The Primary Source - Winter 2026
Contact Us
Archives & Special Collections
archives.speccoll@wwu.edu
(360) 650-7534
Letter from the Director
Greetings from Archives & Special Collections! We are pleased to bring you a new edition of The Primary Source with the latest updates from our staff and programs. In this issue, we share bittersweet news about departing colleagues, but also celebrate our graduating student employees, and introduce both a student-curated exhibit and a new credit-bearing course offering from A&SC.
In staffing news, and as some readers may be aware, Elizabeth Joffrion retired at the end of Fall Quarter after 13 years as Director of A&SC. It is an understatement to say that she is missed immensely. Heartfelt congratulations to Elizabeth on a remarkable career, including myriad contributions to this division, Western, and the archival profession. We wish her a long, happy retirement and adventures ahead!
In mid-February, we also said farewell to our wonderful colleague David Schlitt, who has excelled and impressed in his roles here as Judaica Project Archivist and Special Collections Manager. It has been a joy to work with David over the years: he too will be sorely missed, and we wish him all good things in his new position as Special Collections Accessions Librarian at the University of Pennsylvania.
Although a time of transition for our division, we remain buoyed by and committed to our work. This newsletter centers in different ways on A&SC connections with students and on student success. We thank our student employees and interns who lend their time, skills and enthusiasm to the work of this division. Three graduating seniors (congratulations to Mya, Dexxtor and Francesca!) were generous in sharing pieces about their experiences and past projects for this issue. Their words underscore the incredible contributions of our student employees, and ways that campus work opportunities can help shape career paths.
Additional points of connection with Western undergraduates include a student-curated exhibit in Special Collections, our new “Exploring Archives and Special Collections” course, in addition to ongoing support for visiting classes and student researchers throughout the year.
We welcome any questions about the work and collections of A&SC, and are always pleased to see or hear from you.
With warm regards,
Ruth Steele, CPNWS Archivist and Interim Director, Archives & Special Collections.
Reflections from Student Employees
Mya Phelps, Marine Science major (Winter 2025)
I started working at University Archives before I knew exactly what an archivist did. I studied Marine Science, so working at the archives was unlike anything I had ever done. Despite this, I still decided I wanted to apply.
I had the opportunity to learn many new things about not only how records are stored and handled, but also the importance of preserving knowledge. Getting to know my coworkers and supervisors, working individually, and getting to experience a different field of research made the job so much fun. I am very grateful for the time I got to spend working at the archives!
Dexxtor Kudia, History/Social Studies major, Political Science minor (Winter 2025)
During my time at the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies I worked on a range of projects from digitizing early 20th century newspapers and photographs to updating collection labels and processing record additions.
I am optimistic about my career path after my experience with CPNWS. I plan to pursue further involvement in the library field and look forward to continuing my connections at the archives while engaging with the local community and also expanding my network abroad.
The academic, social, and emotional support I received was instrumental to my success at Western. I found community in the archives for which I am endlessly appreciative. The staff of Archives & Special Collections are like family to me and my experience was truly phenomenal.
Francesca Breneman, Political Science major, Sociology minor (Winter 2025)
Working in Special Collections was a deeply formative part of my experience at Western. I was lucky enough to stumble into the position during my first quarter at Western. Due to the unfortunate circumstance of my brother and father both holding BAs in history from WWU, I opted out of pursuing the same degree and chose to major in political science and minor in sociology instead. Despite that decision, I have a longstanding appreciation for history and began considering archives as a career during my senior year of high school. My time at SC revealed the depth of my passion for the care and keeping of antiquities, and my pursuit of political science allowed me flexibility to execute that fascination.
My position in SC was that of general gopher and assistant, a role I thoroughly enjoyed. In a single day, my duties could vary wildly between repairing books, conducting research to locate new materials, helping with reference, matching campus photo collections with decades-old spreadsheets, and organizing master’s theses to move to the basement archives.
My job was utterly enthralling, even the mundane task of re-shelving books, darting from corner to corner of the vault and discovering materials that are striking in their beauty or age or content. I was constantly reminded how lucky I was to work there with those materials. When I carefully glued the spine of a book back together, I found myself marveling at the me of only two years ago who held a love of books and history in an abstract fashion. The me who exists now has a love of history that is firmly rooted in the present through the daily handling of remains of the past and working to secure their existence for the future.
I could never perfectly plan out a shift which was just how I liked it. An unexpected patron could appear, a leak in the vault could derail the whole day, and I could never guess what new fascinating book would cross my desk. The wide gamut of duties allowed me to accumulate skills and experience across the spectrum of archives and special collections work.
Every day in SC was a gift. The sparks of quiet but exhilarating discovery, the patient guidance of my supervisor, the satisfaction of a job well done when a delicate book was returned to the shelf, snug in a well-made box—those moments helped structure my life at Western and I will hold them dear as I forge ahead into my future.
New Course: "Exploring Archives & Special Collections"
In fall quarter 2025, Western Libraries began offering a new undergraduate course. Taught by Michael Taylor (Special Collections Librarian) with guest lectures by Ruth Steele (Archivist, CPNWS) and Tony Kurtz (University Archivist), the course will be taught again this coming fall (2026) and is intended primarily for students interested in learning about archives and special collections as a potential career path. It also explores selected holdings in the Libraries’ Archives & Special Collections division as a way of demonstrating why and how these materials are collected, organized, preserved, interpreted, and made available.
After an introduction to the subject, a lecture on the history of archives and rare book libraries, and tours of Special Collections and the Goltz-Murray Archives Building, the sixteen students who enrolled in the course learned about the basics of what people working in this profession do. Hands-on activities and discussions provided opportunities for them to put theory into practice and get a taste of the kinds of decisions they would have to make as future professionals.
In the unit on acquisitions and appraisal, for example, students were given several unprocessed collections and learned firsthand why archivists cannot keep every single document. From there, they gained a better appreciation of how challenging it can be to describe materials that an archive or special collections library does decide to keep, and why most repositories have digitized only a small percentage of their holdings. Several class discussions were centered on scenarios that helped students see that there is not always an easy answer or solution to situations that archivists and librarians face, especially when it comes to security and disaster response.
Towards the end of the course, students watched Unarchived, a documentary about various community archives in British Columbia. Afterwards, they discussed the strengths and weaknesses of community archiving and reflected on the film’s criticisms of institutional archives. They were also given several “you be the judge” scenarios in which they had to decide how to respond to hypothetical cases of replevin and repatriation, deepening their awareness of the complex challenges they will be sure to encounter if they go into this profession.
“The hands-on learning was the absolute best part about this course,” one student commented in the course evaluation, while another wrote: “I just wish I could keep taking classes here at Archives & Special Collections.” Three students from the course are currently enrolled in our new credit-bearing internship program and plan to apply to graduate programs in library and information science later this year. We are thrilled to be a part of their learning experience and look forward to seeing where they go!
Centuries of Caricature: Critiquing Cultural Conflicts
A new exhibit featuring 19th– and 20th-century caricature from Europe and the United States is now open in Special Collections (Wilson 6). Co-curated by students in Julia Sapin’s Exhibition Theory and Practice class, it is available for viewing Monday-Friday from 9am-noon | 1pm-4pm, and by appointment. Contact Special Collections Librarian Michael Taylor at taylo213@wwu.edu | (360) 650-3097 for more information or to schedule class or group visits.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our volunteers and student employees for all they do in support of Archives & Special Collections. We would also like to thank the many individuals, families, and organizations who have made generous monetary gifts and contributions of collection materials.
Image information:
- Image of Mya Phelps, courtesy of Mya Phelps.
- Image of Dexxtor Kudia, courtesy of Dexxtor Kudia.
- Image of Francesca Breneman, courtesy of Francesca Breneman.
- Image of "The German Tango," from Louis Raemaekers, The Great War: A Neutral's Indicment, available in Special Collections.