Preserving the Order's Past
How does a large organization remember its history? For many organizations, memories of the past are lost when those older members who participated in them are no longer involved or are no longer living. But for Dan Soszynski, the chairman of the Digital Archive Committee at NOAC 2009, remembering history means collecting and digitizing historical artifacts to share them with all the members of the organization.
Dan is a senior history major at Northeastern University in Boston and is overseeing the digitizing process at the conference. Over the past few years, the Digital Archive Committee has collected slides, newsletters, photographs and other historically significant memorabilia from national events. At NOAC, they have several scanning stations set up to digitize these artifacts. Later, they will be uploaded to the committee's website for use by Arrowmen across the country.
Their efforts - scanning takes at least 90 seconds per slide - have already begun to pay off. The opening show on Saturday night featured a large panoramic photo of all the conference delegates from the 1975 national conference, scanned in by members of the Digital Archive earlier that day. Other historical photos of the founders and other early figures in the Order of the Arrow history were used in the show on Monday night.
Many of the slides and other artifacts loaned to the committee had been stored in basements for years and are in poor shape. Many slides are physically falling apart and more are losing their color as they age.
Dan sees many different purposes for the project. Ceremonies and dance teams can use photos of past performances to help with their research for outfits and staging. Trainers can use old videos and materials from National Leadership Seminar sessions as inspiration for their future training events. Publication editors can get ideas for content from the collection of National Bulletins. And certainly, historians of the Order will find value in seeing these historical artifacts.
As he puts it, "My passion is to preserve how things were in the past." With these efforts, there's a greater chance of that succeeding.
NOAC 1977
Revised 8/3/2009