Princeton University Library (PUL) and the Princeton University Art Museum welcomed 15 students and five faculty members from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to campus for the 2025 edition of the Research, Equity, Archives, Curation, and History (REACH) program. 

REACH is a two-week program run through a partnership between the Library and the Art Museum for students to immerse themselves in archives and museums, in which they learn behind the scenes of the day-to-day operations of a University Library and Museum, from the curation of collections through the technical services work, to doing research in archives and Special Collections.

“Often students from underrepresented backgrounds don’t feel welcome in archives or are intimidated by archives,” said Lexy deGraffenreid, Assistant University Librarian for Special Collections, Technical Services. “REACH helps to show these students that their experiences and histories are represented in archives, and to help them think critically about what’s in archives and museums so that they can take that knowledge back to their careers and institutions.”

“REACH has been fruitful because it’s shown me the importance of preserving stories in an empowering and a liberating way,” said Jeninya Holley, a recent graduate from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

“This is particularly important right now because we need to show that archives and museums are for everyone,” said deGraffenreid. “Everyone’s histories are represented in the archives and these spaces help to preserve and provide access to a very broad and diverse representation of human history.”

In collaboration with the Art Museum, Library staff curated a series of workshops, activities, and speakers that encouraged participants to question how we talk about history, and what can be done to ensure access to objects and artifacts in libraries and archives for years to come. 

During the second week at the Art Museum, students were asked to consider what it means to display an expansive collection of art in a university setting. 

“As a research institution devoted to prompting inquiries in equal measure to explanations, does the Museum have a responsibility to interrogate exhibition, acquisition, and interpretation practices?” asked Janna Israel, Mellon Curator of Academic Engagement.

The second week of the REACH program considered these timely issues while introducing participants to the inner workings of a university art museum and a variety of museum careers and opportunities, including a broad array of installation practices and procedures, curatorial methods, design, art handling, and interpretation to explore and reimagine the stories and resources offered by museums and galleries.

“This program offers a unique opportunity to students who attend HBCUs that they don’t usually get at their institutions,” said Jason Gibson, a REACH mentor and History Department Chair at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. 

“Princeton offers a robust pool of experiences for students to thrive in this archival space,” Gibson added. “I had a student who attended REACH last year, and because of something she experienced here, she changed her entire senior thesis.”

Updating Toni Morrison’s “The Black Book” 

Students were thrust into thinking about what aspects of the Black experience in America they would add to Toni Morrison’s “The Black Book.” Published in 1974, the book is a visual anthology of historical and cultural milestones, ranging from familial records and artwork to photographs and advertisements. 

“I’d add this marriage license from 1871 to The Black Book,” said Lonnie White, a recent Morehouse College graduate. “It represents the ability to certify your marriage as an African-American post-slavery.”

While some of the items on display were quickly chosen as necessary inclusions for the book, others were left open to interpretation and needed further research. 

“There’s a lot of absence in this photo,” said Reference and Outreach Specialist and session leader Emma Sarconi of an unnamed photo of a Black couple in Red Bank, New Jersey. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a story. Who is worth keeping information on? Can we find another way to tell their story without knowing their names?”

Archivists for a day

In keeping with the theme of figuring out how to tell stories in archives, the processing session led by Will Clements, Phoebe Nobles, and Amy Vo placed participants in front of newly acquired materials that have yet to be accessioned into PUL’s Finding Aids.

Because archival records are collected in all kinds of formats, they can feel more organically created than traditionally published materials. 

But that also means that archivists are tasked with creating metadata to describe the collections, often with limited information about the nature or context of the included items. 

“What archivists do is work to make these items accessible, comprehensible,” Clements said. 

Thus, REACH participants were asked to try and describe various archives. One archive, the “Dhoruba bin Wahad and Robert Boyle Collection of FBI Files”, include some 110,000 pages of redacted FBI and NYPD photocopies about the Black Panther Party.

These papers were only recently acquired by PUL, meaning the students had an opportunity to interpret and describe them through their own lenses. 

“The officials kept painting the Black Panther Party as violent people, but these records only cited the community breakfast program,” said Condoleeza Semien, from Dillard University in New Orleans.

“What’s so violent about free breakfast?”

Why do archives matter?

Amidst the wealth of collection materials and deep conversations about library best practices, the REACH students and mentors revisited a throughline: that libraries and archives need people to do the work. 

“When you have a repository that doesn’t have consistent people working in it, some items end up in the wrong place, like this photo of Einstein at Lincoln,” said Raquel Lightner, University Archivist and Records Manager at Lincoln University. 

In describing an archive, the students agreed it needs to be contextual, protected, and sacred. It needs to be the place where researchers can go to find the pieces that tell stories. 

“The archive is many things at once,” Sarconi said. “It’s both an idea and an actual place. And we can talk about the archive in theory, and in practice.”