Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / Teaching Motorsports History: A Liberal Arts Blueprint from McPherson College

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Teaching Motorsports History: A Liberal Arts Blueprint from McPherson College · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

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Brake Fix's History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part
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by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the
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Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of
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Commerce, and the Argettsinger family.
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Teaching Motorsports History at Merfierson College, a three part
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episode featuring Ken Young, Christy Socia, and Jeremy Porter.
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Part 1, Towards a Motor Racing History Curriculum, Ideas from McPherson
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College, presented by Ken Yong.
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Ken Yong is a social scientist keenly interested in how the
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automobile shapes our lives.
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With a Ph.
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D.
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in political science and a postdoctoral work in history and economics, Ken has
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held faculty positions at universities in Japan, Germany, France, and Poland,
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including a sabbatical and scholar in residence at the university of science
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and technology in Lille, France.
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For the past 25 years, Ken has been teaching at MacPherson college in
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Kansas, where he is currently chair of the history and politics department.
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The automotive restoration technology program at MacPherson
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college was established in 1996.
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And since its inception, the curriculum has included the study of technical
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and social history of the automobile.
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Given this experience, Ken addresses how McPherson might inform teaching
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the specialized field of motor racing.
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He will begin by giving an overview of the McPherson automotive history
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curriculum and conclusions about content choices and best teaching practices.
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By examining the comparative scope of automotive history and motor
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racing history, Ken presents areas of substantial overlap and differentiation.
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Finally, he will present suggestions for curriculum and teaching
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practices, and participants will be requested to share their
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reflections on the following question.
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What three key topics should every motor racing historian understand?
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Kenyon has been there for a while now, I guess.
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A lot of students have gone through the school and he's going to give
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you an idea about the teaching the undergraduate aspects of this.
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I want to give you an idea of what liberal arts means and why
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we really think that's the way to approach that for our institution.
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The breakdown of the fields that we use when we teach it and then
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talk about how we Fold history all the way through the curriculum.
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It's not something that's added to the curriculum.
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It's actually permeates it and then some time for questions and consequences.
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So in a liberal arts context, we formed about 25 years ago something called an
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IMG statement and it was a dream of what we would like a McPherson graduate to be.
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And we were keeping in mind that in the long term people change
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careers again and again and again.
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If we were going to prepare people for careers and actually become
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involved in their lives, we had to think in a bigger picture about what
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kind of competencies they needed.
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And it came from so many different directions in different ways.
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You know, one of the ways it happened in our college is we had this unique
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history as a small agricultural college.
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We're the last private college in Kansas that had a agriculture program.
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And so there was a real hands on approach to understanding how you solve
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problems and working with machinery.
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And then, in the early 70s, we had a local car collector who just loved cars.
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And he was a very casual collector.
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He would buy them into auctions and put them in a shed.
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And he just liked to look at them.
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And he came to the College of President and said, I've got all these cars.
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You could probably fix them, couldn't you?
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And the president said, I don't know.
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And the guy said, I've got some money, and the college president
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said, yeah, we can fix those.
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And so they built a building, and they started an associate's degree,
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and then we kind of hit hard times.
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We had a decline in enrollment to college, and we were really trying to sort through
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how we were going to make it financially.
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A problem hit us with turnover in the faculty, and we had faculty
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that were leaving in droves.
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And so we had to figure out how we were going to recruit people to
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stay here with the salaries we had.
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We're in the bottom 1 percent of the United States in salaries.
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And so we had to rethink how faculty relationships work and
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what a job environment was like.
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And so we came to some conclusions about having a flat kind of egalitarian norm.
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It had been with our institution for a long time.
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We had a flat salary structure.
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Every, every rank, every department gets paid exactly the same, which
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is a real anomaly in education.
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We had super standardized promotion credentials.
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We got rid of research as a promotion credential.
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We realized that it had to be all about the students, but it had to
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stop being about the student's degree.
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We concluded it wasn't about the student's degree.
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It had to be about the student's lifetime.
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And so, those kinds of things reoriented, and one of the consequences of that is
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that for the last nine years we've been in the chronicle of higher education runs
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this great colleges to work for program.
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They have 15 criteria that you can succeed in an institution.
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In the United States, there's only five colleges that have been ranked
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in the top tier in 13 or more of these, and we're one of them.
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So, we're one of the five absolutely best institutions to work for.
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in the United States.
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This has a huge spillover.
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Surrounding yourself with people who want to be where they're at
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generates a type of dynamic energy that pours into the curriculum.
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Then we had a new set of challenges we're asking ourselves about exactly
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how we implement this long term career path and we realize that as we're
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looking at ourselves and our faculty, I would just say we have a tremendous
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amount of affection for each other.
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It's like a family, except you like everybody.
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It's such a amazing environment to work in.
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Christy and Jeremy and I have been on the road a bunch lately.
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We went to the KU research library to look at digitizing technology.
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You know, on Monday we're jumping in the car and we're going off
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to Sline and we got together for breakfast the other morning and.
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The faculty and the students were involved in each other's lives.
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My hobby is vintage bicycle restoration.
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So Tuesday nights, I have bike church at my house.
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In restoration, students come over, we get pizzas, and then we work on
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vintage bicycles in my basement.
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Through this kind of collaborative approach to the long term of the
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career, we've created a different set of relationships in academia.
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This here is the heart of a real curriculum.
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A real curriculum, we typically assume to be a set of classes and requirements,
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but the real thing that drives, and by the way, every one of you knows this,
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one of the things that draws you to this is the relationships and the integrity.
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And in this field, there's no substitute for integrity.
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In a field where there's a lot of money at stake and there's a lot of ways
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that people can fudge things, And where long term relationships are actually
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the things that sustain you, there's no substitute for personal integrity.
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And so working with a group of people that are beloved by their
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students transforms the education.
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Because at the very heart of all education, you're asking someone to
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take something that they believe.
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And you're asking them to set it aside and exchange it for what you believe.
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And that's the fundamental dynamic and it only happens in a
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position of trust and reliance.
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I have a lot of things to say about the curriculum of how one teaches it, but it
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has to begin with a process of recruiting.
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And so while we were trying to figure out how we were recruiting, get people
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to stay at a job that doesn't, by the way, our salaries are still low.
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I mean, seriously, we're in the bottom 10 percent of the United States.
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Kansas is in the median.
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of the cost of living, but we still have low salaries, but we have places
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where people love to come to work.
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And so that bleeds over.
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So this is fundamental.
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You figure out how to recruit.
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You have to clarify your values about the careers.
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When you bring people to campus, you have to talk to them about that.
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Honestly, one of the first things we lead off is, this doesn't pay much.
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You need to know it from the get go before you even go down the
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path of even having an interview.
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You need to know up front, this isn't going to pay well.
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Here's our limits and here's our problems and you put them up in front because
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you want people to make sure that they get the jobs that they want to have.
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Not just in recruitment, but in promotion.
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So you have to make sure that the promotion process and the
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incentive process for all of the staff across the whole institution
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is wed to the institutional goals of students successful lives.
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And by successful, what we mean is, the student becoming what they want to become.
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And that's what we mean.
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Of them being developmentally advanced.
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We have five separate fields.
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I was thinking one way to illustrate what a profession in motorsports
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looks like is just to walk around.
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This building, you know, you have the press box and you have the little
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archives and you have people who are doing engineering of the building
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spaces and designing roads and people who are managing crowd flow.
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And if you were to try to assemble all the marketing and all of the different
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kind of talent subsets that go into this one facility, you've captured already
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something that encompasses probably 20 30, the different professional preparations.
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And this is just the tip of the automotive industry.
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So providing a whole breadth of approaches, art and design,
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communications, history, management, and restoration is fundamental
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to this because these are 18 year olds that walk in the door.
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A third of them are there because they like watching fast and furious, but
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we're going to tell them all kinds of amazing things, you know, There were so
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many great presentations this morning, for example, made me think about exactly
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the stuff that we do, thinking about West Virginia motorsports, the context
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of rural life in the West Virginia, up in the mountains and the impact of
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the second world war and the economy, and you have to have liberal arts.
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To do that, you have to have students that go through economics classes, and
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they go through history classes, and they understand what the Great Depression was.
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They roll into the school, you know, thinking Fast and the Furious, and
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then next Tuesday we're looking and dissecting Nazi rocket motors from 1945.
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And they begin to appreciate the depth of the history that's required,
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and the passion that you can have, because it ties to who they might be,
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and who they want to be, and their fascination for the world around them.
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The idea of acquiring research acumen of the desire to be in the
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library are things that flow out of this process of engagement.
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And then the gender issues are something that we put really
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front and center in our teaching.
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When I begin teaching automotive racing, the very first thing I start
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with is Joan Cuneo and Alice Ramsey.
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So we start with women racers as the way of even introducing automotive racers.
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We have to produce students that are prepared for a different
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world than they're coming from.
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And so we need to provide a lot more DEI education for them because their workplace
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is going to be dramatically different.
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We have a notion often that big city kids are more broadly prepared
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than small city kids, you know.
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That's a general conception we have, but it turns out for most people, all
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the way through their lives, they grow up with a small community of friends
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that they associate with, and they spend their time talking to them.
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Whether it's in Los Angeles, you actually have a very small circle of friends
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who tend to be very much like you.
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And then even if you're a small town, you have a small set of
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friends who are very much like you.
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And so, we have a, another bonus of this really broad liberal arts
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program, where they're going to have to ask spiritual questions.
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They have to find out what their moral and ethical compass is like.
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And they're throwing them with people who are dramatically different.
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One London Times bestseller was, just placed us as the number one
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most diverse campus in the Midwest.
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And the reason they said it is because you can't escape people
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who are different from you.
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Because we have 800 students.
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If you go to the University of Kansas, you can hang out with all goth theater
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students who want to wear black lipstick.
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You can have your own little civilization on campus.
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You can't do that where we're at.
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And we have one out of ten students are international students, and
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we place them in the workplace.
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Here's what I mean by history across the curriculum.
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The eight gentlemen that I identified previously represent textiles and
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metallurgy in the classroom, but also I want to let you know they
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come from very different backgrounds.
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Our sheet metal specialist actually was an art historian, and he was
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a sculptor when we hired him.
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He's teaching sheet metal.
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So, we have all these different skill sets and dispositions, but at the bottom
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is this initial sequence of what we traditionally think of as a component set.
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But the component set is a physical component set of the car.
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And so, the classes mirror that, but within each one of them, it has its
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own historical narrative, because you can't understand upholstery, actually,
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completely appreciate it, unless you're also talking about the historical
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development of textiles, and the machinery with which the textiles are being
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processed, the types of sewing machines.
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You can't understand the sheet metal development, the way the cars are
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made, the way they're made, and have the complete understanding
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unless you understand the different metallurgical processes, advances in
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materials development, and the types of machinery that was shaped to steel.
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And so every one of these classes, they're substantive, hands on.
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muscle memory, touching classes.
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They have a lab component of working on it.
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They have a theory component and every one of them has historical
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components embedded in it.
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The social history of the automobile is structured around what I would
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call the historical component structure of the automobile.
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And it's important, and we give this class early on in their presentation,
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and this tends to be for them one of the classes that really opens them up.
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It's a pretty easy case to argue that the automobile is the most
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significant technological change in the history of the planet.
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And that it is a central organizing aspect of every single thing we do in our lives.
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And when you can place the automobile in the context of someone's personal
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lives, it's going to determine who you date, where you work, how
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you spend time with your family, and how you define your family.
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And when you can put it in an existential context of the student's
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present and the student's future, they're ready to step beyond a wrench
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and go out and dig into a book.
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And so this happens, it doesn't matter what field of human endeavor
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you're engaged in, At some point, the automobile is going to be a
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significant question for how you live.
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And so it provides a perspective on history itself.
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And that's the second stage, along with the history of automotive design, which
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is taught by our sculptor, that represent these specialized context courses.
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And then we advance into our research courses in methodology.
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So we want to make sure that we have a blend of hands on and theoretical
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work about the physical artifact.
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And then we need to make sure that we have the research and methodological
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tools of archival, of vetting research materials, of search engines.
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And it can be, even if you have a mechanical bent, you need to
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know what the bolt heads were.
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How were they shaped?
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How are they stamped?
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How many stitches per inch go into the upholstery?
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And so you need research skills to go with that.
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And so we have a three stage process for that, which is an introduction
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to research methods, the technology and society, which is a broader
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theoretical class, and then we have historiography as an advanced research.
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These are all done at an undergraduate.
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There's very few undergraduate sequences where they have four methodology classes.
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I don't know of any programs in the world.
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Let alone an automotive restoration program that have
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four specific historiographic and methodological courses within them.
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And then our senior thesis is, one of the things that we really want
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to do is, we want to make this like into a playground of knowledge.
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One of the essential organizing concepts are, we're going to
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give you specific case studies.
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We're going to draw on specific personages.
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For instance, I have a short list.
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There's only four things you need to know to be an automotive restorer.
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You need to know who Henry Ford is, you need to know what the Model T is, you
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need to know who Harley Earl is, and you need to know who Alex Tremulous is.
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And those four things.
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And if you know those things, that gives you the tools you need because
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you can look at the lives of great men, you can look at the history of
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industrialization, you can look at the artistic expression, the way we
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engage with the car, the development, the globalization of the industry.
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And once you have those case studies, it lays a groundwork where
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you get to do what you want to do.
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And so, it's kind of like presenting a buffet for the students,
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and then you cut them loose.
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And then you say, now, for your thesis, you're going to do anything you want.
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Which includes, recently I've surveyed, uh, supervised theses on the history
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of the banjo, women in piracy, the list, it just goes places it would
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be totally unexpected, but they get to follow their dreams, they follow
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their passions, and they move on the careers that they want to develop.
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And that's our history across the curriculum for the college.
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I know that the field of automotive history is so vast
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that we're scratching the surface.
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Well, there isn't anybody that gets to do much other than scratch the surface.
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If you get a narrow field, you get to scratch a little deeper in one thing.
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But how do you construct a broad appreciation for someone and make
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their life engaged in the content?
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And how do you become a representative of the field?
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And my gut answer is just that as an educator, and you want to convey to
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someone, you have to recognize that you're a bridge between the content.
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and the person, the individual that's in front of you.
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And that there's a real big tendency in some parts of education where
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the obligation to the content swallows up the obligation to the
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person that's in front of you.
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Students are confused, they're unmotivated, they're hungover, they
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have all the things that go along with being a real college student.
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To be the person who's actually going to Take the student that's right in
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front of you and say, that's good.
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That's fine.
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You're hungover today.
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You know what?
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I did that too, you know, and I'm going to accept you and I'm going to just provide
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whatever I can to connect you with this material and help you find your passion.
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My gut feeling is that every single thing I know about, Automotive restoration
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is actually, is a straight parallel for understanding the automobile as a sport.
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Because every one of these elements, there's continuity.
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Because the impact on social structures, the impact on a sport, the impact
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on history, the role of fascism.
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My VP came to me yesterday, she said, we have Mussolini's mistress
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coming to campus in a few weeks.
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Which is the car that Mussolini attempted to flee.
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She says, could you prepare some notes and do a little public presentation?
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I said, yeah, I'd love to.
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Well, thank you.
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Now I have one.
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Things are going so well for us.
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We're all so grateful for how well it's going.
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And we have a whole set of challenges that almost no school has ever had before.
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Some of you know that recently we were given a billion dollars.
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Which is like a thousand millions or something like that.
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It's a lot of money, a billion dollars.
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Right now it's kind of money that's been promised for the future.
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It's in a state so we don't have any of it.
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It'll be arriving, it's dedicated.
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And so we're trying to really ask ourselves, What does this work with?
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What do we do with it?
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What is our dreams?
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What's our possibilities?
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As I was trying to assess that, I started looking at exactly what is it that we do
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right, and why is it that we're working.
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And for some of you in academia, this ties really closely, but actually this ties
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to everybody who's in this discipline.
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Because, when we're communicating with someone or trying to transmit,
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first thing is you have the student experience, and then you have
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your institutional experience.
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environment that you create for the students.
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And so, if you look at the student experience, so you have to have a long
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term view of your complex student.
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A student is a complex creature who's moving into a world that's full of
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mystery and they don't know where to go.
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And Jeremy is grounded and solid.
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We love Jeremy, but Jeremy doesn't know where he's going.
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Sometimes there's a student who goes to college where they know
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where they're going and hopefully they change your mind, right?
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Hopefully they learn something that sets them off in a different direction.
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So you need to have this breadth of the liberal arts.
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So that they're going to be able to read and write.
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We have five writing classes in our sequence.
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Our students can write when they leave.
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And you've got to be able to write.
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And we have public speaking sequences.
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They've got to be able to articulate the automobile as a dream.
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Because this is the language.
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It's the language of dreams.
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That's what the automobile is all about.
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At the same time, you need to provide concrete experiences.
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Eighty percent of our students go through internships across the whole institutions.
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That means psychology students, art students, theology students.
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They go to internships.
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We had 99 percent of our class of 2022 job placement within six months, 99%.
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And we had, of our students who wanted to go to graduate school, we had 90
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percent placement rates in graduate schools because we work internships
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and we work futures and career plans.
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We do that with the events.
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We do that within, so that we have an exploratory process where
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students have different gifts, but they don't know what they are.
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And it's so easy for us as.
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All of us in this room to define ourselves by the things that we can't do.
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You know, I can't do that because I don't have that skill.
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And it turns out that, you know, most of life is just showing up.
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And then whatever modicum of skill you happen to have, you
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figure out how to leverage it.
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When you're working with a group of students where they all have
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different aptitudes, you have to try to just get them up off the couch.
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I heard a really great quote the other day, it was like, nobody
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gets remembered for leaving butt prints in the sands of time.
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You know, the first thing to do is just try to motivate people to get
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off the couch, follow their dreams.
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We have the course content that has to be both substantive and methodology for the
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teach to fish, for the methodology side.
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And then finding the people to work with.
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that actually are ready to be student centered.
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They're ready to make the leap of faith to say this is all about student success.
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And all of your careers and everything that happens, and it
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has to be really technically hard.
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And the people in this room that know each other, that have been together for year
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after year, conference after conference, it's because you know that they're people
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that you care about because you're kind.
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You have to be really soft on humans.
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Humans are frail and humans can't succeed unless you nurture them.
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It was beginning in the 1970s that the NFL started having professional
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counselors, like psychological assistants for every team player.
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Because they realized that it's your emotional structure is what
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gives you the capacity to succeed.
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And especially in college life, most people don't understand that,
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how much college life has changed.
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In the generation since I went to college, when I was in college, you
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know, it was okay for the faculty to say, well, they were unmotivated,
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so I guess they're out of luck.
21:36
They got messed up, something bad happened, and I guess they're out of luck.
21:40
I had a student came forward last week, wouldn't tell me, someone else told
21:43
me, his mother got shot in a drive by.
21:46
She's been in a coma for five weeks.
21:48
If he doesn't come to class, who's gonna stop and intervene?
21:52
The real things that are the barriers to student success,
21:55
Rarely are they about intellect.
21:57
Rarely are they about intellect.
21:59
Usually it's about figuring out how to get up out of bed in the morning,
22:02
trying to find some kind of sense of self worth and self dignity.
22:05
If you have an educational infrastructure that's going to succeed, it actually
22:09
has to deal with that, if you want excellence, and it has to deal with that
22:13
issue of alcoholism and drug addiction in your staff, and your colleagues, and
22:18
personal lives, and divorces, and so it has to be technically hard But it
22:21
has to be humanly soft and that's how you succeed in teaching auto history.
22:31
Thank you, Ken.
22:32
Any questions or comments?
22:34
Do you accept vehicles for donation and what do you do with cars
22:38
when you finish restoring them?
22:41
Yeah, we gladly accept vehicles for donation and in a lot of ways the kind
22:45
of donation challenge that Christy has.
22:47
We've had in the past where people want to send us cars to restore, but
22:51
it's really horrible for them because what we do is when it's time to do
22:55
a certain pull out the cars with that fender shape and we work on it.
22:59
And so were you to send us a car for restoration, we couldn't promise
23:02
it would ever, ever get done.
23:04
So we don't do that.
23:05
When we get cars for donations, sometimes we put them into our archive of cars
23:10
that we use as sample works for students to look at and to understand and as
23:14
teaching tools, you know, for suspension types and engines and radiators.
23:18
And, and then sometimes on occasion we'll, Pick one as a restoration project.
23:23
In the past, we've been giving free auction space at some prestigious auctions
23:28
where we can auction those off and use it to support the education program.
23:31
Maintaining a shop space with all these kinds of resources is really expensive.
23:36
Tools, materials, liquids, paints, and it's an expensive proposition.
23:41
And so we're always looking for You know, I would suggest if there's a box
23:45
up in front, you write a check on your way out and we'll put it to good use.
23:50
Thank you all so much.
23:55
Part two, Cruising Through the Stacks, a special library
23:59
collection by Christy Socia.
24:01
Christy Socia earned her BA in history from Wichita State University and
24:05
her MLIS from Kent State University.
24:07
She has worked in a variety of roles in Kansas libraries for the past 13 years.
24:12
Christy is currently entering her third year as the Director of Library Services
24:16
at Miller Library at McPherson College.
24:18
Her responsibilities include providing library and research
24:21
services, support, and instruction to the entire campus community.
24:24
She also oversees two special collections located within the Miller Library, the
24:28
Brethren College and College Archives, and the Paul Russell and Company Center
24:32
for Automotive Research, which houses the Special Automotive Materials Collection.
24:37
Christy is currently serving as Vice President of the College and
24:39
University Libraries section of the Kansas Library Association.
24:43
The Paul Russell and Company Center for Automotive Research, housed
24:46
within the Miller Library at McPherson College, currently holds over 5,
24:49
000 automotive related titles.
24:51
And this presentation will consider the benefits and challenges of
24:54
curating a special library collection and archives, which supports
24:57
automotive restoration education.
24:59
Christy will discuss the types of materials currently available to
25:03
researchers, the varying processes of obtaining materials, and options
25:06
for organizing the collection.
25:08
Next up, also from McPherson, I don't envy you.
25:15
Holy mackerel, I've been in your shoes having to follow an act like that.
25:18
But anyway, Christy Shania will talk about the archival All right, good afternoon.
25:26
I am Christy Sojka.
25:28
I am in my third year as director of Miller Library at McPherson College.
25:35
It was actually the automotive restoration department that in a
25:40
roundabout way brought me to McPherson.
25:42
I was working as the head of instruction and circulation at another university
25:48
in Wichita, which is where I live.
25:50
It's about an hour south of McPherson.
25:53
And my third oldest son was trying to figure out where he
25:57
was going to go to college.
25:58
And he was looking at some two year associate degree programs in automotive.
26:04
And I had heard about McPherson College's program through some
26:08
library contacts that I knew.
26:10
I can't remember for sure, but I said, Hey, I sent him the link to
26:14
the website and said, check this out.
26:16
And he said, yeah, this looks more like what I really want to do.
26:21
So we went to the campus for a visit for our son.
26:25
As we progressed through that day, I came away with this feeling.
26:30
And I can only describe it as this vibe that I was getting as we met people.
26:36
Everyone we encountered welcomed us, they said hello and this was a community
26:42
vibe that I was not feeling on my current campus where I was working.
26:47
At the end of that day, I said, Riley, I think this is really
26:50
the place that you want to be.
26:52
You know, of course it's your decision, but he decided yes.
26:55
And so he applied, he was accepted and was on his way to
27:00
getting started the next fall.
27:03
In June of that year, I received an email through a library listserv and there
27:09
was a job opening at McPherson College for the director of library services.
27:15
It was my goal to become a library director.
27:17
I kept thinking about this.
27:20
Positive feeling that I had when I was on that campus.
27:24
And so I applied for the job and then I asked Riley, Hey, is this okay?
27:28
He was like, I guess I came out for my interview.
27:31
And one of the people that I got to meet with that day was the head
27:35
of our auto restoration program.
27:38
And she shared with me this plan that had been started at this point for renovating
27:46
a part of the library to dedicate.
27:49
For our automotive restoration materials collection.
27:53
So that was kind of my first introduction to that collection.
27:57
And so I ended up getting the job and I accepted, I like to say,
28:02
follow me for more parenting tips.
28:04
This is how you follow your kid to college.
28:07
If anyone's interested in doing that, that's how you do it.
28:10
But I always show this slide in all of my presentations when I present
28:14
to students on campus, referencing our mission for the library.
28:18
And we're really on campus to provide access to information.
28:22
And then to help our students to learn how to locate, use, and
28:26
evaluate the information that they're coming into contact with.
28:30
I want to give you a little rundown of overall view of our library resources.
28:35
So currently we have about 55, 000 physical items.
28:39
This is our whole collection, including books, DVDs, and periodicals.
28:44
We have 145, 000 ebook titles available to us Currently, this number 10, 500
28:51
is a little different in your program.
28:52
It says 5, 000 active automotive restoration titles.
28:56
This number has actually grown to 10, 500 just in a short period.
29:00
It continues to grow almost on a daily basis.
29:03
And I'll talk about why a little bit later.
29:06
We also have about 60 databases.
29:10
Providing access to thousands of academic journals, streaming
29:13
films, including documentaries, and then more such as newspapers.
29:18
I just added a brand new to us database with the automotive
29:23
restoration program in mind.
29:25
It is Chilton library.
29:27
It will have access to all of Chilton's repair manuals online.
29:32
Although we do have repair manuals as part of our library collection,
29:36
our students will be able to access these from the sheds.
29:39
For example, so when they're out there working on their cars, they'll be able
29:43
to access that important information.
29:46
So when I arrived at McPherson and Miller library, the automotive restoration
29:51
collection was housed in a room.
29:54
It's an okay sized room, but the collection had grown so much that
30:01
the room was basically crammed full of the books and magazines.
30:06
Shelving was like ceiling high and it was very dark in there when
30:09
everything was still in that room.
30:12
It was cramped and there wasn't a lot of room for our students to work.
30:17
The vision was to create a space that would be more accessible to our students.
30:24
Through the generosity of Melanie and Richard Lundquist, who donated
30:29
a one million dollar gift to us to put towards the renovation of a wing
30:35
of the upper level of the library, we were able to dedicate the Paul
30:40
Russell and Company Center for Automotive Research in May of 2022.
30:46
This space has created just a lot more room for our students
30:52
and for other researchers to come and access our collections.
30:56
And I have a little drawing here of our floor plan for the library.
31:00
The plan on the left is our main floor, and this is where
31:04
the former space was located.
31:06
In that room, circled in red, On the other side, you will see the second floor
31:12
where the Paul Russell and Company Center is now located, and it encompasses that
31:17
entire wing of the library at this point.
31:21
So you can see significant size difference.
31:24
A little note on some of our collection, it encompasses a number of periodicals.
31:31
Numerous books.
31:32
Some of the books are very old and very fragile, and I'll talk about what we've
31:37
done to try to preserve those, but also make them available for students.
31:43
We also have a large collection of dealership brochures.
31:47
Going back clearly of the fifties, but I am sure further back than
31:52
that, I'm thinking about a particular assignment that a professor assigns and
31:56
they go back to the fifties on that.
31:58
And then we have a large collection of repair manuals for our students.
32:03
Space wise, we've got a 2, 900 square feet open collection that also provides
32:09
a variety of study space for students.
32:12
It really has made a difference opening this space up on our upper level.
32:18
It is not restricted.
32:19
Any student from across disciplines across campus can feel free to come
32:24
to this space and use it to study.
32:26
It is very bright, very light, but the space houses our
32:31
open part of our collection.
32:32
We also have 1, 296 square feet of restricted space.
32:38
space, which is enclosed in a glass room.
32:41
We keep it locked because these are materials that we consider to be more
32:45
rare, more difficult to replace if something were to happen to them.
32:49
But we do provide study spaces within this room so that our students and our
32:55
researchers can still access these items.
32:58
They just come to us at the front desk and ask to be let in.
33:02
And we unlock that room for them, and they are able to work in there.
33:06
And then we also have a small office for our auto restoration
33:11
students who work at the library.
33:13
They do some of their work from this room.
33:16
It's located right alongside these other spaces.
33:19
And this makes them available for any other students who
33:23
have questions and they're very familiar with these collections.
33:27
They use them and they work with them on a daily basis.
33:31
So I thought it was important to have them upstairs right there.
33:35
Within this special collection, we have a couple of smaller special collections.
33:40
One being our dealership brochures.
33:43
As I said, these go back quite a ways.
33:45
This filing cabinet is almost full and I have another room full of brochures.
33:53
It's a beautiful collection to see what the dealers were highlighting, who they
33:57
were targeting with their advertising.
34:00
I like to have students think about some of those questions of like, who
34:04
was the target audience for this?
34:06
Was it the wife and mother?
34:07
Was it the single bachelor depends on the automobile and then those Duesenberg
34:13
blueprints and these are the drawers where they have been Jeremy from, like,
34:18
I think my first Day almost at McPherson has been knocking down my door to
34:24
figure out how can we digitize these?
34:26
It was a brilliant solution to have him work on this as an independent study.
34:32
And so he is doing this research of what do we need to do to make this work?
34:36
That happened a little bit about some of the collaborations that
34:40
I am privileged to work with.
34:44
I have a quote that is on a sticky note on the bottom of my desktop computer
34:49
at work, and it says leadership is about relationships, build them.
34:54
I really believe that.
34:56
And so I work very hard to build partnerships across
35:00
campus with our various faculty.
35:03
And I've worked.
35:04
Very closely with the automotive restoration faculty, and so our
35:09
professors who teach intro to automotive restoration, they bring
35:14
their freshman students over during the fall semester, and we do an orientation
35:19
with the collection and the students.
35:21
space.
35:22
And they get a tour and they start getting a feel for everything
35:25
that we have available for them.
35:27
And then I also offer a library instruction.
35:30
And this is where faculty will invite me to meet with our classes to talk about the
35:35
ways that our resources and our services.
35:39
One of the partnerships that I've been involved with, our professor who
35:45
teaches advanced trim approached me and said, I'd like for my students
35:49
to do a research presentation and I want them to specifically use
35:53
the brochures in the collection.
35:55
And so we work together to create something that allows that to happen.
36:01
I also have some really important relationships.
36:05
that I have built with the student library employees who are
36:09
automotive restoration majors.
36:11
There are five of them who were a part of helping us get the Paul Russell
36:16
and Company Center up and going.
36:19
They physically moved materials from that first floor up to the second floor.
36:25
And so we included them in that day because it was really important
36:29
for me to recognize the hard work that they had put forth.
36:33
But I also, I try to identify their strengths and their interests and they
36:40
have projects that I give them that will hopefully help them to explore those
36:46
strengths and interests at a deeper level.
36:49
So when I started out thinking about what I would include in this presentation, I
36:54
was thinking about some of the challenges curating this type of collection.
37:00
came to mind when I was thinking about challenges.
37:03
Although there are many many benefits to the donations that we receive.
37:08
These photos are from four separate storage spaces that I
37:12
have currently in the library.
37:14
This is why the collection is Keeps growing.
37:17
We have a backlog right now of donations.
37:21
I have two of our automotive restoration students who are
37:25
working through this backlog.
37:27
They are cataloging, sorting, processing, doing all the things that we need
37:32
to get these items on our shelves.
37:35
And so that is how it keeps growing.
37:37
And like I said, it's pretty much on a daily basis because at least
37:41
one of them is working each day.
37:43
For these two students, it is their primary focus this year.
37:46
As we work through the backlog, we continue to get more donations.
37:51
I just received a large donation of books and magazines.
37:57
From a very kind lady named Nancy, who lives in Des Moines.
38:02
And she heard about us from actually one of our internship employers.
38:06
And so she reached out and we've been talking since May.
38:10
We were finally able to work through the logistics and get
38:13
her collection to the college.
38:16
That is another relationship that I work to cultivate is
38:21
those people who are looking.
38:23
For a place, usually it's for their loved ones, collections that relate to the cars
38:31
or vehicles that were interesting to them.
38:34
And so I had lovely couple from New Jersey who came to see me last year to bring me a
38:39
collection, another couple from Michigan.
38:43
But became very emotional because these were her father's books and they were so
38:49
excited that our students would benefit and that someone would continue to benefit
38:56
from the books that they were bringing us.
38:59
And so really the challenge is having the space to continue to store them.
39:05
Jeremy mentioned Templeton and even over there, they had a couple of pallets of
39:11
donations that we just brought over to the library in the last couple of weeks.
39:15
So it's an ongoing continuous cycle, but the real challenge is the space issue.
39:21
And I hope that.
39:23
It continues to be an issue because it is a wonderful way for us to add
39:27
to our collection and to support the learning of our students with that.
39:33
I am open to any questions.
39:35
Thank you.
39:35
Question.
39:37
So first, a short self interested question.
39:40
Do you participate in interlibrary loan so we can borrow your stuff?
39:44
Yes, we do.
39:45
And so anything that.
39:48
That is in that open collection.
39:50
The things in the restricted collection, we do not send out because of the
39:55
rarity and the value, but anything that's in the open collection can be
39:59
borrowed through interlibrary loan.
40:01
That's good news.
40:02
Thank you.
40:02
Yeah.
40:03
The larger question is, what's the college's current
40:06
relationship with Hagerty?
40:08
I don't have an answer for that question.
40:10
That is a good Okay, Jeremy can answer that, actually.
40:14
They are a very strong supporter of the school.
40:17
They feel Hagerty actually helps bond our environmental restoration
40:21
board towards the school and towards the digital art program.
40:24
But these athletes, such as Elvish, who both want to pair up with you.
40:29
Summer at the Longwood Residence is not for a lot of internship students
40:34
and college students to meet with.
40:38
members of that kind of world.
40:40
So actually this past summer, I had lunch with McKeel Haggerty, which was great, but
40:45
Haggerty is very supportive of our school.
40:47
I know we have some alums that work there.
40:49
The one I know most off the top of my head's name is Kyle Smith.
40:52
He is actually an author for them and writes articles specifically within
40:55
the motorcycles, so it's not just cars.
40:58
I'll leave it at that.
40:58
The question I had was, How many restoration students work in the library?
41:03
So this year we have four.
41:05
The last two years it's been five.
41:07
Just worked out that it was four this year.
41:09
So I like that number of four to five.
41:12
So I have four restoration students out of 11 total.
41:16
So they make up a good amount of our student employees.
41:20
Now I understand you have a summer program.
41:23
Yes, the Summer Institute.
41:24
I know a little about that, but Jeremy might be more.
41:27
Better question for him, but I guess in the greater scheme of things, do you
41:30
have programs for adults, continued, you know, learning education, things like
41:34
that, for those of us who maybe aren't lucky enough to be, you know, 18 again?
41:39
Yes, so our Summer Institute is actually a perfect opportunity for
41:44
anyone who has an interest can come and participate in the Summer Institute.
41:49
Very cool, thank you.
41:50
Thank you, Chrissy, that was great.
41:51
Thank you, very informative.
41:58
This episode is brought to you in part by the International
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42:02
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They encourage research into any aspect of automotive history.
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The SAH actively supports the compilation and preservation of papers.
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Organizational records, print ephemera and images to safeguard, as well as to broaden
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