{"id":413,"date":"2019-04-19T11:30:18","date_gmt":"2019-04-19T15:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/blogs\/lis476\/?p=413"},"modified":"2019-04-19T11:30:18","modified_gmt":"2019-04-19T15:30:18","slug":"meet-maggie-hoffman-archivist-at-the-cambridge-historical-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/blogs\/lis476\/?p=413","title":{"rendered":"Meet Maggie Hoffman, Archivist at the Cambridge Historical Society"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Jasmine Bonanca<\/em><\/p>\n

How can I talk about what\u2019s in our collections and make sure that I\u2019m bringing that forward into today and really getting people to ask serious questions about it?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The Cambridge Historical Society (CHS) is an organization eager to connect the Cambridge community\u2019s past to its present, and Maggie Hoffman is the organization\u2019s enthusiastic archivist.\u00a0 She\u2019s part of a cozy staff of three that includes herself, the CHS\u2019s Executive Director Marieke Van Damme, and the Program Manager Perri Meldon, all of whom report to the organization\u2019s governing council.\u00a0 Together, they all work to further the CHS\u2019s mission of collecting the history of Cambridge and using it to provide insight on the community\u2019s present, and hopefully its future.<\/p>\n

Hoffman works part-time as both the CHS\u2019s archivist and, as of 2019, their social media manager.\u00a0 Much of her work involves working processing the organization\u2019s backlog, carrying out preservation management, and answering reference questions.\u00a0 She carries out about 20 reference interactions a month, which she receives from both researchers and the governing council.<\/p>\n

Actively contributing to the Cambridge community\u2019s dialogue about its history and trajectory is a sincere passion of both Hoffman and the CHS.\u00a0 To that end, the CHS takes part in a number of outreach programs.\u00a0 One that Hoffman highlighted was the CHS\u2019s \u201cHistory Caf\u00e9s,\u201d wherein speakers are invited to local restaurants, bars, etc., to discuss timely topics through a historical perspective.\u00a0 These meetings are often built around the CHS\u2019s yearly themes, which they pose to themselves in the form of a question.<\/p>\n

2019\u2019s theme is one that Hoffman is particularly excited about: \u201cHow does Cambridge Engage?\u201d\u00a0 Cambridge has a long history of being a socially and politically active community, and she\u2019s excited to use the CHS collections to demonstrate the ways Cambridge community members have historically engaged with the goings-on of the wider world. \u00a0Specifically, she\u2019s excited about the new exhibit she is currently working on, which focuses on a collection of papers from the Harvard chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, who during the Vietnam War era, protested both the presence of the ROTC on Harvard\u2019s campus and what she referred to as \u201cHarvard\u2019s land-grabbing habits.\u201d\u00a0 Though she was aware of the anti-war protests, which were national in scope, the fact that Harvard students had also been protesting the school\u2019s land purchases surprised her, especially as that is an on-going concern in the community.\u00a0 It also adds a unique Cambridge nuance to what at the time was a national conversation.<\/p>\n

Hoffman is especially grateful to work at an organization that allows her to create exhibits around such important and sensitive topics. \u201cIt\u2019s a project that could be seen as a little bit controversial, but the fact that I\u2019m able to do that makes me really happy and reminds me of why I love doing this work,\u201d Hoffman said.\u00a0 She believes that bringing making collections like these available to the community, and developing conversations around them, is both important outreach and part of what makes archival work so wonderful.<\/p>\n

Other outreach activities the CHS undertakes include working with the Cambridge Historical Commission to participate in Cambridge Open Archives, Archives Hashtag Party, and a host of other events that both physically and digitally get the CHS \u201cout of the house\u201d and into the greater Cambridge area.<\/p>\n

In all of her efforts, Hoffman tries to keep social responsibility in mind.\u00a0 For example, when the CHS decided that 2018\u2019s theme would be \u201cWhere is Cambridge From?\u201d she realized that answering that question solely from the CHS\u2019s collections would present an incomplete, cis-, white, male version of Cambridge history, and reached out to other archives with more diverse holding to help fill in the gaps as the organization told Cambridge\u2019s history.\u00a0 The CHS has also taken on a finding aid verification project that involves bringing finding aids up-to-date and when necessary rewriting them to make them more reflective of the collection\u2019s content, especially content concerning historically marginalized content creators or significant subjects who in previous versions were not given their due space in the finding aids.<\/p>\n

Maggie Hoffman strives to follow the CHS\u2019s mission of using Cambridge\u2019s past to understand and imagine its future.<\/p>\n

For more information on the CHS, please visit their website: https:\/\/cambridgehistory.org\/<\/p>\n

For more information on the CHS History Cafe\u2019s, see here: https:\/\/cambridgehistory.org\/events\/2018-history-cafes-and-walking-tours\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Jasmine Bonanca How can I talk about what\u2019s in our collections and make sure that I\u2019m bringing that forward into today and really getting people to ask serious questions about it?\u201d The Cambridge Historical Society (CHS) is an organization eager to connect the Cambridge community\u2019s past to its present, and Maggie Hoffman is the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Meet Maggie Hoffman, Archivist at the Cambridge Historical Society”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":433,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[30374],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historical-societies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/blogs\/lis476\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/blogs\/lis476\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/blogs\/lis476\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/blogs\/lis476\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/433"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/blogs\/lis476\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=413"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/blogs\/lis476\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":414,"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/blogs\/lis476\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions\/414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/blogs\/lis476\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/blogs\/lis476\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slis.simmons.edu\/blogs\/lis476\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}