Hello! I’m Sam Sfirri, the new Collections Archivist in the Special Collections & Archives team at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University. It has been almost three months since I started in this position, having worked as a digital archivist for the previous five years at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania, and the five years before that as a processing archivist in Special Collections at the College of Charleston. There is a lot to say about starting somewhere new, but thanks to everyone I work with—including faculty, staff, student workers, volunteers, and even the previous Collections Archivist!—I could not feel more welcomed or honored by everyone’s kindness and willingness to help me navigate my way through these early days.

In my opinion, the best way for a processing archivist to get started in a new place is to process a collection from start to finish, to become not only familiar with the collection in question, but to learn how collections have been processed here in the past, to see what decisions predecessors have made over throughout the history of the department, and of course, to get a better sense of how the team works together to make collections accessible to researchers—our ultimate collective purpose.

Four days after I started in my new position, I was scheduled to meet a donor of a small, but impactful collection of documents relating to the efforts of a Baptist student group, primarily from 1968 to 1970. The donor, Stuart Sprague, Ph.D. (1947- ), was a student protester in Baptist Students Concerned, a progressive student group, and played a crucial role in their efforts at the 1968, 1969, and 1970 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meetings. Importantly, Sprague collected and retained the material evidence of these activities and consulted this material for his own research, and upon the conclusion of his research, decided that Wake Forest University, with its rich collection-base of Baptist collections, would be an ideal home for the files for the long-term.

Dr. Sprague and I met on the Reynolda Campus on a quiet, late-summer morning. After spending a short while looking at the documents, with some clarifying questions and comments, we went our separate ways: Dr. Sprague literally leaving behind a piece of his legacy and that of his fellow classmates, and me with the documentary evidence of their efforts, ready to prepare the documents for long-term research use. It was immediately clear to me that this was the collection I should process first. It had everything: it was small and very well organized to begin with, it dealt with Baptist history—a major component of the collections that I am responsible for stewarding—and I had access to the donor, creator, and accumulator of this collection when I had questions.

In an attempt to lead you to the finding aid for the Stuart Sprague Collection of Baptist Students Concerned protest materials (MS 1009), where there is a thorough description of the historical context and the scope of the materials in the collection itself, I’ll keep my description here brief: this collection documents a progressive streak by 1968 amongst some members of the SBC and their interaction with Southern college and university students who grew up in the South, attending the SBC annual meetings from 1968 to 1970 as “messengers” representing their respective Southern Baptist congregations. Their goals was to address the major social issues of the time—including racism, poverty, and war—which would have been otherwise absent from the SBC annual meeting agendas and forums. If this is interesting to you, take a look at the finding aid, request any items of interest, and plan to visit us on the 6^th Floor of the ZSR Library to conduct your research!

As for me, I am simply thrilled to have gotten started working on collections material here at the ZSR Library and am much clearer on how we work as a team, which workflows are already in a great place and which ones could use some improvement, and the invaluable collective knowledge that my colleagues have stored in their brains and in our documentation. It has been such a pleasure to get started and I look forward to writing again soon on some collections and projects that we are working on now!