Today in the Curatorial Corner, we’re featuring our archivist, Graciela St. Onge, who is reflecting on our summer archives move.
As the opening of the newly constructed Bruce Springsteen Archives & Center for American Music (BSACAM) building gets closer and closer, there is still much to do, especially with regard to our archival collection. Thankfully, one of the most daunting tasks we were facing was completed this summer: moving the bulk of our archival collection from the small cottage where it has resided since 2011 to an offsite storage location. While the next steps for our archival collection, such as migrating to a new archival management software and then moving it into the new building, are equally as daunting—the first hurdle has been cleared. The small, former residential house held the vast majority of our archival material for a decade, and as visitors to this house can corroborate, we were bursting at the seams and quickly running out of space for our vast collection. We’ve known for some time that we would eventually need to move every single item out of that house, but that task always seemed too far in the future and borderline mythological. But with some intense planning, Lowy’s moving company, many helping hands, and a lot of elbow grease, we were able to conquer this Herculean task in a matter of days.
As the archivist, the weight of the responsibility of the move became all too real as I stepped into the Archives House on a late July afternoon, equipped with markers, sticky notes, and stickers to label each rack full of archive material and their contents for the movers. Labelling everything clearly was imperative, as the movers would have to take each box off its shelf, move it onto the truck, deconstruct each shelving unit, drive everything to offsite storage location, reconstruct the shelves, and place every single box back on the shelf in the original order. To minimize the chaos inherent in any move, we had to make these labels as legible and simplified as possible.
With the unique scope of our collection, we house everything from paper documents to large instruments, stage props, and drywall from now-defunct music venues. Having the items stay in their designated spots was imperative to our future archives audit, so we could not have anything go missing or misplaced in transit. Thankfully, with Denali Lasko and Shannon Whartnaby by my side on this task, we completed all labelling in one workday, just in time for the moving company which would come the next morning.
The next morning, the day of reckoning had arrived. It was 8 o’clock in the morning and already the late July weather was unforgiving. It was time to pack every item in the house and transport it. Thankfully, Lowy’s movers were there bright and early and got right to work, and as the morning went on our student volunteers were there to help organize unprocessed artifacts, move boxes of duplicate periodicals down to the basement, and generally assist with the frenzy.
While we wanted to give this move the attention it deserved, we also had time constraints as we had one exhibit opening soon at the Long Branch Arts and Cultural Center, another opening here on campus, and the weeklong celebration of Born to Run’s 50th Anniversary to prepare for. Much of the first day of the move was spent with staff personally transporting high-value artifacts to our various storage locations and continuously making decisions on the fly. This part of the process was mentally strenuous for me as I knew I was in charge of keeping all of these artifacts safe and accounted for and arranged properly for the audit. A lot of this process was spent figuring out how to make “Future Me” less angry at “Present Me.”
As that initial day came to a close, two rooms now empty, our offsite storage room slowly filling, and nervous energy slowly dissolving, this move was now seeming less daunting. We arrived the next morning, knowing that there was still a lot of work ahead but that we were accomplishing something big for the sake of our future. As the movers of Lowy’s continued packing boxes, student worker Carlee Migliorisi, Denali, and I focused on bubble wrapping framed prints. It seemed like a simple job at first, but once the posters and photos started coming off the wall, it was amazing just how many there actually were. Our once endless supply of bubble wrap dwindled, and we actually had to send someone out to buy more, a fact which still shocks me given the fact that that particular roll of bubble wrap had endured 2 years of constant use. Amazingly, the final artifacts being wrapped coincided with the last of the boxes inside the Archive House. It was time to move the last of the collection to the secondary storage and close the archival chapter for this house.
Our secondary storage, which once appeared as a large empty space, now resembled a library full of aisles of wire shelving, brimming with archival boxes and crates full of artifacts. The unprocessed items were collected into small groups and labelled with identifying information to be used later, the boxes were on their designated shelves, large items were stacked into neat piles, and empty archival materials arranged as if they were in a store. We had finally accomplished one of the most intimidating missions of our development as an archive. The house that had contained decades of artifacts, countless hours of manpower, memories, and visions of students and volunteers past and present, now lay (mostly) empty. A new chapter for this former Archive House will commence soon, as some of our administrative offices will move there in the coming months. We look forward to the opening of our brand-new building which will carry us to new heights, but we cannot forget the roots of our organization which housed both the legacy of Bruce Springsteen and American music for so many years.
