An Interview with Kathryn Harvey
Kathryn Harvey, Head of Archival & Special Collections in McLaughlin Library, is finishing up her term as Head on Feb. 14. As a tribute to her 11 years in this position, Amanda Etches, Associate Chief Librarian (Research), sat down with Kathryn to ask her some questions about her career and her legacy over the past decade.
Amanda Etches: What made you go into archives?
Kathryn Harvey: I did my PhD in English at the University of Alberta — a biography of Kathleen Innes, a British feminist pacifist during World Wars I and II. When I was trying to find information about her, I discovered her papers scattered everywhere! Some were in the Friends House Library in London, England (she was a Quaker); some at the University of Reading (which holds the archives of the publishing house Hogarth Press, one of her publishers); some in Andover (where she wrote for the local paper); some in Boulder, Colorado at the Archives of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (she was an international co-chair during WWII); some at the Imperial War Museum (her WWI diaries and letters are there); and some at the Fawcett Library in London (more records of her WWI work with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals). Traces of her were all over the world! That led me to wonder, how on earth do these places get these materials?
After my PhD, I was hired by Dalhousie University to do their first digital archive project, and that really got me into archives before I got into archives. I processed the papers of Thomas Head Raddall and was Project Manager of the digital project about his life and work. Subsequently, I was hired into a full-time position in the archives. I have a minor in Theatre Studies from my undergrad, and I’d been interested in theatre for a while, and Dalhousie has a good theatre archives collection. And then when the Head position came open here at Guelph, I knew I wanted to be here, since we have the best theatre collection in the country! Interestingly, when I was leaving Dalhousie, I was about to approach Daniel MacIvor for his papers because he’s a Nova Scotia local. When I got to Guelph, I discovered that one of our staff members was already processing Daniel MacIvor’s papers! We had just acquired them.
AE: What has surprised you the most in the eleven years that you’ve been Head of the archives
KH: Probably how versatile one has to be to do this work! Situations present themselves that you would never have expected. For instance, when we first kicked off our recent renovation, I went to a workshop in Minneapolis about archival climate controls and I learned all about physical building issues and HVAC systems and “dew points.” That is not something I would have expected to have to know or be involved in! That’s just one example. The job is really multifaceted though and in addition to having to learn about facilities, I also had to learn about a wide range of other things like legal matters, contracts, negotiations, copyright and permissions, licensing, reference/public service standards, security standards, arrangement and description standards, cataloguing — the list goes on
AE: What are you most proud of in the last eleven years?
KH: A couple of things come to mind. One of the biggest is systematizing how we do our work and documenting our departmental policies and procedures. As well, having led the team through our most recent renovation, I’m really proud of how we handled that and came out of it. We had to reinvent ourselves and our service model, which we did! And we continue to do so.
AE: Do you have a favourite item in the collection? What do you love about it?
KH: Possibly the skull. It’s part of the Phoenix Theatre Company collection and was purchased by the company from the University of Toronto’s med school for use in theatre productions like Hamlet. I remember showing it to Christopher Plummer when I gave him and his wife a tour of our department! When he saw it, Plummer mused that he’d like to donate his skull to an archives! His wife seemed dubious.
AE: What are you most excited about now that your term as Head is over?
KH: I’m probably most excited about getting to do the things I wanted to do when I joined the profession. Like processing theatre collections, digital preservation, digital projects, and learning more about born-digital records and how to archive them. I’m excited that I get to be an archivist again!
Photo by Alex Vialette
A version of this article appeared in print in The Ontarion issue 188.2 on February 13, 2020.
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