One of the nice things about staying in the same city where you go to library school, particularly in the case of Simmons/Boston, is that on occasion, you get to stay in touch with people who were in the program with you.
Brian Sullivan, the archivist at Mt. Auburn Cemetery, were both in the Simmons GSLIS program in '98, survived a few shared classes, and have seen each other from time to time over the past 11 years. Yesterday I happened to pick one of the best days ever to get my tour of the repository and grounds yesterday.
We did a quick visit inside to see the climate control, the boxes- each plot (4-digit number usually) is its own catalog number, but since the grounds opened in 1832, there's still a lot to organize and frame in an archive/researcher-friendly way.
As Brian noted, Mt. Auburn is a very unusual sort of amalgamation of active burial ground, a garden, and an archive. The grounds itself is an archive with some interesting features and pitfalls. Instead of shelvers, there are gardeners. The headstones have preservation issues- the marble melts away over the years, the slate separates. Families request changes to their plots and presto changeo, the literal landscape is altered. Oh, and sometimes trees fall down.
I would recommend touring the grounds with Brian. He is amazed, awed, enthusiastic, and on 175 acres, I suspect you could take a walk every day for months- years?- and see new things. Particularly when you remember the aforementioned ever-changing landscape and on top of that, changing seasons. He showed me amazing, beautiful, and heart-breaking. I think I overused the word "wow" just a little bit. The size and nature of the grounds are such that it's filled with famous people and particularly famous Congregationalists. I have squeezed a promise from Brian to write as a guest blogger here about someone whose collection we have- someone yet to be determined.
Thanks, Brian, for the tour and the photos from this post. Be sure to see the thousands of entries at Flickr of the grounds.
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