Articles

The DMC Archive Team

By Madeleine Cerone

November 10, 2023

Our team of DMC Student Ambassadors has a lot of different moving parts, and one of those parts is the Archive Team. Composed of Luna Zou ‘24 and Jason Casado ‘24, the Archive Team works behind the scenes to make sure the history of the DMC is not lost or forgotten.

The DMC’s online website for Women’s History Month posters and the startup of the DMC’s youtube channel can both be credited to the Archive Team. Each year they work tirelessly on creating and updating new databases or adding to old ones. “It’s kind of a gradual process,” Luna explained in our interview. “We do digitization in one semester and then we present our work in the next semester.” 

Digitization involves converting paper, text, or sound information into a form that can be easily processed by a computer. Luna and Jason could be charged with digitizing anything from cassette tapes to old hand drawn posters from the 90’s. After this is done, these pieces of artwork or lectures from guest speakers are placed onto a website or database where they are easily accessible to students, staff, faculty, and the public. 

It’s arduous work that’s done outside of the limelight, but the archive team’s job is essential to both the campus community. Jason told me that you can only make spaces better if you keep track of what was done in the past… what worked, and what didn’t work? In this way, the organizational tools that Luna and Jason create and fill with data can be a resource for future directors and students alike to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion at the DMC and at Hamilton. 

Inside these databases, there are dozens of different perspectives from many forgotten clubs and famous speakers. The pieces of art and the lecture videos that Jason and Luna place in these databases are evidence of the hard work that Hamiltion students have been doing for so long to make a difference at Hamilton. Jason mentioned that it can be grounding to look back at the speakers and the events that the DMC and its student organizations have hosted in the past, because it shows the changes that have taken place as a result of this work. 

“I feel like when you go into a new space like college, you see a lot of problems and you imagine that you are the first one to be fighting them because, well, the problems are still here,” Jason said. But seeing Hamilton’s progress through the DMC archive can be somewhat inspiring to students of today, and can help students of the future move forward. Luna said it well: “Curating a record of the past events and the progress and the different clubs that are affiliated with the DMC makes us part of a process pushing for diversity in college. I think that’s really important.”

At the DMC we want to encourage people to look at the archive and use it, whether that be for your class materials as a professor or for your programming as a student organization! The archive team is also actively looking for new members. If you’re interested, look out for a job listing on Handshake.

Thank you, Jason and Luna, for all that you do.