Student led (Keri Kittleson) interview on the Texas Women’s University campus in the Collection and University Archives room with Archival Assistant: Erica Block
Back ground: TWU is the official archive for several aviation organizations that support and encourage women in the field of aviation. Collections include papers, correspondence, photographs, video, uniforms, and memorabilia. Their official area of expertise that I was interested in researching was in the area of the Ninety- Nines (Established in 1929, the Ninety-Nines, Inc. is an organization of licensed women pilots. The group was named for the original ninety-nine charter members, which included Amelia Earhart, the group’s first president. I also researched the area of Women Military Aviators. WMA is an organization of female military aviators originally established in 1978 (documenting world history of early and present military aviators). It is dedicated to promoting and preserving the role of female pilots, navigators, and aircrew members. Texas Woman’s University serves as their official archive. They also had archives on Bessie Coleman and Marjorie Stinson. Interviewer: Being a Women’s collection archival assistant, what is your main job to help people that come to the archive room for help? Ms. Block: I help researchers of all kinds. I help students, graduate students, doctorial students, and people who have graduated that write books and make documentaries. I guide them through the research process and make resources available to them in order to complete their projects. I am supervised and assisted by Kimberly Johnson, Coordinator of Special Collections. Interviewer: When did TWU start the Women’s collection and how large is it? Ms. Block: The Women’s collection was started in 1932. The president of the university at the time thought that there needed to be a repository of women’s materials. In the mid-2000s the WASP organization chose us to be their official archive, because of their Texas connection. They trained in Texas, and because we are a Women’s University and also a state University. After we got their archive we started collecting more archives on women’s aviation. We are the archive for the women’s military aviators, the whirly girls which are the women’s helicopter association, and then we have many personal collections of pilots as well. The WASP collection has over a million pieces of paper and we have over 200 collections of individual pilots. Some of the manuscripts are three or four folders and some of them are forty boxes. Then we have all of the university archive materials to. It is not the national archives, but it is not tiny. Interviewer: As an archivist how do you feel about history and how it is saved? Ms. Block: We think it’s our responsibility to steward these materials and make them available as widely as possible. It’s not enough to only tell stories once, they need to be retold. We think it is important to keep collecting people’s stories, because in seventy years from now it’s the people that are flying now that information is going to be history. Archivists are generally very worried about how electronic information is going to be stored and saved. People say there is going to be this gap in history, because people wrote and saved letters, and we can never save everything, but we want to make sure there’s enough pieces, so the important things can be re-created. Sometimes there are files saved specifically to be used by one program, but then that program can change where that file is no longer accessible anymore. If something is written down, like a book or papers then the only real enemies are fire, water, bugs, and people. Interviewer: This is the only place I have been able to find original letters, commemorative aviation stamps (Bessie Coleman), WASP uniforms and war memorabilia and original newspaper articles. I did not realize how special it is to see and/or touch things I could only see in a book or online. Thank you so much for all of your time and help today. Ms. Block: You are very welcome. ** Erica contacted Sarah Rickman and is responsible for giving me the opportunity to interview Sarah. |
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