Woodland Hills High School Library Media Specialist Kevin McGuire teaches a library science internship class, working with students in grades 9 through 12 to introduce them to a variety of library-related skills: cataloguing, processing books, and even archiving materials. Each spring, his students visit the Carnegie Mellon University Archives to dive into the materials and explore what archivists do during a day at work.
After working with archivists Emily Davis and Kathleen Donahoe to learn more about archival processes, McGuire and his students decided to evaluate and digitize a collection of historic materials related to the Woodland Hills School District.
Woodland Hills was formed in 1981 by a court mandate that aimed to desegregate Pittsburgh schools by merging seven separate districts across 12 municipalities. As part of his position, McGuire inherited a collection of materials recording the history of these schools: yearbooks from multiple districts that no longer exist, copies of community newsletters, literary magazines, and football programs, and additional ephemera.
“I’ve realized that there is a great need for archives to preserve local history, especially for a district like ours that’s only been around for 40-some years,” McGuire said. “I get calls all the time from people who went to Scott High School or Edgewood High School or East Pittsburgh High School, who are celebrating a reunion and looking for old yearbooks and other materials that they can’t find anywhere else. I was even once contacted by the production staff of a movie set! It’s so important to be able to maintain access to these resources, and share those memories with the community.”
When he asked the archivists for help with this new project, they were happy to offer their expertise.
Goal
- To learn about archiving and digitization in order to preserve the history of Woodland Hills School District and make it accessible to the public.
How We Helped
- Davis and Donahoe invited the group to the Archives Reading Room on the second floor of Hunt Library. Together, they discussed the way archivists approach preservation. After learning more about the process, McGuire and his students were able to evaluate their artifacts, making sure they kept items that were important to the story of their school district.
- They also explored the process of digitization. The CMU Digitization Lab, which has scanned close to two million pages of resources for the Libraries and the Archives, helped the group get started by sharing best practices. McGuire and his students applied these tips as they worked with their own scanner for the project — a device on loan from POWER Library, an online portal to Pennsylvania library resources across the state.
- Finally, archivists shared best practices related to file naming, to ensure that scanned documents are shared in an accessible way.
Results
- After learning about best practices from the Archives, the club has started uploading scanned documents to POWER Library. This had made those documents accessible to the public — and much easier to work with. “When you digitize these resources, you can search them digitally,” McGuire explained. “A student wrote her name in her copy of a yearbook from the 1940s, and by searching her name, we were able to go right to the page with her photo. We didn’t have to flip through the entire book to find it.”
- So far, the Woodland Hills School District: Past and Present collection includes yearbooks from some of the school districts that formed Woodland Hills: Churchill and East Pittsburgh. The yearbooks are digitally available online for anyone to explore.
- McGuire has a huge amount of documents in the Woodland Hills archive, and expects scanning to continue for years to come. “This is going to take a while,” he said. “But we’re inspired by the CMU Archives — what they’ve decided to save, the ways that they make collections available to researchers. This is important work, and it’s great for the students to be involved.”