School Archives Give Students Unique First Hand Experience
When Ben Leeming began teaching his Honors Thesis in History elective, he had to rely on Harvard University and other off-site archives to give students hands-on experience with primary source material. Now, thanks to the work of school archivist Dave Burzillo, Leeming can bring his students just across the street to see what a functioning archive looks like.
When Rivers celebrated its centennial in 2015, Burzillo – a veteran history teacher, coach, advisor, and parent of three Rivers alumni – took on the additional role of archivist and tasked himself with researching best practices of successful archives in order to assemble and organize a comprehensive archive of Rivers’ history. Located on the second floor of the barn between Willis House and the Head’s House, the Rivers archive is filled to bursting with yearbooks, transcripts, photographs, newspaper clippings, and publications dating back to the school’s earliest days.
Now that these relics are organized in a way that is accessible to students, Burzillo has opened the space up this fall to Leeming’s class of dedicated history students. The course is built around a term-long research paper where students pursue a topic they are particularly passionate about, but the classroom sessions revolve around best research practices and studying the work of studying history.
On Monday and Tuesday of this past week, Burzillo gave Leeming and each of his students an archive box filled with materials from a particular year and charged them with going through the containers to see how items are sorted and stored. This experience will prepare them for their trip later this year to Harvard where they will look at their vast collection of relics and meet with their archivists.
With the collection growing by the day, Burzillo is excited by the possibilities the archive could present to students in terms of independent studies or senior projects.
“A key purpose for the archives is to have student in there as much as possible,” Burzillo said. “I would love to have kids in there getting community service hours, working on research projects, doing an independent study, or eventually a course where they have an opportunity to write a research paper on Rivers’ history. Eventually I would like to have standing open hours, but I am more than willing to accommodate anyone that is interested in spending time in there.”
The information contained in the archives served as a major source for the book Rivers at 100: Celebrating the Past, Building the Future, which details the first 100 years of Rivers history. Click here to visit our Centennial page for more information about the book and to see selections from the archives online.
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