Technician Editor-in-Chief Amanda Wilkins sat down last December with Josh Hager, a graduate student in public history and graduate assistant in the D.H. Hill Library Special Collection Archive.

Amanda: What can you do as a student in public history?

Josh: I am training to be an archivist, which means that I work with rare books and rare manuscripts. People in public history are training to be, in general, a museum curator,…a person who does historic preservation. There is also traditional history that we take classes in, and that is a track for master’s degrees. You can go on and get a doctorate and be a professor of history. There are many options within the field.

A: What do you plan on doing with your degree?

J: It’s actually up in the air right now. I’m tracking to be an archivist, but I may end up doing a traditional degree as well later down the road. No matter what [I chose] my public history degree will be done in May to have an archivist degree.

A: What do you do here at the library?

J: I am a graduate assistant in the research service’s department of special collections in University archives, which means I held facilitate researchers working with rare books, rare manuscripts. Unlike the rest of the library, we deal with patrons who can come from anywhere. In the rest of D.H. Hill you have to be affiliated with N.C. State or buy a card to be affiliated. Here you can just walk in off the street, in public, you can come from anywhere around the world, and we help researchers from around the world. Just recently, we did a 1,000 page reproduction request for a PhD candidate in Israel.

A: About what?

J: She was actually researching the history of biomathematics at N.C. State. She’s doing several case studies of biomathematics at universities around the world. She chose N.C. State because of its prominence in science and she said that we had some of the best service of any archive she’d ever contacted.

A: What other things or cool stories do you have?

J:  Recently we had a class come in working on an art project. I think it was a design class. They used books that are special because of the way that they are designed and printed and bound instead of their content which is unique. Usually we hold books for their information. They used books as old as the 1500’s and as modern as a few years ago. They had a wide array. We’ve had queries on things that are famous like ex-governors, prominent alumni. I’ve had queries on not-so-famous things, like right now I’m working on a query about a number of herring in a certain fishery. I’ve had a query on various research projects involving intracies of the digestive system in cows, which is what State has records on, of course. As a reference archivist you get whatever the public wants and you can never anticipate it. As an undergrad I worked at Duke and one day we would have a query on the most prominent figure in Methodism, John Wesley, and the next day we would have a query on Playboy. You never know.

A: What is your favorite part of the job?

J: My favorite part of the job is the moment when you see that the researcher has gotten what they want. It’s very gratifying. It’s cool to use the materials. It’s very nice to use rare books and rare manuscripts, and all of my fellow archivists would agree with that, but as a reference archivist particularly my best moment is when researchers ‚Äúget it,‚Äù when they find that one thing they’ve been  looking for.  Sometimes it happens in person, or the e-mail patron. The Israeli patron I e-mailed with directly. Her e-mail response was that it was exactly what she was looking for and was spot-on. It’s the perfect combination of gratification through service and historical gratification. It was great.

A: I just got finished talking to [Todd Kosmerick, University archivist] down stairs, he showed me the special vault. That was really cool.

J: The vault is the secret side. I get to work with the public side. Either way is fun. I would like to say, if this is on record, a lot of undergraduates here in History or in CHASS in general, think that usually in CHASS your thinking you’ll go for law school or into teaching. Public history is another alternative for anybody in CHASS. Not just here, but any place that has public history. You get to continue working with Humanities, we have English majors in our department, history majors; we have people who have done forging languages. I’ve a second major in French. One of my colleagues is a second major in German, which helps you with some of the manuscripts you work with. You get to continue your humanities studies, but in a professional field. It’s a really good alternative if you aren’t tracking toward teaching and you aren’t tracking toward law school or some other professional school; public history is a really good route to go.

A: Is there anything else that you would like to add about the special collections?

J: We are growing. Public research services is getting more patrons every day, and we encourage anybody at N.C. State to go to the website through lib.ncsu.edu and use the find function to find our collections and Historical State [the website where the special collections are available online], which has all our yearbook images and of course catalogue, other digitized information, as well as our collection guides where you can figure out anything we have and anybody on campus and their friends and family are welcome to come use the materials. It’s a really great experience. If you have a research goal in mind, it’s always fun to just come in and say you want to see a book. Try to have a use for it, but we encourage anybody who has an inclination toward research to use the material. It’s really a one-of-a-kind experience, and it’s a cool excuse to do something fun for a class assignment that might not otherwise be that interesting.

A: I really appreciate you helping me [in September]. The chancellor’s spread, I don’t know if you check out the Technician, but the puzzle pieces were made with the information I gathered from the Technician things that you had given me from the Archives.

J: I see it every now and then. I didn’t get a chance to see it that day, but I appreciate your putting it in there.

A: Well, I came out because I wanted to see the old Technicians, and put the information my predecessors came up with to use. The 1975 [edition] was actually really interesting. I wasn’t expecting them to do a special section on the chancellor and the previous chancellors. It was really interesting, and definitely rewarding.  

J: See? That’s what we do. We provide people with the things they don’t expect to find. We have one-of-a-kind materials that you can’t find anywhere else.