by Colleen Jenkins, 2016 Tom Desilets Memorial Intern
I have been focusing lately on the Dennison Mfg Co Archival Collection and I am hoping to complete as much as possible before my internship ends. The overarching concern with the Dennison Archival Collection is its size. The amount of items that were saved in the History Room in California is tremendous and impeccably detailed. It is a little overwhelming to think that all of these documents have to be organized in a finding aid (finding aids are used by researchers to determine whether information within a collection is relevant to their research) for researchers to easily go through. Though it has been a lot of work for everyone involved, the possibility of researching whatever you want about Framingham’s most renowned company is satisfying.
Knowing that Annie (FHC Executive Director) is intending to make the Dennison finding aid available online is very exciting. Each time former Tom Desilets Memorial Intern Samantha O’Connor (Sam volunteers twice a week at the FHC) and I go through a series of the Dennison Archival Collection, we perfect the finding aid. If someone wanted to chart how the Dennison Human Resources Department grew with the company and they keyword searched “HR” in the document, they would be brought to series five, which is everything on the human resource department. This keyword search allows the researcher to search efficiently through the archival collection instead of spending time searching aimlessly through thousands of archival documents. In my experience, finding documents that are relevant to a project can be the most frustrating part of research, simply because of the amount of time you can spend looking at information that could turn out to be irrelevant. The finding aid eliminates that worry because you can find out in an instant whether or not what you want is there.
As a junior at Framingham State University, I wrote my honors thesis on incorporating technology into history teaching, entitled “History and Technology: Taking Stock”. A large part of my argument revolved around how new technological advances provide an advantage to traditional teaching methods. In the common traditional method of lecturing or writing notes on a board in front of students, their opportunity to interact with material is lost.The fact that so many archives have been made available online gives educators the opportunity to easily provide their students with hands on material for understanding of history.
Museums have just as much of a responsibility to utilize their collections in this way. The presentations the FHC does to spread local history are wonderful and so useful to engaging the community. But this second level of opportunity to explore the material on one’s own so they feel comfortable with Dennison before they even enter our collections room gives the people of Framingham the opportunity to see the history of their town in their own way. This enhanced accessibility is what I find really satisfying about the Dennison Mfg Co. Archival Collection. Such a large collection would be overwhelming for someone to approach with little help from those that have perfected the collection, but a detailed finding aid will significantly lessen the amount of research for a student, professor, or researcher.
I truly enjoy that I am a part of something larger, something that will outlast my ten weeks here. I have already agreed to come back and volunteer after the summer is over, because I’d love to see this project finished. Projects like this reassure my love of history and reemphasizes the importance of the work we all do here at the FHC. I hope the Framingham community takes full advantage of this collection when the time comes to debut the finding aid.