The Dartmouth Vietnam Project exemplifies Birch’s varied involvement. A history course on the Vietnam War was reimagined as an opportunity to gather oral histories to meet the dual goals of enriching the students’ learning experience and gathering material for the library’s collections. Birch collaborated with the professor and an instructional designer to create an experiential learning project for students to collect oral histories from Dartmouth community members who had served in Vietnam. Birch works with students throughout the process. In addition to drawing on her expertise in digital collections to preserve interviews once they have been collected, she also works with students to introduce them to oral history methodology and guides them through the research with primary sources to prepare for interviews.
Launching this spring, SpeakOut, Birch’s most recent collection, came about in another way. Members of DGALA, the Dartmouth Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Alumni/ae Association, approached Birch for advice about collecting oral histories, hoping to document the diversity of experiences–positive and negative–that comprise the history of the LGBTQIA+ community at Dartmouth, as students or as employees. This grew into a project for the College Archives. With funding and support from the Provost and the Dean of Libraries, Birch has continued to develop a model to train students to gather oral histories to document this important part of Dartmouth’s history.
Contrasting these two projects, Birch shares how the engagement with contributors has differed. For the Dartmouth Vietnam Project, interviewees were asked about an event; they reflected on a moment in time at Dartmouth when the college was engulfed by the war, sharing their individual perspectives. For SpeakOut, those who will share their stories for this collection will speak about who they are. “It was not about a time period,” Birch explains, “but what it means for identity to shape experience in college or at work.”
Whether working with traditional researchers, undergraduate oral historians, or Mormon tourists, Birch embraces the opportunity to engage with users. In her position, she combines her experience in history and in archival studies to connect people with the diverse materials of the Rauner Special Collections Library, while actively working to ensure the collections grow to incorporate more stories of Dartmouth’s past to serve the community of the college.