Get to know McPherson College’s Auto Restoration Program

Ken Yohn is a social scientist keenly interested in how the automobile shapes our lives. With a Ph.D. in political science and postdoctoral work in history and economics, Yohn has held faculty positions at universities in Japan, Germany, France, and Poland, including a sabbatical as scholar in residence at the University of Science and Technology in Lille, France. For the past 25 years Yohn has been teaching at McPherson College in Kansas, where he is currently chair of the history and politics department.

Kristie Sojka earned her BA in History from Wichita State University and her MLIS from Kent State University. She has worked in a variety of roles in Kansas libraries for the past 13 years. Sojka is currently entering her third year as the director of library services at Miller Library McPherson College. Her responsibilities include providing library and research services, support, and instruction to the entire campus  community. She also oversees the two special collections located within Miller Library: the Brethren and College Archives and the Paul Russell and Company Center for Automotive Research, which houses the special automotive materials collection. Sojka is currently serving as vice president of the College and University Libraries Section of the Kansas Library Association.

The Paul Russell and Company Center for Automotive Research housed within Miller Library at McPherson College currently holds over 5,000 automotive related titles. This presentation will consider the benefits and challenges of curating a special library collection and archives, which supports automotive restoration education. The presenter will discuss the types of materials currently available to researchers, the varying processes of obtaining materials, and options for organizing the collection.

[00:00:00] Brake Fix’s History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argettsinger family.

Teaching Motorsports History at Merfierson College, a three part episode featuring Ken Young, Christy Socia, and Jeremy Porter. Part 1, Towards a Motor Racing History Curriculum, Ideas from McPherson College, presented by Ken Yong. Ken Yong is a social scientist keenly interested in how the automobile shapes our lives.

With a Ph. D. in political science and a postdoctoral work in history and economics, Ken has held faculty positions at universities in Japan, Germany, France, and Poland, including a sabbatical and scholar in residence at the university of science and technology in Lille, France. For the past 25 years, Ken has been teaching at MacPherson college in Kansas, where he is currently chair of the history and politics department.

The automotive [00:01:00] restoration technology program at MacPherson college was established in 1996. And since its inception, the curriculum has included the study of technical and social history of the automobile. Given this experience, Ken addresses how McPherson might inform teaching the specialized field of motor racing.

He will begin by giving an overview of the McPherson automotive history curriculum and conclusions about content choices and best teaching practices. By examining the comparative scope of automotive history and motor racing history, Ken presents areas of substantial overlap and differentiation.

Finally, he will present suggestions for curriculum and teaching practices, and participants will be requested to share their reflections on the following question. What three key topics should every motor racing historian understand? Kenyon has been there for a while now, I guess. A lot of students have gone through the school and he’s going to give you an idea about the teaching the undergraduate aspects of this.

I want to give you an idea of what liberal arts means and why we really think that’s the way to approach that for our [00:02:00] institution. The breakdown of the fields that we use when we teach it and then talk about how we Fold history all the way through the curriculum. It’s not something that’s added to the curriculum.

It’s actually permeates it and then some time for questions and consequences. So in a liberal arts context, we formed about 25 years ago something called an IMG statement and it was a dream of what we would like a McPherson graduate to be. And we were keeping in mind that in the long term people change careers again and again and again.

If we were going to prepare people for careers and actually become involved in their lives, we had to think in a bigger picture about what kind of competencies they needed. And it came from so many different directions in different ways. You know, one of the ways it happened in our college is we had this unique history as a small agricultural college.

We’re the last private college in Kansas that had a agriculture program. And so there was a real hands on [00:03:00] approach to understanding how you solve problems and working with machinery. And then, in the early 70s, we had a local car collector who just loved cars. And he was a very casual collector. He would buy them into auctions and put them in a shed.

And he just liked to look at them. And he came to the College of President and said, I’ve got all these cars. You could probably fix them, couldn’t you? And the president said, I don’t know. And the guy said, I’ve got some money, and the college president said, yeah, we can fix those. And so they built a building, and they started an associate’s degree, and then we kind of hit hard times.

We had a decline in enrollment to college, and we were really trying to sort through how we were going to make it financially. A problem hit us with turnover in the faculty, and we had faculty that were leaving in droves. And so we had to figure out how we were going to recruit people to stay here with the salaries we had.

We’re in the bottom 1 percent of the United States in salaries. And so we had to rethink how faculty relationships work and what a job environment was like. And so we came to some conclusions about having a [00:04:00] flat kind of egalitarian norm. It had been with our institution for a long time. We had a flat salary structure.

Every, every rank, every department gets paid exactly the same, which is a real anomaly in education. We had super standardized promotion credentials. We got rid of research as a promotion credential. We realized that it had to be all about the students, but it had to stop being about the student’s degree.

We concluded it wasn’t about the student’s degree. It had to be about the student’s lifetime. And so, those kinds of things reoriented, and one of the consequences of that is that for the last nine years we’ve been in the chronicle of higher education runs this great colleges to work for program. They have 15 criteria that you can succeed in an institution.

In the United States, there’s only five colleges that have been ranked in the top tier in 13 or more of these, and we’re one of them. So, we’re one of the five absolutely best institutions to work for. in the United States. This has a huge spillover. Surrounding yourself with people who want to be where they’re [00:05:00] at generates a type of dynamic energy that pours into the curriculum.

Then we had a new set of challenges we’re asking ourselves about exactly how we implement this long term career path and we realize that as we’re looking at ourselves and our faculty, I would just say we have a tremendous amount of affection for each other. It’s like a family, except you like everybody.

It’s such a amazing environment to work in. Christy and Jeremy and I have been on the road a bunch lately. We went to the KU research library to look at digitizing technology. You know, on Monday we’re jumping in the car and we’re going off to Sline and we got together for breakfast the other morning and.

The faculty and the students were involved in each other’s lives. My hobby is vintage bicycle restoration. So Tuesday nights, I have bike church at my house. In restoration, students come over, we get pizzas, and then we work on vintage bicycles in my basement. Through this kind of collaborative approach to the long term of the career, we’ve created a different set of relationships in academia.

This here is the [00:06:00] heart of a real curriculum. A real curriculum, we typically assume to be a set of classes and requirements, but the real thing that drives, and by the way, every one of you knows this, one of the things that draws you to this is the relationships and the integrity. And in this field, there’s no substitute for integrity.

In a field where there’s a lot of money at stake and there’s a lot of ways that people can fudge things, And where long term relationships are actually the things that sustain you, there’s no substitute for personal integrity. And so working with a group of people that are beloved by their students transforms the education.

Because at the very heart of all education, you’re asking someone to take something that they believe. And you’re asking them to set it aside and exchange it for what you believe. And that’s the fundamental dynamic and it only happens in a position of trust and reliance. I have a lot of things to say about the curriculum of how one teaches it, but it has to begin with a process of recruiting.

And so while we were trying to figure out how [00:07:00] we were recruiting, get people to stay at a job that doesn’t, by the way, our salaries are still low. I mean, seriously, we’re in the bottom 10 percent of the United States. Kansas is in the median. of the cost of living, but we still have low salaries, but we have places where people love to come to work.

And so that bleeds over. So this is fundamental. You figure out how to recruit. You have to clarify your values about the careers. When you bring people to campus, you have to talk to them about that. Honestly, one of the first things we lead off is, this doesn’t pay much. You need to know it from the get go before you even go down the path of even having an interview.

You need to know up front, this isn’t going to pay well. Here’s our limits and here’s our problems and you put them up in front because you want people to make sure that they get the jobs that they want to have. Not just in recruitment, but in promotion. So you have to make sure that the promotion process and the incentive process for all of the staff across the whole institution is wed to the institutional goals of students successful lives.

And by successful, what we [00:08:00] mean is, the student becoming what they want to become. And that’s what we mean. Of them being developmentally advanced. We have five separate fields. I was thinking one way to illustrate what a profession in motorsports looks like is just to walk around. This building, you know, you have the press box and you have the little archives and you have people who are doing engineering of the building spaces and designing roads and people who are managing crowd flow.

And if you were to try to assemble all the marketing and all of the different kind of talent subsets that go into this one facility, you’ve captured already something that encompasses probably 20 30, the different professional preparations. And this is just the tip of the automotive industry. So providing a whole breadth of approaches, art and design, communications, history, management, and restoration is fundamental to this because these are 18 year olds that walk in the door.

A third of them are there because they like watching fast and furious, but we’re going to tell them all kinds of amazing things, you know, There were so many great [00:09:00] presentations this morning, for example, made me think about exactly the stuff that we do, thinking about West Virginia motorsports, the context of rural life in the West Virginia, up in the mountains and the impact of the second world war and the economy, and you have to have liberal arts.

To do that, you have to have students that go through economics classes, and they go through history classes, and they understand what the Great Depression was. They roll into the school, you know, thinking Fast and the Furious, and then next Tuesday we’re looking and dissecting Nazi rocket motors from 1945.

And they begin to appreciate the depth of the history that’s required, and the passion that you can have, because it ties to who they might be, and who they want to be, and their fascination for the world around them. The idea of acquiring research acumen of the desire to be in the library are things that flow out of this process of engagement.

And then the gender issues are something that we put really front and center in our teaching. When I begin teaching automotive racing, the [00:10:00] very first thing I start with is Joan Cuneo and Alice Ramsey. So we start with women racers as the way of even introducing automotive racers. We have to produce students that are prepared for a different world than they’re coming from.

And so we need to provide a lot more DEI education for them because their workplace is going to be dramatically different. We have a notion often that big city kids are more broadly prepared than small city kids, you know. That’s a general conception we have, but it turns out for most people, all the way through their lives, they grow up with a small community of friends that they associate with, and they spend their time talking to them.

Whether it’s in Los Angeles, you actually have a very small circle of friends who tend to be very much like you. And then even if you’re a small town, you have a small set of friends who are very much like you. And so, we have a, another bonus of this really broad liberal arts program, where they’re going to have to ask spiritual questions.

They have to find out what their moral and ethical compass is like. And they’re throwing them with people who are dramatically different. One London Times bestseller was, just [00:11:00] placed us as the number one most diverse campus in the Midwest. And the reason they said it is because you can’t escape people who are different from you.

Because we have 800 students. If you go to the University of Kansas, you can hang out with all goth theater students who want to wear black lipstick. You can have your own little civilization on campus. You can’t do that where we’re at. And we have one out of ten students are international students, and we place them in the workplace.

Here’s what I mean by history across the curriculum. The eight gentlemen that I identified previously represent textiles and metallurgy in the classroom, but also I want to let you know they come from very different backgrounds. Our sheet metal specialist actually was an art historian, and he was a sculptor when we hired him.

He’s teaching sheet metal. So, we have all these different skill sets and dispositions, but at the bottom is this initial sequence of what we traditionally think of as a component set. But the component set is a physical component set of the car. And so, the classes mirror that, but within [00:12:00] each one of them, it has its own historical narrative, because you can’t understand upholstery, actually, completely appreciate it, unless you’re also talking about the historical development of textiles, and the machinery with which the textiles are being processed, the types of sewing machines.

You can’t understand the sheet metal development, the way the cars are made, the way they’re made, and have the complete understanding unless you understand the different metallurgical processes, advances in materials development, and the types of machinery that was shaped to steel. And so every one of these classes, they’re substantive, hands on.

muscle memory, touching classes. They have a lab component of working on it. They have a theory component and every one of them has historical components embedded in it. The social history of the automobile is structured around what I would call the historical component structure of the automobile. And it’s important, and we give this class early on in their presentation, and this tends to be for them one of the classes that really opens them up.

It’s a pretty easy case to argue that the automobile is the most [00:13:00] significant technological change in the history of the planet. And that it is a central organizing aspect of every single thing we do in our lives. And when you can place the automobile in the context of someone’s personal lives, it’s going to determine who you date, where you work, how you spend time with your family, and how you define your family.

And when you can put it in an existential context of the student’s present and the student’s future, they’re ready to step beyond a wrench and go out and dig into a book. And so this happens, it doesn’t matter what field of human endeavor you’re engaged in, At some point, the automobile is going to be a significant question for how you live.

And so it provides a perspective on history itself. And that’s the second stage, along with the history of automotive design, which is taught by our sculptor, that represent these specialized context courses. And then we advance into our research courses in methodology. So we want to make sure that we have a blend of hands on and theoretical work about the physical [00:14:00] artifact.

And then we need to make sure that we have the research and methodological tools of archival, of vetting research materials, of search engines. And it can be, even if you have a mechanical bent, you need to know what the bolt heads were. How were they shaped? How are they stamped? How many stitches per inch go into the upholstery?

And so you need research skills to go with that. And so we have a three stage process for that, which is an introduction to research methods, the technology and society, which is a broader theoretical class, and then we have historiography as an advanced research. These are all done at an undergraduate.

There’s very few undergraduate sequences where they have four methodology classes. I don’t know of any programs in the world. Let alone an automotive restoration program that have four specific historiographic and methodological courses within them. And then our senior thesis is, one of the things that we really want to do is, we want to make this like into a playground of knowledge.

One of the essential organizing concepts are, we’re going to give you specific case studies. We’re going to draw on specific [00:15:00] personages. For instance, I have a short list. There’s only four things you need to know to be an automotive restorer. You need to know who Henry Ford is, you need to know what the Model T is, you need to know who Harley Earl is, and you need to know who Alex Tremulous is.

And those four things. And if you know those things, that gives you the tools you need because you can look at the lives of great men, you can look at the history of industrialization, you can look at the artistic expression, the way we engage with the car, the development, the globalization of the industry.

And once you have those case studies, it lays a groundwork where you get to do what you want to do. And so, it’s kind of like presenting a buffet for the students, and then you cut them loose. And then you say, now, for your thesis, you’re going to do anything you want. Which includes, recently I’ve surveyed, uh, supervised theses on the history of the banjo, women in piracy, the list, it just goes places it would be totally unexpected, but they get to follow their dreams, they follow their passions, and they move on the careers that they want to develop.

And that’s our history across the curriculum for the [00:16:00] college. I know that the field of automotive history is so vast that we’re scratching the surface. Well, there isn’t anybody that gets to do much other than scratch the surface. If you get a narrow field, you get to scratch a little deeper in one thing.

But how do you construct a broad appreciation for someone and make their life engaged in the content? And how do you become a representative of the field? And my gut answer is just that as an educator, and you want to convey to someone, you have to recognize that you’re a bridge between the content. and the person, the individual that’s in front of you.

And that there’s a real big tendency in some parts of education where the obligation to the content swallows up the obligation to the person that’s in front of you. Students are confused, they’re unmotivated, they’re hungover, they have all the things that go along with being a real college student. To be the person who’s actually going to Take the student that’s right in front of you and say, that’s good.

That’s fine. You’re hungover today. You know what? I did [00:17:00] that too, you know, and I’m going to accept you and I’m going to just provide whatever I can to connect you with this material and help you find your passion. My gut feeling is that every single thing I know about, Automotive restoration is actually, is a straight parallel for understanding the automobile as a sport.

Because every one of these elements, there’s continuity. Because the impact on social structures, the impact on a sport, the impact on history, the role of fascism. My VP came to me yesterday, she said, we have Mussolini’s mistress coming to campus in a few weeks. Which is the car that Mussolini attempted to flee.

She says, could you prepare some notes and do a little public presentation? I said, yeah, I’d love to. Well, thank you. Now I have one. Things are going so well for us. We’re all so grateful for how well it’s going. And we have a whole set of challenges that almost no school has ever had before. Some of you know that recently we were given a billion dollars.

Which is like a thousand millions or something like that. It’s a lot of money, a [00:18:00] billion dollars. Right now it’s kind of money that’s been promised for the future. It’s in a state so we don’t have any of it. It’ll be arriving, it’s dedicated. And so we’re trying to really ask ourselves, What does this work with?

What do we do with it? What is our dreams? What’s our possibilities? As I was trying to assess that, I started looking at exactly what is it that we do right, and why is it that we’re working. And for some of you in academia, this ties really closely, but actually this ties to everybody who’s in this discipline.

Because, when we’re communicating with someone or trying to transmit, first thing is you have the student experience, and then you have your institutional experience. environment that you create for the students. And so, if you look at the student experience, so you have to have a long term view of your complex student.

A student is a complex creature who’s moving into a world that’s full of mystery and they don’t know where to go. And Jeremy is grounded and solid. We love Jeremy, but Jeremy doesn’t know where he’s going. Sometimes there’s a student who goes to college where they know where they’re going and hopefully they change your mind, right?

Hopefully [00:19:00] they learn something that sets them off in a different direction. So you need to have this breadth of the liberal arts. So that they’re going to be able to read and write. We have five writing classes in our sequence. Our students can write when they leave. And you’ve got to be able to write.

And we have public speaking sequences. They’ve got to be able to articulate the automobile as a dream. Because this is the language. It’s the language of dreams. That’s what the automobile is all about. At the same time, you need to provide concrete experiences. Eighty percent of our students go through internships across the whole institutions.

That means psychology students, art students, theology students. They go to internships. We had 99 percent of our class of 2022 job placement within six months, 99%. And we had, of our students who wanted to go to graduate school, we had 90 percent placement rates in graduate schools because we work internships and we work futures and career plans.

We do that with the events. We do that within, so that we have an exploratory process where students have different gifts, but they don’t know what they are. And it’s so easy for us as. [00:20:00] All of us in this room to define ourselves by the things that we can’t do. You know, I can’t do that because I don’t have that skill.

And it turns out that, you know, most of life is just showing up. And then whatever modicum of skill you happen to have, you figure out how to leverage it. When you’re working with a group of students where they all have different aptitudes, you have to try to just get them up off the couch. I heard a really great quote the other day, it was like, nobody gets remembered for leaving butt prints in the sands of time.

You know, the first thing to do is just try to motivate people to get off the couch, follow their dreams. We have the course content that has to be both substantive and methodology for the teach to fish, for the methodology side. And then finding the people to work with. that actually are ready to be student centered.

They’re ready to make the leap of faith to say this is all about student success. And all of your careers and everything that happens, and it has to be really technically hard. And the people in this room that know each other, that have been together for year after year, conference after conference, [00:21:00] it’s because you know that they’re people that you care about because you’re kind.

You have to be really soft on humans. Humans are frail and humans can’t succeed unless you nurture them. It was beginning in the 1970s that the NFL started having professional counselors, like psychological assistants for every team player. Because they realized that it’s your emotional structure is what gives you the capacity to succeed.

And especially in college life, most people don’t understand that, how much college life has changed. In the generation since I went to college, when I was in college, you know, it was okay for the faculty to say, well, they were unmotivated, so I guess they’re out of luck. They got messed up, something bad happened, and I guess they’re out of luck.

I had a student came forward last week, wouldn’t tell me, someone else told me, his mother got shot in a drive by. She’s been in a coma for five weeks. If he doesn’t come to class, who’s gonna stop and intervene? The real things that are the barriers to student success, Rarely are they about intellect.

Rarely are they about intellect. Usually it’s [00:22:00] about figuring out how to get up out of bed in the morning, trying to find some kind of sense of self worth and self dignity. If you have an educational infrastructure that’s going to succeed, it actually has to deal with that, if you want excellence, and it has to deal with that issue of alcoholism and drug addiction in your staff, and your colleagues, and personal lives, and divorces, and so it has to be technically hard But it has to be humanly soft and that’s how you succeed in teaching auto history.

Thank you, Ken. Any questions or comments? Do you accept vehicles for donation and what do you do with cars when you finish restoring them? Yeah, we gladly accept vehicles for donation and in a lot of ways the kind of donation challenge that Christy has. We’ve had in the past where people want to send us cars to restore, but it’s really horrible for them because what we do is when it’s time to do a certain pull out the cars with that fender shape and we work on it.

And so were [00:23:00] you to send us a car for restoration, we couldn’t promise it would ever, ever get done. So we don’t do that. When we get cars for donations, sometimes we put them into our archive of cars that we use as sample works for students to look at and to understand and as teaching tools, you know, for suspension types and engines and radiators.

And, and then sometimes on occasion we’ll, Pick one as a restoration project. In the past, we’ve been giving free auction space at some prestigious auctions where we can auction those off and use it to support the education program. Maintaining a shop space with all these kinds of resources is really expensive.

Tools, materials, liquids, paints, and it’s an expensive proposition. And so we’re always looking for You know, I would suggest if there’s a box up in front, you write a check on your way out and we’ll put it to good use. Thank you all so much.

Part two, Cruising Through the Stacks, a special library collection [00:24:00] by Christy Socia. Christy Socia earned her BA in history from Wichita State University and her MLIS from Kent State University. She has worked in a variety of roles in Kansas libraries for the past 13 years. Christy is currently entering her third year as the Director of Library Services at Miller Library at McPherson College.

Her responsibilities include providing library and research services, support, and instruction to the entire campus community. She also oversees two special collections located within the Miller Library, the Brethren College and College Archives, and the Paul Russell and Company Center for Automotive Research, which houses the Special Automotive Materials Collection.

Christy is currently serving as Vice President of the College and University Libraries section of the Kansas Library Association. The Paul Russell and Company Center for Automotive Research, housed within the Miller Library at McPherson College, currently holds over 5, 000 automotive related titles. And this presentation will consider the benefits and challenges of curating a special library collection and archives, which supports automotive restoration education.

[00:25:00] Christy will discuss the types of materials currently available to researchers, the varying processes of obtaining materials, and options for organizing the collection. Next up, also from McPherson, I don’t envy you. Holy mackerel, I’ve been in your shoes having to follow an act like that. But anyway, Christy Shania will talk about the archival All right, good afternoon.

I am Christy Sojka. I am in my third year as director of Miller Library at McPherson College. It was actually the automotive restoration department that in a roundabout way brought me to McPherson. I was working as the head of instruction and circulation at another university in Wichita, which is where I live.

It’s about an hour south of McPherson. And my third oldest son was trying to figure out where he was going to go to college. And he was looking at [00:26:00] some two year associate degree programs in automotive. And I had heard about McPherson College’s program through some library contacts that I knew. I can’t remember for sure, but I said, Hey, I sent him the link to the website and said, check this out.

And he said, yeah, this looks more like what I really want to do. So we went to the campus for a visit for our son. As we progressed through that day, I came away with this feeling. And I can only describe it as this vibe that I was getting as we met people. Everyone we encountered welcomed us, they said hello and this was a community vibe that I was not feeling on my current campus where I was working.

At the end of that day, I said, Riley, I think this is really the place that you want to be. You know, of course it’s your decision, but he decided yes. And so he applied, he was accepted and was on his [00:27:00] way to getting started the next fall. In June of that year, I received an email through a library listserv and there was a job opening at McPherson College for the director of library services.

It was my goal to become a library director. I kept thinking about this. Positive feeling that I had when I was on that campus. And so I applied for the job and then I asked Riley, Hey, is this okay? He was like, I guess I came out for my interview. And one of the people that I got to meet with that day was the head of our auto restoration program.

And she shared with me this plan that had been started at this point for renovating a part of the library to dedicate. For our automotive restoration materials collection. So that was kind of my first introduction to that collection. And so I ended up getting the job [00:28:00] and I accepted, I like to say, follow me for more parenting tips.

This is how you follow your kid to college. If anyone’s interested in doing that, that’s how you do it. But I always show this slide in all of my presentations when I present to students on campus, referencing our mission for the library. And we’re really on campus to provide access to information. And then to help our students to learn how to locate, use, and evaluate the information that they’re coming into contact with.

I want to give you a little rundown of overall view of our library resources. So currently we have about 55, 000 physical items. This is our whole collection, including books, DVDs, and periodicals. We have 145, 000 ebook titles available to us Currently, this number 10, 500 is a little different in your program.

It says 5, 000 active automotive restoration titles. This number has actually grown to 10, 500 just in a [00:29:00] short period. It continues to grow almost on a daily basis. And I’ll talk about why a little bit later. We also have about 60 databases. Providing access to thousands of academic journals, streaming films, including documentaries, and then more such as newspapers.

I just added a brand new to us database with the automotive restoration program in mind. It is Chilton library. It will have access to all of Chilton’s repair manuals online. Although we do have repair manuals as part of our library collection, our students will be able to access these from the sheds.

For example, so when they’re out there working on their cars, they’ll be able to access that important information. So when I arrived at McPherson and Miller library, the automotive restoration collection was housed in a room. It’s an okay sized room, but the collection had grown so [00:30:00] much that the room was basically crammed full of the books and magazines.

Shelving was like ceiling high and it was very dark in there when everything was still in that room. It was cramped and there wasn’t a lot of room for our students to work. The vision was to create a space that would be more accessible to our students. Through the generosity of Melanie and Richard Lundquist, who donated a one million dollar gift to us to put towards the renovation of a wing of the upper level of the library, we were able to dedicate the Paul Russell and Company Center for Automotive Research in May of 2022.

This space has created just a lot more room for our students and for other researchers to come and access our collections. And I have a little drawing here of our floor plan for the [00:31:00] library. The plan on the left is our main floor, and this is where the former space was located. In that room, circled in red, On the other side, you will see the second floor where the Paul Russell and Company Center is now located, and it encompasses that entire wing of the library at this point.

So you can see significant size difference. A little note on some of our collection, it encompasses a number of periodicals. Numerous books. Some of the books are very old and very fragile, and I’ll talk about what we’ve done to try to preserve those, but also make them available for students. We also have a large collection of dealership brochures.

Going back clearly of the fifties, but I am sure further back than that, I’m thinking about a particular assignment that a professor assigns and they go back to the fifties on that. And then we have a large [00:32:00] collection of repair manuals for our students. Space wise, we’ve got a 2, 900 square feet open collection that also provides a variety of study space for students.

It really has made a difference opening this space up on our upper level. It is not restricted. Any student from across disciplines across campus can feel free to come to this space and use it to study. It is very bright, very light, but the space houses our open part of our collection. We also have 1, 296 square feet of restricted space.

space, which is enclosed in a glass room. We keep it locked because these are materials that we consider to be more rare, more difficult to replace if something were to happen to them. But we do provide study spaces within this room so that our students and our researchers can still access these items.

They just come to us at the [00:33:00] front desk and ask to be let in. And we unlock that room for them, and they are able to work in there. And then we also have a small office for our auto restoration students who work at the library. They do some of their work from this room. It’s located right alongside these other spaces.

And this makes them available for any other students who have questions and they’re very familiar with these collections. They use them and they work with them on a daily basis. So I thought it was important to have them upstairs right there. Within this special collection, we have a couple of smaller special collections.

One being our dealership brochures. As I said, these go back quite a ways. This filing cabinet is almost full and I have another room full of brochures. It’s a beautiful collection to see what the dealers were highlighting, who they were targeting with their [00:34:00] advertising. I like to have students think about some of those questions of like, who was the target audience for this?

Was it the wife and mother? Was it the single bachelor depends on the automobile and then those Duesenberg blueprints and these are the drawers where they have been Jeremy from, like, I think my first Day almost at McPherson has been knocking down my door to figure out how can we digitize these? It was a brilliant solution to have him work on this as an independent study.

And so he is doing this research of what do we need to do to make this work? That happened a little bit about some of the collaborations that I am privileged to work with. I have a quote that is on a sticky note on the bottom of my desktop computer at work, and it says leadership is about relationships, build them.

I really believe that. And so I work very hard to build [00:35:00] partnerships across campus with our various faculty. And I’ve worked. Very closely with the automotive restoration faculty, and so our professors who teach intro to automotive restoration, they bring their freshman students over during the fall semester, and we do an orientation with the collection and the students.

space. And they get a tour and they start getting a feel for everything that we have available for them. And then I also offer a library instruction. And this is where faculty will invite me to meet with our classes to talk about the ways that our resources and our services. One of the partnerships that I’ve been involved with, our professor who teaches advanced trim approached me and said, I’d like for my students to do a research presentation and I want them to specifically use the brochures in the collection.

And so we work together to create something that allows that [00:36:00] to happen. I also have some really important relationships. that I have built with the student library employees who are automotive restoration majors. There are five of them who were a part of helping us get the Paul Russell and Company Center up and going.

They physically moved materials from that first floor up to the second floor. And so we included them in that day because it was really important for me to recognize the hard work that they had put forth. But I also, I try to identify their strengths and their interests and they have projects that I give them that will hopefully help them to explore those strengths and interests at a deeper level.

So when I started out thinking about what I would include in this presentation, I was thinking about some of the challenges curating this type of collection. [00:37:00] came to mind when I was thinking about challenges. Although there are many many benefits to the donations that we receive. These photos are from four separate storage spaces that I have currently in the library.

This is why the collection is Keeps growing. We have a backlog right now of donations. I have two of our automotive restoration students who are working through this backlog. They are cataloging, sorting, processing, doing all the things that we need to get these items on our shelves. And so that is how it keeps growing.

And like I said, it’s pretty much on a daily basis because at least one of them is working each day. For these two students, it is their primary focus this year. As we work through the backlog, we continue to get more donations. I just received a large donation of books and magazines. From a very kind lady named [00:38:00] Nancy, who lives in Des Moines.

And she heard about us from actually one of our internship employers. And so she reached out and we’ve been talking since May. We were finally able to work through the logistics and get her collection to the college. That is another relationship that I work to cultivate is those people who are looking.

For a place, usually it’s for their loved ones, collections that relate to the cars or vehicles that were interesting to them. And so I had lovely couple from New Jersey who came to see me last year to bring me a collection, another couple from Michigan. But became very emotional because these were her father’s books and they were so excited that our students would benefit and that someone would continue to benefit from the books that they were bringing us.

And so [00:39:00] really the challenge is having the space to continue to store them. Jeremy mentioned Templeton and even over there, they had a couple of pallets of donations that we just brought over to the library in the last couple of weeks. So it’s an ongoing continuous cycle, but the real challenge is the space issue.

And I hope that. It continues to be an issue because it is a wonderful way for us to add to our collection and to support the learning of our students with that. I am open to any questions. Thank you. Question. So first, a short self interested question. Do you participate in interlibrary loan so we can borrow your stuff?

Yes, we do. And so anything that. That is in that open collection. The things in the restricted collection, we do not send out because of the rarity and the value, but anything that’s in the open collection can be [00:40:00] borrowed through interlibrary loan. That’s good news. Thank you. Yeah. The larger question is, what’s the college’s current relationship with Hagerty?

I don’t have an answer for that question. That is a good Okay, Jeremy can answer that, actually. They are a very strong supporter of the school. They feel Hagerty actually helps bond our environmental restoration board towards the school and towards the digital art program. But these athletes, such as Elvish, who both want to pair up with you.

Summer at the Longwood Residence is not for a lot of internship students and college students to meet with. members of that kind of world. So actually this past summer, I had lunch with McKeel Haggerty, which was great, but Haggerty is very supportive of our school. I know we have some alums that work there.

The one I know most off the top of my head’s name is Kyle Smith. He is actually an author for them and writes articles specifically within the motorcycles, so it’s not just cars. I’ll leave it at that. The question I had [00:41:00] was, How many restoration students work in the library? So this year we have four.

The last two years it’s been five. Just worked out that it was four this year. So I like that number of four to five. So I have four restoration students out of 11 total. So they make up a good amount of our student employees. Now I understand you have a summer program. Yes, the Summer Institute. I know a little about that, but Jeremy might be more.

Better question for him, but I guess in the greater scheme of things, do you have programs for adults, continued, you know, learning education, things like that, for those of us who maybe aren’t lucky enough to be, you know, 18 again? Yes, so our Summer Institute is actually a perfect opportunity for anyone who has an interest can come and participate in the Summer Institute.

Very cool, thank you. Thank you, Chrissy, that was great. Thank you, very informative.

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