Originally Published in the Cecil Whig
“Order out of chaos,” that’s how Dr. Terry Snyder describes the work just completed by her students at the Historical Society of Cecil County around several paper document collections that they organized and made available for public scrutiny. Those collections included old photographs, tax records, road books, and an Elkton police blotter. Dr. Snyder is the Librarian for Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania. But it is in her capacity as an adjunct faculty member in the University of Delaware Museum Studies program, that she utilizes her 30 years of experience with special collections to teach her students “how to deal with materials in theory and practice. I teach them how to contextualize, assess, organize, appraise, and value paper based collections. I teach practical skills through hands on volunteer work at local institutions. The program prepares students for careers in public history.”
One of those local institutions is the Historical Society of Cecil County. Dr. Snyder explains that her students looked for ways to help the society “build its collections.” She says “organizations collect material in order to preserve them and they preserve them in order to make them available, so we can foster cultural understanding.” To that end, from the get go, “students begin to make recommendations around describing the material, cataloging it, creating finding aides, and arranging it in a way that is user friendly and excites access.” The goal, Dr. Snyder says, “would be to create that larger cultural understanding.”
One collection the students reviewed was a batch of World War I era documents. Dr. Snyder says it “was that of Theodore O’Brien, a box of records that came in without order. Students sifted through the material. They understood what the concepts were, what was being covered, then they grouped the materials: military correspondence, personal correspondence, military records, photographs, military decorations, keeping the like materials together, and creating an inventory. So, the next time someone comes in (to the Society) interested in World War I, the person working at the (Society) can look at the index and say ‘we have these records and here’s where you can go to find them.’”
According to Dr. Snyder, it’s that “here’s where you can go and find them” statement that’s key to Society efforts.
“One of the attributes that we discuss around the value of an organization and its special collections is that a free and democratic society relies on access to many types of records. The value of history,” Dr. Snyder points out, “is that we study the past in order to understand how we got to the present and that enables us to make informed choices around where we want to go. So the value of the past isn’t to celebrate it in its own right, but to understand and make informed choices about the future. The degree to which we have access to records really helps with those choices.”
Dr. Snyder says she sees a lot of good things coming from the students’ work at the Historical Society of Cecil County. “I think places like the (Society) collects and documents a community and understands what the fabric of that community is and allows it to understand itself for its strengths, possibly for its weaknesses, and then helps it forge a path forward that makes sense to that community. So I think it’s extraordinarily important to collect material, but without making that material available, it’s a lot less meaningful.”
Dr. Snyder adds that “it has been a great privilege and a great pleasure to work with the Historical Society of Cecil County to examine the historic fabric of Cecil County and appreciate the generosity of access to the collections that (the Society) has offered us.”
As Dr. Snyder’s students wrap up their projects, they are making their findings available through social media, web sites, blogs, and finding aides. All of these will eventually have links on the Society web site at www.cecilhistory.org.
We thank Dr. Snyder and the students with the University of Delaware Museum Studies program for their work in organizing and making available several of our collections.