Archives

Scope & Contents

The Archives of Greenfield Community College document the institutional memory of the college, dating back to the Regional Community College in Greenfield, which was established in 1962 to serve the Franklin County community. This collection contains official records as well as unpublished material documenting the functions, activities, and intellectual materials produced by and about members of the GCC community. Content has been contributed by college administration, staff, faculty, students and alumni. Content types include: meeting minutes, memoranda, administrative records, published reports, official publications, student publications, newspaper clippings, yearbooks, scrapbooks, photographs, posters, event programs, brochures and personal papers.

Digitized Collection

Most GCC records have not been digitized. The following items are available:

• Course Catalogs, 1962-present
• Student Newspapers at the Internet Archive
• Video Recordings
• Oral Histories and Photographs in Digital Commonwealth, including the Saul Sherter Greenfield Jewish Community Oral History Collection and the Franklin Medical Reserve Corps' Resiliency During COVID-19 Pandemic Oral History Project

Processing

The initial inventory, arrangement and processing for this collection were completed in the spring of 2018 by Caroline Dubinsky. Additional processing and description have been completed by Claire Lobdell and by student workers Joshua Reis, Mark Waite, Polly LaCoy, and Sophie Brown.

Donations

The GCC Archives is happy to accept gifts of materials related to the history of the institution, its students, staff and faculty. The Nahman-Watson Library is unable to accept materials on loan; donated materials become the property of the library. Library staff are unable to provide financial appraisals for tax or other purposes. Please contact Claire Lobdell before bringing materials for donation.

Arrangement

This collection includes 15 records groups. You can expand the links below to see the contents of the records groups. Detailed listings for individual records groups will be linked below as they are indexed. Please note that some series sub-series numbers are missing– i.e., numbered sub-series may jump from .05 to .08. This is because the original organizational archives plan has since been revised as it had a level of granularity that was not needed in practice.

The MacLeish Collection was founded in 1974 by six educators from Greenfield Community College to advance the knowledge and understanding of poet Archibald MacLeish—the man, his life, his works and his times. Mr. MacLeish authorized and supported this effort by contributing his own time and energy to a series of interviews about his work and offering books and manuscripts to the collection. In 1984, the heirs to his estate donated 1690 additional items to the collection. The Archibald MacLeish room, housing MacLeish's personal library, is on the third floor of the Core, just outside the library, in room C307.

The collection is composed of two parts:

Part I

Archibald MacLeish's personal library of poetry and prose by authors he liked, or who influenced him, or who were influenced by him. It consists of 1,629 cataloged monographs, including 1,503 books, 122 periodical issues and four music scores. More than 130 of these items have handwritten annotations by MacLeish; more than 180 are inscribed by their authors; and nearly 45 contain holograph inserts.

MacLeish's library is significant not only because of the intrinsic value of the individual books, but also because MacLeish put it together himself over his lifetime. The value of these books lies in their relationship to each other and to MacLeish, and in MacLeish's notes and annotations contained in them.

Part II

The Friends' Collection, organized in November 1986.

In 2002 the Friends' Collection consisted of 2,432 books, booklets, pamphlets, galleys (page proofs) and periodical issues; 1,178 letters and manuscripts; and nearly 10,000 non-print items including artifacts and memorabilia for a total of over 13,500 items.

The Friends' Collection is valuable for its diversity of form and content and its ability to inform us of how MacLeish and his works are viewed by others. It also helps define for us the times in which he lived and worked, and from which he derived his inspiration.

Resources

Amherst College
Materials by and about Archibald MacLeish are not collected under his name, but can be found in many of Amherst College’s special collections, such as the Robert Frost manuscripts.

Library of Congress
These collections offer hundreds of items by and about MacLeish, including sound recordings of events, letters, photographs, etc.

Princeton University
Princeton has a small Archibald MacLeish collection, as well as MacLeish materials in other collection in their archives.

Smith College
The William Allan Neilson Library’s Special Collections include scattered speeches and letters, located in various class records and printed in the Smith Alumnae Quarterly, along with correspondence with various Smith College presidents, and photographs.  The online catalog lists books, scores, videocassettes, programs, and so forth.

University of Massachusetts Amherst
The University Archives includes a small Archibald MacLeish collection, as well as publications and MacLeish materials in other collection in their archives.

University of Virginia
Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections contain books, manuscripts, etc. by and about MacLeish.

Vassar College
Approximately 100 items are housed in Thompson Library and special collections.

Yale University
The Beinecke Library at Yale provides a finding aid database for locating materials by and about A.M. The Archibald MacLeish Collection (MSS YCAL 38) and the Archibald MacLeish Collection Addition (YCAL MSS 269) consist of correspondence, writings, personal papers and sound recordings, documenting Archibald and Ada MacLeish’s personal life, family history and careers.