Oberlin, a place that prides itself on being a school of political activism and social change, should understand its own history, and that process is best achieved through student engagement. The legacy of professors and students, the mark of protests and student organizations, and the music and art that is made on campus are all elements of Oberlin’s history that slowly disappear without documentation.
College third-year Finn Sipes and College fourth-years Marta Abrams and Marco Syrett have been working with Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing and Communication David Gutherz, OC ’09, as media associates on a project surrounding Oberlin’s digital archives for the past two years. Most recently, the media associates have been responsible for transcribing large volumes of guest lectures, commencement speakers, and interviews that have taken place at Oberlin in the last several decades.
The three students first started working together last fall in a class taught by Gutherz, WRCM 220: Writing for the Ear. Through that class, Sipes, Abrams, and Syrett were properly introduced to the Oberlin College Archive and Special Collections and had the chance to engage with some of their works. From there, an interest in the history and creative potential of the Oberlin archives guided their work with Gutherz.
When Gutherz taught a second installment of the class, Sipes was a teaching assistant. In addition to assisting with the needs of the class, Gutherz encouraged Sipes to work on her own creative and narrative projects. In the process of proposing different projects, Sipes and other students found themselves recording events and elements of everyday campus life that weren’t otherwise being documented.
“ We realized there was a big issue,” Sipes said. “We realized how little was being done to keep events that were happening on campus recorded. … There would be no pictures of events. … It’s hard to even hear about events and then, if there was an event, there was no recording of it.”
Gutherz collaborated with Special Collections to digitize and present a handful of audio recordings to the students to be transcribed and technically enhanced. Sipes, Abrams, and Syrett have been organizing and transcribing these recordings, some of which date back to the 1950s.
There are 12 works, which are now being displayed on the Oberlin College Libraries website, that include an audio file and a PDF transcription. The 12 pieces that have been published are just a small portion of what Sipes, Abrams, Syrett, and other media associates have been working with, and just a fraction of what the Oberlin College Archives maintains. These recordings include a speech from E.E. Cummings at Finney Chapel in 1958, a speech from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1964 on the future of integration, a speech from Cesar Chavez while over a thousand Oberlin students were in the midst of a hunger strike, and a number of other lectures and talks with prominent figures, all of which took place on Oberlin’s campus.
These recordings are not just special because they took place on our campus, they are special because they are documentations of historical figures and moments of time that are larger than one college’s history.
“ It’s not just Oberlin history,” Syrett said. “It’s world history. A recording of Martin Luther King is an incredibly important document.”
Most students that engage with the archives come by way of a particular class. They will arrive with a specific focus for their research and staff at the archives will be able to provide them with documents and recordings to search through. Making audio archives available online poses challenges.
“We have to be concerned about, you know, the rights, who owns the rights to the recording and so forth,” College Archivist Ken Grossi said. “It is a broader issue that we face, especially when you don’t have release forms that go along with recordings to specify how you can use a particular record, and that is not the case with a lot of these [recordings] because they were done 30, 40, 50 years [ago].”
Often, the contracts that were signed with the guests that have come through Oberlin include limitations to who is allowed to hear the recordings and how they can be distributed. The contents of these contracts, along with the limitations that come of the property ownership of these recordings, make the larger goal of accessibility challenging.
The desire to make Oberlin students aware of these resources comes from a deep understanding of the Oberlin archives as an educational and creative asset.
“ The fundamental goal is simply to help Oberlin see and hear itself,” Gutherz said.
“ We don’t wanna use the archives just as an academic resource,” Sipes said. “It should also be a creative resource because the human voice is so interesting, the way people talk is interesting. It’s very musical.”
In speaking with the media associates and Gutherz, this idea of a loss in institutional memory seemed to surface a number of times, and, in discussing further with Grossi and Visual Resources Collection Curator Heath Patten, this idea of loss seems to really be a problem of disconnect. The Oberlin College Archives have been around since 1966, and while the digital era has proven a new set of challenges for archivists around the world, the act of preservation has not stopped.
“Oberlin students were often saying to me that they felt that there was this great loss of institutional knowledge that they didn’t even know what [Oberlin] was like five years ago, let alone 10 years ago, let alone 50 years ago,” Gutherz said. “So I’m always looking for ways to create new bridges to create that transmission.”
In a time when us young people are constantly being berated with news of genocide, war, unstable democracy, and the threat of an uninhabitable planet, it’s hard not to feel like we are going through this alone. But we’re not, and these struggles are not new, and history gives us perspective.
“There’s not no hope for us right now because it’s a new issue that we’re dealing with,” Sipes said. “I think there’s hope in that. And getting to hear that is, I think, really important to a student population.”
Sipes explained that pieces like Nikki Giovanni’s talk from 2002 and Kwame Ture’s lecture from 1996 remain relevant and valuable to Oberlin students today. The historic contexts and arguments should be further engaged with by current students.
“ Working with audio archives is really rewarding because of audio’s ability to transport us into these different times,” Syrett said. “So we’ll sit down to do transcribing and we’ll put our headphones on, and also because we’re inhabiting the same space that these people did when they gave these talks, it’s very easy to kind of travel back.”
“ The accessibility is not only rendering them digital, but rendering them legible and easy to engage with,” Gutherz said. “So that’s why we felt it was so important to have transcripts, to build metadata around them, to make them searchable and all these ways that we’re still working on making them more accessible because simply being digital doesn’t mean accessible.”
Sipes, Abrams, Syrett, and Gutherz continue to sift through hundreds of recordings and documents that they hope to bring closer to students.