Alumni Almanac

Preserving sports treasures from past

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If you didn’t know there was method to his madness, you might think Jordan Goldstein, BA’08, MA’10 (History), was starring in his own episode of A & E’s ‘Hoarders’.

Huddled in a nondescript room in Thames Hall, surrounded by photos, footballs and other sports treasures from the past, the public history grad, with some help from undergrad student Shangda Li and others, is moving forward in the careful cataloguing and digitization of literally hundreds of photographs and memorabilia that had previous homes in the basements and closets of alumni.

Goldstein has funding from the ‘W’ Club, a room courtesy of the Faculty of Health Sciences and a bit of elbow room to unroll old-fashioned panoramic team photos that have to be “professionally flattened” before being digitized.

This paid position is an extension of work Goldstein was doing as part of his master’s work for Michelle Hamilton, Director of the MA Public History program in the Department of History.

A year-long project for his museology class was to set up a museum in a professional setting. In his next semester, as part of his public history class, his assignment was to catalogue different artifacts. The donated sports artifacts and the J.P. Metras Sports Museum in the foyer of Alumni Hall were a perfect fit for his class assignments.

A collections management policy was set up and with additional help from Western Libraries archivist Anne Daniel, Goldstein and others have learned how to properly take care of photographs, films and other one-ofa- kind collectibles from the past.

Goldstein sees time as his biggest challenge in getting through the stacks of vintage sport history that he’d like to share with an audience of today’s students. There are many potential projects he and ‘W’ Club member and Metras Museum curator, Ted Hessel, BA’67, would like to get started, now that decades of photos and other Western sports memorabilia has been unearthed.

“What I’d like to have is a lot of roving (sports) exhibits around campus,” says Goldstein. “There’s a lot of space that doesn’t get used and I feel as seasons change and different sports come in, we could do a better job with the Athletics Department in promoting not only current athletics but the history of athletics. And it could almost be symbiotic. You use the history to promote the present and get people involved.”

Also on the wish-list would be a professional website “with all the trimmings” and an online database of Western’s photos and collections that would enable alumni or sports enthusiasts to “go on the net and find almost anything they needed without having to come here …and have it accessible. That would be the ultimate. That would be many, many, years down the road.”

Please visit: metrasmuseum.omeka.net

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