One Simmons and New York State of Mind

Posted November 2, 2021 by William Crouch

Alright so I’m finally getting around to our ONE Simmons project. You can probably read more about this here but I’d like to discuss a little more about the student experience with having things a little messy on campus currently. Since I came back in September, the major changes to campus have taken some getting used to, but I’ve learned to navigate my way around the campus. Classes are a little more all over the place currently with some LIS classes in Lefavour, some in the Palace Road building, and some in the Management Building. While I won’t get to be here when it is all said and done, I’m expecting that once the library has opened back up in its proper place, then things will settle down a little more. Speaking of, as someone who has needed to heavily rely on the library’s resources this semester because of my thesis, I’ve been impressed with how they have problem solved effectively with such a reduced space. InterLibrary Loan is still active and has been a great resource for me to find out of print books that are relevant to my research. And despite a smaller space, the library seems to still be providing a great resource for students in terms of research guides, coordinating research, and helping students to find a way to circumnavigate new issues with accessibility that have come about during the pandemic. I am truly grateful for all the efforts that the library staff has obviously put into working around the issues of space and pandemic accessibility that has helped me immensely during this semester.

On the topic of research, I recently took two trips to NYC to get at some archives for primary source material. Due to the pandemic, many archives have pushed back research appointments which has caused many institutions to require appointments months in advance to get through their backlog. The first repository I went to was the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, a black archive that has existed for nearly 100 years! The collection I needed to access was the Arthur Ashe Papers, a collection of material featuring correspondence between Ashe and famous figures and other important documents from his life. After reading book after book and memoir after memoir about Ashe, getting to see the actual items that these were referring to was incredible and made me truly feel like a historian. The collection gave me some important information and resources for how to shape my paper in terms of Arthur Ashe’s impact. The second archive I visited was the Billie Jean King Collection at the New York Historical Society. A similar aura of “wow this is actually the real thing” came over me while going through the collection. Seeing BJK’s items and what she chose to keep like schoolchildren’s letters from the 1970s or a notebook from a history class in 1960 really put into perspective how what someone chooses to keep is important to the person and to what narrative is created by what is kept. Both archives provided great sources of information for a paper that will keep developing as I continue to write. As for how I actually got to New York, the first trip I took an Amtrak train, which was just incredible for someone who has never taken a major railway trip like that. The second trip was much rougher for me. I decided to make a day trip out of it and to save money, I took the earliest flight to JFK at 6am and the latest flight out at 10:45pm. I cannot emphasize enough that you should not do that. It completely exhausted me and taking an earlier flight back would have been much smarter even if it was more expensive. That about does it for this blog. I’m currently in the thick of the writing process of my thesis so wish me luck and see you next time.