The fourth annual Oregon Archives Crawl will celebrate all things dusty, yellowing and sumptuously crinkled next Saturday, Oct. 18.
The event, which collects and displays precious archived materials from numerous sources around the city, will be spread across three venues: the Multnomah County Central Library, Oregon Historical Society and the Portland Archives and Records Center.
The event will run from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at each respective location, and will be brimming with historical information and special goodies. Archivists from more than 30 participating organizations will be on hand.
There will be tours of the facilities, tabletop exhibits, and talks on projects, research, activities and collections. Door prizes will be given away throughout the event.
Cris Paschild, head of special collections for Portland State, said the event is great for people who are interested, and for people who don’t know that they’re interested. Generally these collections are open by appointment only, but at this event they’ll be exhibited as an open house and the public will be able to chat with archivists.
Oregon Historical Society will offer postcards of nearby historic locations, which participants can visit between the crawl’s three locations. Visitors can also get their passports stamped and enjoy free admission to many of the galleries, including Worth/Worthless: Valuing our Collections and Plastics Unwrapped.
Jim Carmin, a special collections librarian, will be providing tours of the John Wilson Special Collections room at the MCCL. There will also be an Ask an Archivist table where visitors can ask any questions about organized personal or academic research projects, or alleviate any burning archival related questions.
Along with the crawl, there will be a Home Movie Day, an international event in which actual home movies are screened by and for the public.
Home Movie Day will be hosted locally at the Northwest Film Center on Oct. 18 from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. It’s the perfect opportunity for anyone who might have some dusty rolls of film (16 mm, 8 mm and Super 8 film, but no videotapes).
Matthew Cowan, an archivist for OHS, said some people bring a single reel while others will bring whole boxes. According to Cowan, the key is to get people to bring in home movies, but many people show up to enjoy watching the movies others bring. According to Cowan there’s even a home movie bingo with squares like “mustachioed uncle.”
Portland State is holding a similar, smaller event on Oct. 24. The event will be held on the first floor of Branford Price Millar Library, at University Archives and Special Collections. There, visitors can see medieval manuscripts from the 10th century in an early form of Arabic called Kufic, rare books and more contemporary materials that document the development of Portland as it is now.
This year the city of Portland wanted to focus on multiculturalism. Visitors can see the Rutford Family Collection, which recalls the history of a three-generational African-American family of Northeast Portland. Records date back to the 1890s and recount their involvement in the NAACP and church groups.
Millar Library will also have its Oregon Public Speakers Collection on display, historic audio tapes from university records since the establishment of the Black Studies Department.
