By Wendy Korwin, Archives Services Manager
Some days – especially during spring field trip season – bright voices bounce off the concrete walls of the Ohio History Center. The hollow space of the second-floor plaza fills with school groups taking a break from exploring the exhibits. Grown-ups pair students with the correct lunch bags. Some groups even have nifty matching t-shirts.
Meanwhile, one floor above, my colleagues and I tend to work to a less boisterous soundtrack: the whoosh of the HVAC; genealogy questions discussed at the reference desk; staff chit-chat and coffee-making; slightly squeaky carts wheeling materials from the closed stacks into our work spaces. The difference can be jarring on days when I emerge to grab a bagel from the café (archivist carbo-loading). This place is alive.
This contrast is, in part, what inspired our Archives Services team to develop an exhibit about how young people inhabit archival spaces. They’ve always been there – in the records of state-run institutions, family collections and more. But we haven't always thought to look for them, or to make them very findable. In 2022, manuscripts curator Matthew Benz published a blog featuring kids’ faces and voices that he had discovered while working with our collections. Several of the documents from Matthew's blog are now on display.
As archivists, we work by arranging items, describing and categorizing them. The majority of our collections have been written and donated by adults, and it's usually adults who use them. But young people are also creators – as well as editors, publishers, and curators! Many child-produced artifacts are challenging to pin with a singular label. What's the best way to catalog a ledger that a doctor once used to track patient accounts, but later became a young girl's sketch book? How about a handwritten, mimeographed newspaper that a teenager made for his neighbors? In some cases, the documents young people create offer a counterpoint to adult narratives. In others, kids might reimagine texts in ways that disrupt the ordered world that adults like myself work to construct.
We invite you to view this new exhibit for yourself up on the 3rd floor of the Ohio History Center! See our hours and plan your visit here.
