NSU President George L. Hanbury II, who plans to release a book reflecting on his time at NSU, hopes to use the NSU Archives in the Alvin Sherman Library, Research, and Information Technology Center as one of his sources.
“I’ve gone over there quite often just to look at some of the old history. And as a matter of fact, I’ll use some of it when I’m writing my book,” Hanbury said.
The archives feature documents, memorabilia and more spanning over 50 years of NSU’s rich history, including how it originally started as Nova University of Advanced Technology.
Gena Meroth, university archivist and director of the Department of University Archives Institutional Scholarship and Resource Sharing Services, heads her small team of archivists in preserving the historic documents and artifacts, ranging from course catalogs, brochures, commencement programs, photographs, The Current newspaper and more.
Alongside the archives is NSUWorks, a digital repository of uploaded paperworks.
“A born digital item might be something like one of the open access journals that we host in the repository. Conference proceedings from conferences that we host in person will be in the repository. And then paper-based collections that we’ve digitized,” Meroth said.
In addition to historic documents and artifacts from NSU, the archives have accepted special collections through donations like a bayonet from the Civil War, a copy of “Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant” signed by 18th U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant himself, and personal work from artist Conni Gordon.
Some of Gordon’s artwork was donated to the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale and her personal collection is in the archives. Gordon was named in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “World’s Most Prolific Art Teacher.” She died on May 2, 2017.
“I like, just in general, when we’re able to build a story about the university when people will email me or call and say, ‘I’m looking for the first date that NSU did something.’ ‘Can you confirm that we had this program or this event on a certain date,’ and we can reach back into our archival collections and say, ‘Yeah, look,’” Meroth said.
Whether it’s for NSUWorks or the physical archives, Meroth explained how they have stringent requirements on what they can accept, such as gently worn documents or specific collections relating to NSU, the Davie/Fort Lauderdale or special interest items. The archives attempt to also keep donations in the order they were received with minimal changes.
“Our motto is, if in doubt, don’t throw it out,” Meroth said. “If you’re a faculty member and you’re going to donate papers or your research from your tenure while you were here, if it’s a community member donating something that they’ve collected over the years, we’d like to see it in its original form because it’s really important when you archive items.”
The NSU Archives is on the fourth floor of the Alvin Sherman Library. The hours are 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. If students are looking for something specific, Meroth suggests sending an email to nsuworks@nova.edu.
“We’re also putting on faculty and student scholarships and attempting to broadcast worldwide what NSU is producing in terms of research. It’s really, really important. I want to say is that I want people to know about us and to know what we’re doing here, you know, that’s really, really important,” Meroth said.
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