Mosaic

Issue date: 2/22/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Caroline Crosbie The Salve Regina University Archives hold the history of the official seal.

When looking for a buried treasure, one might only have to look as far as the Salve Regina University archives, located in Room 304 on the third floor of McKillop library.

Salve's archivist, Maria Bernier, recently joined the Salve Regina community in September. "The primary mission for this part of the library is to collect the documents of the institution, preserve them, and make them accessible," Bernier said.
The archives contain documents that were used by or affiliated with Salve in any way and are now inactive. Salve Regina owns the copyright to all of the archives within its collection.

"There were three archivists before me and they were all nuns," Bernier said, "They have been collecting for 30 years."
The majority of the archives are property records of Salve's lavish landscape. There are also minutes from meetings, course syllabi, faculty files, university publications, yearbooks, newspapers and directories.

"Anyone who has taught a class, whether it was archery in the physical education department for one semester or a faculty member who worked here twenty years ago, it's all here, " Bernier said.
The earliest archive in the Salve Regina collection dates back to the 1934 charter for Salve Regina College that was presented to the state of Rhode Island by the Sisters of Mercy. There was a large gap between the time when the charter was established and when Salve Regina was actually started in 1947.

"These are important to the institution, they are our founding documents," Bernier said. The latest piece of archives arrived within the last month and they are so new they sit unsorted in Bernier's office in boxes.

One box contains test results, student teaching records and evaluations from the Education department that date from 2002-2006. The other box holds the Cultural Historic Preservation plan which the University developed to maintain and preserve the architecture and buildings of Salve, according to Bernier.

Bernier is in charge of developing policies for acquiring the archives, what should be kept and how the documents are sorted and preserved. Currently, they are kept in file folders inside filing cabinets.
The archivists before her collected a lot of material, "but they did not develop processes for using the archives or what to collect," Bernier said. The nuns duplicated a lot of the documents and Bernier said she is now trying to improve the archiving system and expand the collection.

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