I was at Special Collections at the University of Texas El Paso today. It’s been awhile since I’ve been at an archive. It’s been about two years. After leaving the archive, I kept thinking about how the archive seems to be a place and space of neglect considering that students in Composition courses are not encouraged enough to begin or even to conduct research at an archive. Students are, instead, directed to internet databases where they type a simple keyword, search an article, print the article, read it and then weave it into their research paper. Seems practical for students who are just learning how to do research, right? However, I think it would be ideal to have students engage in hands-on research by working with primary documents they can search, examine, read, and analyze as individual markers of memory and as collective markers of memory about a particular point in time. In addition, it would be ideal to have students write about what information is stored in an archive. Most importantly, it would be ideal to have students answer why an archive has particular information over other information considering a certain body of knowledge’s relationship with time. Also, it would be beneficial for students to ask who visits archives and how an archive is constructed. Furthermore, it would be essential for students to understand some of the rules that govern the search and use of primary documents in a specialized space at a university library. All in all, I’m thinking of the archive as a place and space for memories. It is a significant domain of knowledge that is constructed in specific ways. No longer is the mind the tool from which the art of memory resides, but in the actual archive. The archive is the loci for memoria.
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