* This is an archived copy of a previously released newsletter*
Fall 2024/Spring 2025
Welcome to our newsletter!
We’re so excited to share a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on at St. Olaf’s Special Collections & College Archives. The stories featured here are just a fraction of what we do!
Exhibit Highlight: 150 Years of St. Olaf History
To celebrate 150 years of St. Olaf history, Paige Ewert and Jillian Sparks assembled a virtual exhibit of 150 items and documents in the archives. Grouped by decade, the selected items provide a bite-sized taste of our shared history and the types of materials held in the College Archives. Check out this awesome exhibit here!
Left: Students bobsled down Old Main. Right: The Brass Band performs in front of the Hong Kierkegaard Library (from the Felland Glass Negatives Collection).
Instruction Update
I knew the 150th year would keep us busy, but I did not anticipate the large amount of people we would get to connect with this Fall! Thanks to all 606 of you who visited us during our Homecoming pop-up exhibit, at our “It Came from the Archives” pop-up exhibit, and our exhibit receptions for Cheers to 150 Years! and The Expanding Renaissance. It was a delight to share our collections with you!
I am grateful to all of the instructors who chose to partner with me this semester. We offered 36 classes in total! Zines were a huge draw this semester! Students from Corporate Finance (Ali Esther), Intro to Gender and Sexuality Studies (Lau Malaver), FYS 120: Love in History (Averill Earls), and Hip Hop Feminism (Dana Horton) worked with myself and Ezra Plemons to learn about zines and then make them in our makerspace. I was delighted to print cards on our BookBeetle press with Nora Vosburg’s German Media Literacy students! And very glad to work with Eric Becklin (Asian Studies and History) and my LITS colleagues Sara Lynnore and Ann Schaenzer on the Qing Ming scroll annotation project once again.
A special shout out to Nancy Thompson, Christina Spiker, and D’Angelo Christian in Art and Art History! The 35 students in Nancy’s The Expanding Renaissance course curated a beautiful virtual exhibit using materials from our Special Collections and the Flaten Art Museum. Christina’s History of Photography students kept our reading room busy looking at scrapbooks. Kristell and I both enjoyed chatting multiple times with Christina’s Making Museums Matter students about our professional work in libraries and archives. My biggest thanks to D’Angelo for bringing his beginning and intermediate photography students to the Special Collections and College Archives and for giving me the opportunity to teach bookbinding to the intermediate students. We’ve held a record-breaking 21 sessions together over the past 7 semesters! I’ll miss working with you, D’Angelo, and I wish you the best back in California!
Here are the Fall numbers!
Number of classes: 36
Number of students in classes: 819
Number of events: 4
Number of people at events: 606
Contact time: 59 hours
Jillian Sparks
Distinctive Collections Engagement Librarian
College Archives Exhibits
150 Years of St. Olaf History: Curated by Paige Ewert ’26 and Jillian Sparks, Distinctive Collections Engagement Librarian. To celebrate 150 years of St. Olaf history, we have gathered 150 objects and documents from the St. Olaf College Archives.
Cheers to 150 Years!: Curated by Jillian Sparks. Toasting St. Olaf College history with cups, mugs, and more from the College Archives! On display in Rolvaag Memorial Library Fall 2024. Read more about the exhibit in the St. Olaf News.
Jillian Sparks holds the mini teacup that is on display in the “Cheers to 150 Years!” exhibit.
Christmas Fest: The Growth of a Legacy: Curated by Briar Bell ‘24. According to the Christmas Festival homepage on the St. Olaf College website, the festival has been ongoing since 1912. But what is the real story behind Christmas Fest? How did the Christmas concert of a liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota, become the event it is today: a multi-day, live-streamed, radio and TV-broadcast musical celebration, hosted in Orchestra Hall, with hundreds of performers captivating thousands of listeners every year? Enter the exhibit and dive into the archival history of the event so integral to the St. Olaf identity.
Life on the Hill: Curated by Students in Kari Lie Dorer’s Fall 2024 First Year Seminar course. The collection features an expanded timeline of the College’s history. The students shared their virtual exhibit during this year’s Founder’s Day celebration.
Practicing Democracy: 150 Years of St. Olaf Student Civic Engagement: Curated by Flaten Art Museum staff. This fall exhibition featured materials from the College Archives.
Special Collections Exhibits
Hasegawa’s Whimsical World: Curated by Anika James ‘25, Laura Smith ‘25, and Dr. Christina Spiker. The online site and physical exhibit examines over 20 Japanese crepe paper books held in Special Collections. Completed as a summer 2024 CURI project.
The Expanding Renaissance: Curated by students in Nancy Thompson’s Fall 2024 ART 257 course. The seven virtual exhibits explore printmaking and printing technologies in the Renaissance, the iconography of Christ and religious imagery found on the altar and at home, the dissemination of scientific and humanist thought, and the evolving attempts to map the known world. The students researched materials in both the Flaten Art Museum and the Rolvaag Library Special Collections.
Many thanks to the students, faculty, and staff collaborators who have helped showcase our materials across campus and online!
Students from Kari Lie Dorer’s FYS class present their digital timelines of St. Olaf history at this year’s Founder Day celebration.
Jillian Sparks
Distinctive Collections Engagement Librarian
We are sad to say goodbye to our graduating seniors, Sophia Hayes and Lauren Schilling, but we know they will go on to do great things! Here are their plans after college and favorite memories as students and student workers at SPARCS!
Where will you go from St. Olaf? Do you have any future plans?
Sophia: I will be pursuing a career in secondary social studies education. I hope to one day pursue a graduate degree in either library sciences or history.
Lauren: I am currently waiting to hear back from graduate schools for various American Studies and Art History programs. I am waitlisted at the University of Texas at Austin for an American Studies Ph.D., and I just completed an interview at Kent State University for an M.A. in Art History. I plan to attend graduate school to continue my research on the Meat Industrial Complex, exploitative labor practices, and the speciesist roots within the industry. I’m still figuring out what I want to do post-graduate school, but I love working in archives, art collections
What will you miss most about St. Olaf?
Sophia: Definitely the people! The relationships I have formed with faculty, staff, and other students have had the greatest impact on my time at St. Olaf.
Lauren: I will miss spending time with my close friends regularly, Sunday morning slow flow at River Flow Yoga, and yummy crepes at Raven’s Nest Cafe. I’ll also miss when the leaves change on campus in the fall.
What skills will you take away from this job?
Sophia: SO MANY! This job has required me to get better at time, task, and project management. I gained more experience working on a team in a professional environment. I have also learned things like web design and digital asset management.
Lauren: Working at the archives affirmed how much I love conducting research. This job taught me a lot about navigating collections databases, which will inevitably be a part of my graduate studies and future career.
What is your favorite memory from working at SPARCS?
Sophia: One of my largest projects has been working with library professionals to get digital assets uploaded and accessible to the public. It really warms my heart when I can see that these materials are being used and have a positive impact on the lives and work of alumni, faculty, students, and the greater Northfield community.
Lauren: Our conference room chats as a whole team, bonus points for when there are treats (when are there not)!
What was your favorite project during your time working for SPARCS?
Lauren: I had a lot of great projects throughout my three years working alongside the SpArcs team, but my favorite project was working with the Flaten Art Museum (FAM) for the Practicing Democracy exhibition. I worked simultaneously at the Flaten Art Museum as a Collections Assistant and as a Curatorial Assistant during the planning stages of Practicing Democracy. As a ‘double agent’ between the Archives and FAM, I got to intimately know portions of St. Olaf political and student activist histories. I got to know the exhibited archival materials very closely while navigating my various positions in the cross-departmental collaboration. I started the project by pulling archival materials, met with my co-curators to narrow down which materials to exhibit, de-installed the work, and then rehoused each item in our Special Collections and Archives spaces. I was honored to see the project in all of its unique phases across different departments.
To learn more about St. Olaf alums, contact the Student Associate for Archival Support at college_archives@stolaf.edu.
Sophia Hayes ’25, Lauren Schilling ’25, & Louisa Lamarre ’28
It’s been a seven-year sprint in Special Collections and College Archives as our newly formed unit and staff raced to meet the needs of an ever-changing community about to celebrate its 150th anniversary.
In that time, we leveraged all the support and expertise we could muster: from individual donors to state and federal grants, and from the vast expertise of our library and IT staff to external consultants in the archival and conservation professions. We assessed our collections, began conservation of the most fragile materials, and built a new facility to keep them secure and preserved. Drawing on the expertise of our LITS colleagues, and grant funds that allowed us to hire 4 descriptive archivists and 2 librarians, we’ve built out FRAM (our finding aid for our archival collections), began a retroactive description of our archival collections, and enhanced Catalyst records for many items in the Library’s Special Collections.
Jillian Sparks, teaching across both Special Collections & College Archives, has developed a thriving engagement program, aligning pedagogy and practice with emerging educational trends by working with faculty to integrate materials from these collections into the classroom, and into pop-up and rotating physical exhibits on campus, and student-curated virtual exhibits available worldwide. As the College’s Lead Archivist, Kristell Benson determines not only the intellectual structure of the College Archives but also its governing policies. In this aspect of her work, she regularly intersects with the College administration to ensure the policies and activities of the archives align with federal law (examples of relevant regulations include FERPA, HIPAA, and Title 17/Copyright Law), and the ethical frameworks of the profession. We’ve also strengthened our relationship with our partners in the Norwegian-American Historical Association and its archive, working together to serve researchers of Norwegian immigration. It’s been an exciting ride!
Construction of the new vault!
Recently we moved a couple of our popular collections to the new vault, the Felland Glass Negatives (left) and the Norwegian-American Newspapers (right).
Now we’re poised to begin another major step forward. With the vault complete, more than ten thousand archival boxes containing STO’s historical records, 3-D objects, letters, papers, plans, photographs, scrapbooks, and other preserved ephemera are moving into the vault, where they will join rare, antiquarian, and fine-press books, medieval manuscripts, artists books, and broadsides. Meanwhile, the work to describe our 100+ year backlog continues: In November, we hired our first full-time, permanent descriptive archivist, Ashley Taklo. She’s recently finished describing her first collection: the department records of Social Work and Family Studies! With Ashley on our team, we can make an ever-growing body of College history available to researchers, regularly increasing access without relying solely on grant-funded projects.
We’re also preparing to move – with our NAHA colleagues – into shared space that includes offices and work rooms where we can continue to accept, process, describe, and prepare items coming into the collections; where we can prepare materials for transport to our conservation and preservation partners; and where we can develop exhibits, hold classes, and welcome researchers who want to use the materials in our care. This change is no small thing: we’re now teaching 50+ courses, mounting/hosting 10+ exhibits and events, and fielding 200+ research appointments and inquiries each year. Since 2022, there have been more than 20,000 searches of our newly-digitized, web-accessible content. And, we’ve accepted hundreds of departmental transfers and community donations, adding them to the collections.
Inhabiting the new spaces will allow us to work more efficiently and effectively, and to better serve our community of learners and thinkers. We’re thrilled to see our vision becoming reality, and to be stepping confidently into St. Olaf’s next 150 years!
Fram! Fram! (Onward! )(Onward!)
Mary Barbosa-Jerez
Head of Strategy for Library Collections & Archives
Our colleagues in Marketing and Communications have showcased the College Archives several times this Fall. Check out the articles below for further reading!
Have a question about college history? Ask the archivists!
Cheers to 150 Years!
Celebrating and archiving the stories of queer Oles
A special sesquicentennial Founders Day
Edited by Louisa Lamarre ’28
Student Associate for Project Management and Strategy Support
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