As a small team tasked with preserving and making accessible the records that comprise the histories of schools, institutes, departments, faculty, students, and staff across a dynamic campus spanning over 8,000 acres, the University Archives works with a select group of undergraduate students hired each year to organize, rehouse, and describe archival collection materials that tell the story of Stanford in all its chapters.
Student processing assistants represent a core element of the Stanford Archives’ programmatic approach to collection processing and serve a key supportive role in rehousing and listing archival materials under the guidance of professional staff. Student assistants also directly contribute to our mission by helping the University Archives deliver collections to address the research needs of current and future faculty and students.
Beyond archival support work, we have found that connecting students with projects aligned with their interests and talents yields more descriptive finding aids, which are ultimately more useful for the researcher. And for the students who were hired during the years bookending the COVID-19 crisis, the University Archives provided a sense of community for those whose campus lives had been impacted by the pandemic.
From 2023 to 2025, the Archives had the great good fortune to engage and work with Evan Miksovsky, who graduated with honors from the Department of History this past June and is currently pursuing graduate studies at the National University of Taiwan. Evan shares his experience as a former University Archives processing assistant below.
Evan Chen Miksovsky, Class of 2025
For anyone wading into the discipline of History, the concept of the archive looms large. All first year students are asked to consider "what does and doesn't make it into the archive": an introduction to contemplating the inequities within a fragile, (mostly) text-based discipline. Meanwhile, the acknowledgements of history books are profuse with gratitude to archivists "who don't often get the thanks they deserve." Then again, historians consider themselves intrepid explorers, venturing into the unknown territory of archival space. In the ideal situation one stumbles upon a revealing document, previously miscategorized or hitherto ignored deep within the annals, and is the first to recognize its significance, to connect it to a constellation of other documents and elucidate a groundbreaking argument. It was only in my third Stanford year that "the archive" transformed from a conceptual invocation into a part-time student job. The silent, focused atmosphere of reading rooms gave way to a bright, airy space on the third floor of Green Library, with a view of Main Quad's swaying palm trees. I worked with pencils encased in neon pink or green, and I rarely wore gloves. When I was not chatting with my supervisors or student coworkers about subjects ranging from Fantasy Baseball to Mexican politics to cats, I listened to a podcast called Normal Gossip or the ramblings of my favorite Youtuber. Amid the floor-to-ceiling shelves of boxes waiting to be processed there was also a box of googly eyes in the spectrum of sizes, from three millimeters in diameter to larger than my palm—I appropriated some of the larger ones to decorate my dorm room, imbuing my lamps and record player with a bit of personality.
As I got to work, the first thing that struck me was the rich variety of material. In my first week, I delved into the papers of Lewis E. White, a member of the class of 1917 whose academic career was interrupted by the outbreak of WWI. An earnest, good-natured student who doodled in the margins of his geometry notes, White corresponded with his family and fiancée, from training camp in Washington State, during his railway journey across the continental United States, and finally during his deployment in Germany where he died. Subsequent projects included cataloging a collection of three hundred lantern slides depicting Palo Alto's earliest days, and sorting through notes of a 1983 convention in which scientists pragmatically discussed the ecological concerns of nuclear fallout. I used genealogy websites to find the full names of long-dead nuns, and traced the adventures of academics to East Africa, Europe, and Asia, exploring both their published pieces and the poetry they left in their wake. In this way, the projects I undertook through University Archives brought me in contact with a much more variegated corpus of history than I ever would have encountered through my research interests alone.
But beyond browsing interesting collections, I soon realized that my position had inherently made me an active participant in shaping the archive itself. Even placing files into an acid-free box, I was already confronted with important decisions. For example: would it be better to organize things chronologically or thematically? At various points, either strategy proved salient, and by judiciously employing both, I could preemptively design a story. In one box, full of papers which touched on themes of student activism, I even reorganized the folders into a sort of hero's journey. Beginning with a folder of glossy university brochures and introductory pamphlets for new students, followed by a folder with flyers accusing the university of underpaying its workers—what Joseph Campbell might term the Ordinary World and Call to Adventure—the rest of the box then represented crossing of the threshold, into a liminal space of floating trials, tests, and alliances. Order is narrative argument, as historians will tell you—here I learned to assemble narrative not through a table of contents but through linear feet.
Beyond the judgements made in categorization, I found another level of decision making in a surprising place: the recycling bin. Amid the clerical detritus that arrives on the processing desk one finds stacks of loose printer paper, excessive amounts of duplicates, post-its with unidentified, illegible numbers. Knowing the infinite creativity of history, where the smallest of minutia provide the foundation for narratives and counter-narratives, where even a stray enigmatic footnote in a manuscript can birth an entire research project, at first the idea of recycling struck me as surprising. And yet within a few weeks, a strange satisfaction overtook me whenever we identified something that could be confidently pared down. I came to accept the fact that, although not everything makes it into an archive, it is also true that not everything should.
On one level, working at University Archives helped me solidify a functional understanding of my chosen major. Analyzing the research notes of a dozen established professors gave me ideas for how to organize my own research; reading their iterative drafts served as a template for my writing process. Moreover, it was through examining professional interactions—colleague feedback, the internal correspondence of conference organizing, or letters of rejection/acceptance from publications—that I gained a better appreciation for how this multi-layered discipline functions, not to mention the evolution of what it finds exciting.
Yet my brief experience with archiving also gave me my own opinions on what history itself ought to be. To identify a promising area of research, historians invoke a certain, vaguely-defined litmus test: "is there a 'there' there"? As I had learned, however, anything in a box is there. It is not enough to merely venture into archival depths, to discover the existence of something curious and interesting, or even to expose great injustices. Rather, history must lend the archive its interpretive creativity: by applying the heuristics we develop through our lived experience, we elucidate a story with universal resonances. Anything and everything can be a scrap of human history, but only by imbuing them with our humanity do such scraps become once again rich with meaning.