by Diana Beltrao de Macedo
Molly Brown holds a bachelor’s degree in History and English. During her undergraduate days, she completed an internship at a repository where she first discovered her passion for cultural heritage. Because of that, after her graduation she decided to join Simmons University’s dual degree in History and Archives Management to pursue a career as an archivist. In the meantime she worked at the Federal Reserve Archives where she had the opportunity of working with a digitization project and at Boston College’s library where she started working with reference.
Molly started at the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections as a part-time employee. While she was still pursuing her MLS degree and working part-time, there was an opening for the reference and outreach archivist position to which she applied and was offered the position. Since then, she has been responsible for providing reference for users and developing inreach and outreach projects for the institution.
Northeastern University holds a large archival collection of records related to the institution such as theses, publications, photographs, yearbooks, etc. Additionally, the Special Collections houses thousands of documents regarding the history of the University’s surrounding neighborhoods and of Boston’s underrepresented communities such as the African American, Latinx, and LGBTQ communities. They also hold the records of the Boston Globe as well as the extinct Boston Phoenix newspaper. Preserving such documents is in direct accordance with the archives mission of documenting “the teaching, research, community service, and administrative functions of the University” and of preserving “the records of private, non-profit, community-based organizations that document diverse and under-documented populations.”
According to Molly, a lot of the outreach connection work had already been done by the time she started in the position. That means, that currently her goal is mainly to sustain those relationships and to develop new projects. Currently, she focuses her outreach job on getting closer to the local community and attracting them to the archives. One of her recent projects consisted of developing a partnership with some of Boston’s public high schools. For this occasion, students visited the archives over a month to learn more about desegregation by looking into primary sources found in the Boston Public Schools Desegregation Collection. After that, they were asked to write a biography of an activist in school desegregation in Boston based on the information discovered at the repository. Another one of her projects consists in promoting conversations with the local community by hosting panels, bringing a specialist or screening film sessions at the archives. Called “Neighborhood Matters,” this outreach project happens three times each semester and it is a great opportunity to bring the community to the repository since the events are free and open to the public.
Within the university community, Molly partners with student groups and professors so that they are aware of the archives’ existence even though the repository is “hidden” at the basement of the library. She advocates for professors to use their resources as part of their classes, either by bringing students to see the archives or assigning homework that requires research at the repository. She also joins student groups to promote the archives holdings. A recent example that she shared with me was visiting an event hosted by the Asian-American student group to present a little bit about the Asian-American collections they have in their repository.
Along with her other two archivist colleagues, Molly Brown plays an essential role in keeping the archives alive and accessible. Through outreach programs, she wants to ensure that not only traditional users in the university community have access to the archives’ records. She also wants to attract other people, especially the young, and educate them about the importance of archives. Her goal is to demystify the idea that repositories are meant just for academic research. According to her, “everybody becomes a researcher when using the archives.”