By Finbar LaBelle
Without proper funding and staffing, the City College Archive has become lost in the sprawling Ocean Campus. This underrepresented resource with an unexpected history is located in rooms 335 and 334B in the Rosenberg Library.
Open every weekday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Fridays from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., the library is a place to study and the home of the college’s Library Information Technology and Periodicals Department.
However, few students are familiar with the archives interspersed throughout the building.
A prime example of interest is the Diego Rivera collection housed in R510 — a special collection in its own right. As one of the natural offshoots of building an archive, there is a file on Julian Burgman, a librarian who worked extensively on promoting the City College Diego Rivera mural and the special collection.
This and similar files can be pulled, and students may be surprised to see that the documents begin to build a profile on City College staff and people of importance.
Additionally, for our readership and fellow journalists interested in The Guardsman’s history, most bound volumes of The Guardsman, dating back to 1935, are located upstairs in Room 517.
Anthony Costa, a librarian for over thirty years and City College’s staff librarian, met with The Guardsman to introduce the community to this resource’s offerings.
Before joining the City College staff in 2024, Costa was a librarian for the San Francisco Public Library for 20 years, alternating between most major branches in the city. With his vast amount of library experience, Costa still feels that more attention can be given to the City College archives. “Unfortunately, we are not really collecting much these days. In previous years, when there was more time dedicated to it, the archives hoped to collect all relevant information about the college,” Costa said.
Today, the majority of interest comes from alumni and those interested in logging campus magazines such as Etcetera and the English Department’s Forum magazine. Workers at the Rosenberg library are always pleased to see alumni from all different eras of the college return to see a project they worked on decades ago.
Costa elaborated on the importance of a specialized archive. “We have a complete run of all the City College catalogs going back to 1935. So we get a lot of requests from alumni and departments of admissions and records from not only our college, but from other colleges in the country when former students are trying to transfer their units, graduate, or transfer classes to other colleges. They often want the course catalog description. And, if it’s a course from the 1980s, we might be the only ones who have it.”
Costa added that students can find most materials from the archives on the library’s website via the “collections” tab.
Costa, limited to his duties as a librarian, admitted that with the inconsistent focus on the archives, “I couldn’t really tell you about all that is in the archive. ”
The Rosenberg Library team hopes to draw more attention to the archive and garner a wider audience. The first potential step would be to hire a full-time archivist to preserve and continue the collection.
Regarding the need to make possessions available, Costa pointed to college records where, “you can see many times that we have requested an archivist, but so far, no real action has been taken [by the college].”
Higher attendance and subsequent demand could encourage the college to support the archive. Using this vital resource could combat some direct issues encountered by the library, archive, and staff.
“We generally try to accommodate requests for appointments, but it’s not always possible because of limited staffing budgets. Yet anybody can make an appointment to come,” Costa explained. He mentioned that “the biggest issues that we run into” have all to do with the fact that there is no archivist on staff, and these requests become a “strain on our workload.”
Researchers, students, and alumnus alike are denied requests more often than the staff would like. “Most times, we’re not equipped to accommodate their request. We truly just need another person on staff,” Costa expressed.
The Archive’s History
The Guardsman’s interview with Costa led to correspondence with former faculty member and admin Christopher Kox, who was heavily involved in the archive. Kox only echoed Costa’s sentiments while delving into the colorful and peopled history of the archive.
“At this moment, the budget for the college continues to be very tight because the number of students has declined precipitously over the past 20 years. I am confident that the librarians are doing what they can, under the circumstances, to meet the expectations of students at CCSF. Still, it would be good if at least one librarian were granted about a third of their duties, to manage archives and serve those seeking materials from it,” Kox said.
Kox chose to begin at the, very beginning, 1935 to be exact, when the SF School Department founded City College. Initially, with one location at Galileo High School and the other in the 500 block of Powell Street, both locations were equipped with libraries from their very inception. This was possible from a starter collection of about 3,000 books, gifted from the University of California, and soon after, other gifts and donations followed.
According to Kox, the public sought a new central campus after the donations. “By 1940 or 1941, Science Hall was built on what is still the main campus at Balboa Park. The library was located [there] until Cloud Hall was built in 1953. The library was on the third floor of Cloud Hall, and over the years, other ‘learning resource’ services located on that floor. The library was built with the idea of [housing] the Diego Rivera mural on one of its walls,” Kox said. The mural was earmarked as a gift to the college by Timothy Pflueger, architect of the college and principal involved with Art in Action at the 1939 World’s Fair on Treasure Island. but this did not materialize then, or later in 1995 when the new library, the Rosenberg, was completed. Within the library at Cloud Hall, located within the department of Library Information Technology, was a small “college archive” collection.”
A more solidified archive, although relatively informal, came into place with the hiring of John Few as Department Chair, with duties to maintain it, in the 1980s. John Few meticulously transferred materials deemed crucial to the college’s history from the general library to the archive collection. This effort was supported by fellow librarians, including Terry Alberigi, then the head of the periodical department. Their priority was to include early college catalogs, publications, and the student newspaper dating back to 1935. The collection expanded to encompass documents from the Academic Senate, materials from faculty and classified staff unions, college board agendas and minutes, faculty sabbatical reports, artifacts and trophies, and selections from student activities. Similar to its present state, this collection operated without official funding or college endorsement and remained relatively small.
But throughout the correspondence with Kox, it became blatantly obvious that there has never been proper support for the archive, only people with a large bandwidth and a reverence for archives and special collections.
Flashing far into the future, in 2001, John Few retired from his position in Library Technology and Archives. Kox then assumed both positions. In the 2010s, the college did, in fact, recognize the archives as a “resource,” and just before Kox retired, he made the archives far more accessible by developing the aforementioned library research guide, which he self-described as a “fair reflection of materials in that collection.”
Kox continued, “Indeed, there are still active links from the resources described to some digital material such as photographs, and there are finding lists for publications held in the archive.”
Overall, Kox seemed delighted and engaged in his career at City College and his involvement in the archives. He ended his correspondence with The Guardsman on an optimistic note, egging students on to go discover the treasures of the archive, “Students have always gotten thrilled looking at the newspaper, at old college catalogs, and at photos of students and structures from the past. Fortunately, some photos can be viewed online and the Guardsman at the Internet Archive. I always enjoyed some of the scrapbooks created by members of student clubs in the 1940s and 50s, but these are in very fragile condition today.”
The Enduring Value of Archives
With this being the final issue of the year, this article serves as a broader reflection on the enduring importance of diverse resources and practices, including those that may seem outdated or unfamiliar to our current generation. In an evolving future where the increasing presence of artificial intelligence may influence critical thinking, engaging with the tangible preservation of information becomes a vital practice for discerning truth, understanding historical realities, and maintaining factual accuracy.
The intention with this exploration of archives has inspired an appreciation for these enduring practices, recognizing their potential to safeguard the integrity of truth in a changing world. Embracing valuable aspects of the past alongside technological advancements offers a balanced path forward, keeping important histories alive and tangible.