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Renovated space completed for Holy Cross
Archives and Special Collections By
Allison Chisolm
 Want
to see a Holy Cross student’s illustrated grade report
from 1845? Review film footage of Crusader football games
from years past? Or read through the early 20th century scrapbooks
of former Boston Mayor and Massachusetts Gov. James Michael
Curley? You won’t have to go farther than the third
floor of Dinand Library. After months of renovation, the
College Archives and Special Collections area recently resumed
operation.
Access to these materials had been limited last year as reconstruction work got
under way. What had been a “warren of little rooms,” according to
College archivist Mark W. Savolis ’77, has been transformed into a modern
facility with 160 percent more storage space for the College’s collections.
Now visitors will find archival assistant Jo-Anne Carr manning the reception
desk, ready to help find the appropriate research materials for their projects. “Ready
reference” materials line the elegant wooden bookshelves behind her, including
College yearbooks dating back to 1907, every issue of the student newspaper since
1925, College catalogs and other publications. Four tables offer scholars enough
elbow room to review their materials.
Beyond the front desk are the rare book collections. “It’s a little
bit of everything,” says Savolis, including incunabula (books printed before
1500) and Americana (books published in America prior to 1829). The library collection
also includes personal papers and “realia” (non-paper possessions)
of historic figures like Gov. Curley, and the College’s photographic history,
from albums of 1980s student musicals to glass plate negatives of 19th century
commencements. The Jesuitana Room is filled with books written by and about Jesuits
during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. In the back are the archives of the
New England Province (see sidebar) and work areas for archivists and student
assistants to process new material.
Planning Ahead
The planning for these renovations began in the early 90s. “We ran out
of space years ago,” says Savolis. “I found letters from the early
1980s that said we would be filled in a year or two.”
Built in 1923, Dinand Library was renovated in 1977; by the mid-1990s, it was
clear that the third-floor home of the College archives and special collections
needed help. The air conditioning system had problems, and there wasn’t
an inch of spare storage space for the growing collection of materials. It was
time to undertake another renovation.
The layout of the rest of Dinand’s book collections meant that the special
collections had to remain on the third floor. The weight of all those books and
papers presented a problem: how to achieve maximum storage space while remaining
within the building’s floor load limitations. The solution was compact,
movable shelving—bookshelves that move along a track when cranked apart
to access their contents.
The consulting engineers told the shelving contractors what weight the building
structure could bear, and the shelving contractors drew up plans.
What Holy Cross needed, Savolis learned, was about a mile of shelving not only
to house its collections but also to anticipate future requirements. “We
have a lot of material,” Savolis says with some understatement.
Hard Hats, Long Waits
By mid-June 1999, the construction brought the usual work
of the archives to a complete halt. Most of the collections were boxed up
and moved to two rooms
in the library that had been emptied as temporary storage areas—the Debate
Room and the Faculty Room. According to Savolis, each room held rows of boxes
stacked about 30 feet long, 30 feet deep and four feet high.
Normally, he says, “we evaluate material as it comes in, process it and
make it available to researchers.” During the construction, members of
the staff handled requests as best they could, drawing on the collections’ most
frequently used sources that had not been put into storage. Often, they pointed
visitors to the College Archives Web site, which outlines the contents, folder
by folder, of a few collections and also features “Holy Cross: A Photographic
Perspective” with a series of photographs from the Archives.
“Eventually, we hope to have a good deal of the collection up on the Web,” says
Savolis.
Renovation work included the installation of a new heating and air conditioning
system, carpeting, handicapped access ramps and a larger, user-friendly reading
room.
Critical to any library storage system, the storage shelves proved to be a bump
on the road to renovated archives. Their construction and installation delayed
the project about three months, says Savolis.
Finally on site and in good working order (even during a recent power outage),
the new shelves rise seven rows to the ceiling, each shelf 42 inches wide, with
eight shelves per row. The top shelves remain empty for future expansion.
Moving the collections box by box, both into storage and out again, involved
approximately eight-to-10 library staffers, plus six building employees on the
actual moving day. “Everybody was working pretty much full time to get
this ready,” says Savolis.
To complicate matters, the elevator broke down the day the boxes were scheduled
to return to the new space. So the boxes moved another day.
But opening day arrived at last. By Nov. 15, everything was out of storage and
back in the archives, according to Savolis. “Now we have a really nice
place for our patrons.” Treasure from Weston moves to Dinand
The archival
material for the New England Province of the Society of Jesus,
was originally housed at Campion Center in Weston, Mass.
The formal development of an archives was initiated in 1996
when the Provincial’s office in Boston recognized that
the material should be assessed, processed, and properly
stored in order to record the history and growth of the New
England Province from its earliest days to the present.
“The Jesuit Province asked me for advice on what to do with their archives,” recalls
Rev. Paul J. Nelligan, S.J., retired College archivist. He explains that he suggested
the collection move to Holy Cross “because we could afford to house it,” and
adds, “Professor Stephen Ainlay, vice president for academic affairs and
dean of the College, was very excited about getting this collection here.”
Fr. Nelligan, Mark Savolis, current College archivist, and a student spent part
of the summer of 1997 packing at Campion Center. The initial 550 boxes gathered
from file cabinets ballooned to 700 or more, once they reclaimed the archival
items “floating around” the facility, says Savolis.
The truckload of boxes arrived in Loyola Hall’s basement in November 1997,
and sat untouched until the Province hired a professional archivist to begin
the painstaking process of cataloging it all. Fr. Nelligan expects it will be
a five-year project.
Project archivist Steve Urgola came to Holy Cross in June 1998 and got right
to work. Using directories put out by the 10 provinces around the United States,
he established five basic categories of materials: records of the provincial,
foreign mission records, province treasurer files, Jesuit house/community papers,
personnel files, and personal papers of individual Jesuits. Many of the papers
need to be sorted chronologically, as well as by subject.
Project archivist Rachel Segaloff has taken over where Urgola left off last July.
She’s still processing the records of the provincials, placing the material
into acid-free folders and boxes and creating a finding aid for these records.
“It’s a pretty straightforward collection representing an organization,” she
says. “But there’s the bonus of the personal papers, a large number
of photographs and videos. This adds a different flavor.”
Unusual among the records for foreign missionaries’ work are 16mm films
and videotapes. The New England province had missionaries in Iraq from 1932 until
1969, and continues a missionary presence in Jamaica today. While they have not
yet been viewed, the visual materials should offer a fascinating perspective
on Jesuit life abroad.
One uncovered item that surprised Fr. Nelligan was a notebook with beautifully
handwritten accounts of Provincial visits to a few Jesuit communities in New
England from 1864 to 1945. Until 1874, those reports were written in Latin.
Segaloff sees many potential thesis projects within the personal papers. Rev.
John Ford, S.J., for example, left 25 boxes of personal material after his death.
A scholar of moral theology, he taught at the Weston seminary for several decades
and corresponded with bishops and cardinals who sought his advice.
Researchers interested in reviewing the archives will have to wait a while longer
as the processing continues. Also, due to the sensitive nature of some aspects
of the archives, access to certain materials will require clearance from the
current Provincial, Rev. Robert J. Levens, S.J.
Over Christmas break, the Province archives moved from Loyola to Dinand Library’s
renovated third floor. The New England Province archives are now housed with
the College’s other special collections. Though the College is providing
the facility to store the materials, the Jesuits still own the material.
Fr. Nelligan plays a key role in cataloging the extensive photographic collection.
A Jesuit for 58 years, he says of the Province’s founding fathers, “Some
I knew; others, I knew people who knew them. I had a familiarity with all of
them.” And once the entire collection is processed, future generations
at Holy Cross will also have that same familiarity.”
Allison Chisolm is a free-lance journalist from Worcester.
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