DU’s Guardian of Memory:
Kate Crowe's Influence on Archival Preservation and Student Curriculum
Outside the door at Room 101A, on the University of Denver library's first floor, Kate Crowe presses a few keypad buttons and walks toward the back. Rows of tall gray shelves line this room, filled to the ceiling with files, cookbooks, and broken reel-to-reel decks waiting to be used for parts. The room stores an assortment of books and trinkets on moving storage racks, each equipped with a manually operated spin handle.
Crowe, DU’s curator and archivist, spins the handle on one of the shelves and reveals two rows of brown cardboard boxes. She takes a lid off one of the boxes, which is part of what’s called the “Jewish Consumptive Relief Society Collection.” The files are labelled with hundreds of names: There’s Max Matlin, Anna Kachanick and Louis Eller. All were patients who’d immigrated to Denver more than a century ago, in a last-ditch effort to save their lives.
“There are probably tens of thousands of patients on these shelves,” says Crowe, 43, who came to DU 17 years ago from Emporia, Kansas. She held one of the Jewish Consumptives Relief Society (JCRS) files. In the early 1900s, Crowe said, discrimination against Jewish individuals was prevalent in society, particularly in healthcare. Institutions like the JCRS were created to provide care for Jewish patients who’d faced discrimination, providing them with a safe respite—in an arid part of the United States—for recovery.
Among those who came to Denver was Sadie Marmeltstein, A 25-year-old from Utica, New York. Crowe held Sadie Marmelstein’s file in her hand. The young tailor had been sick for 20 months before arriving at the JCRS. Sadie’s file provides other information such as her mother, Rose Marmelstein and her address in Utica, New York.
Crowe carefully slid the files back into the cardboard box. Each one gave another snapshot into a life lived more than 100 years ago. “At its core, these archives are extending community memory,” Crowe says.
DU’s collection JCRS Collection is just part of a larger DU archive, which includes more than thousands of papers, books and artifacts. This stored a variety of sound recordings, manuscripts, films, and a surprisingly large collection of cookbooks.
Before her time leading the archive, Crowe studied library science in Kansas, at Emporia State University. Both her parents were librarians, and Crowe jokes that her chosen occupation is due more to a “lack of original thought” than anything else. “I saw the possibilities of having a job where every day is a little bit different,” she says.
Crowe was hired in 2007 as a project archivist for a temporary, two-year position cataloging and digitizing athletics photographs along with simple management of specific archival content. A year and a half into the job, a full-time position opened that would allow her to oversee processing and cataloging. She was appointed to it on an interim basis; four years later, she was appointed the collection’s curator.
Crowe's job leads her to be hidden away on the lower floor of DU’s library most of the time. But, when students make their way to her with questions about specific historical topics, Crowe helps locate documents, photographs and other miscellaneous artifacts. “I think the most important thing is the thing that builds up the evidence to help someone answer the question they have,” Crowe says.
Crowe isn’t sure when the archives collection began, “sometime in the 1940’s” she says. Initially, the archives were designed to collect items that could be used when writing media releases. Over time, though, the collection grew. The materials began to include records of the school, faculty and other community events.
These days, donations mostly come from alumni, current or previous DU staff, and others involved with the university. Crowe reviews the materials and decides if they belong within the DU archives. Crowe wants the donated materials to be honored and justly represented in their new archival home. “My priority as an archivist is that the donor and the materials find the best possible home,” she says. “It’s like match matching and the home may not be [DU] for a variety of reasons.”
Crowe’s predecessor didn’t incorporate the archives into students' curriculum. After taking the curator job, in 2013, Crowe created an ambitious plan that would make the university’s archives into a hub for student learning. As part of a curriculum partnership with professors across campus, Crowe wanted to use the archives as a place for critical thought and analysis. “I want you to have a better understanding of the place that you all are paying to be at, often a lot of money to be here,” Crowe says. “The main goal is to use the collections that we have to help [professors] meet the class goals and to create really engaging experiences for students.”
Rob Gilmor, 43, is a writing professor at DU that has worked alongside Crowe for ten years. He teaches a writing and research course, ‘Student Life and Campus Space.’ The class is held on the library’s second floor. The archives and special collections help the students through their hands-on research process. “Explore silences and gaps in the historical record and explore what it means to recover lost stories and voices,” reads the course description.
Gilmor sees his work with the archives as an extension of Crowe’s vision, albeit a work that’s still in progress. For the past ten years, Gilmor has been refining and evolving the class curriculum to incorporate the archives into its coursework. Gilmor’s students learn the research process, especially how to make sense of their collected data. Students put together small portfolios containing data, analyses, and summaries of their findings. As a final project, students create digital exhibits that showcase their chosen research topic in the theme of the student experience at DU at some point in its history. “Students can make a legitimate contribution to the body of knowledge we have about the past in general and about DU in particular,” Gilmor says. “It’s an opportunity for students to have a real voice in telling the stories of the DU community.”
On one side of the classroom, the windows look out over to the Transfer house across Evans Avenue. Bordering the other side of the room, the windows look to the rest of the library. In today’s class, students had their exhibit drafts taped up on either window surrounding the room to emulate how a real exhibition will look and read.
Each draft had a 75-word description along with photos. At the front of the room, Professor Gilmor's slideshow displayed the three levels of ideas: Reference the artifact, connect it to the story, and put it in context. “How does this particular artifact fit into the bigger picture and story you are telling?” Professor Gilmor asks the class. Students partnered up to read their drafts and with colored pencils, they began reviewing and editing each other's work.
Professor Gilmor went around the room assisting students, answering questions, and providing feedback. One student, Emerson Longi, 19, stood by his work listening to Professor Gilmor’s feedback. “Enrollment hits high: 5716 now registered,” was written in bold at the top of his draft.“You are missing that second level, how does it affect DU?” Professor Gilmor says. Professor Gilmor re-reads Longi’s draft and continues to scribble revisions in an orange-colored pencil.
Longi seeks to answer questions surrounding how the Veteran's return to DU affected campus life. How did the increase in students affect classroom quality? How did the housing crisis affect larger problems that veterans and their families faced after WWII? How did sharing housing affect student and social life around campus?
Longi is a finance major taking Professor Gilmor’s writing course to fulfill the common curriculum requirement. “But, it’s cool to get to do all this archival research even if it doesn’t go outside of DU or anywhere else,” Longi says. Longi and his peers continued to chat away about their drafts and write out colorful revisions between the lines of their writing.
Back in the archives this past winter, Crowe spun another handle on a bookshelf. These shelves had no boxes. There were books of varying sizes, large cardboard tubes, and mysterious items wrapped in foam. One of these mysterious items sat at the end of the shelf wrapped in a white styrofoam cover. “We've called it variably, like an antiphon or a gradual, it's this enormous choir book,” Crowe says.
The book took up a whole shelf for itself. Crowe puts her hands around the styrofoam to show how large the book is. “It takes two people to get it out and the only thing that is structurally sound enough to open it onto is something like a book cart,” Crowe says. The book itself is from 1530 Spain and contains different chants that were created and probably used in a monastic context.
Walking out of the bookshelves, Crowe passes several reel-to-reel decks scattered about. Some are in working condition, others sit collecting dust waiting for their parts to be taken out and reused. The archives don’t receive many reels to play anymore. These reels can range from personal recordings to business recordings, or even commercials. Crowe makes a spinning circle motion with her hands “There is one reel with the tape on it and one reel to take up the tape and there is a tape head that reads the tape,” Crowe says.
Every day Crowe gets to explore something new because no day is ever the same. Some days she is processing and digitizing files, other days she is guiding a class through their research projects. Archivists like Crowe are vehicles of preservation, culture, and memory. “It’s rewarding to do valuable, critical, interpretive work with the collections, using the collections as evidence in different formats,” Crowe says.
“Memory matters; documentation matters,” Crowe says. “Accountability matters.”