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Era ends as University of Iowa archivist and ‘institutional memory’ retire

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Dec 16, 2001
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Iowa City, IA
A lot of institutional knowledge leaving the UofI. David has helped me with a number of questions over the years about the history of the university.



IOWA CITY — It was 30 years ago, outside his northern Iowa hometown of Charles City, that a dilapidated 156-year-old redbrick home — and efforts to restore it — compelled a then 35-year-old David McCartney to make a change.

Up until that point, McCartney had been in radio news — earning a journalism degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1979 and going on to work at stations in Iowa, Wisconsin and Anchorage, Alaska, where he met his now-husband of 37 years.

He liked that work just fine.

“But, at the time, I felt that it really wasn’t my muse,” McCartney told The Gazette. “In my mid-30s, I was thinking back on what I found to be my muse when I was much younger. And it was history.”

Growing up, his parents instilled in him a love and appreciation for history. But around the time McCartney was primed for a career change, his mom was digging into a specific historical project to save and preserve the girlhood home of Carrie Chapman Catt — a famed coordinator of the women’s suffrage movement who grew up in rural Charles City.

“My mother became very involved in that project,” McCartney said. “And she really influenced me in terms of how a local preservation project can become a source of education and inspiration for people of all ages.”

A nonprofit that McCartney’s mom and friends organized bought the Catt home and in 1992 began the long process of restoring the 1866 Victorian-era farm home, while McCartney got involved on the document side.

“I became interested from the standpoint of learning more about collections of papers around the country that had any pertinence to Carrie Chapman Catt,” he said. “I learned that she was a very prolific author and public speaker. She left quite a substantial trail of papers around the country because she corresponded extensively with other women’s rights leaders.”

'It really excited me’​

McCartney eventually went on to do the same thing for the University of Iowa — on many different levels involving many different topics and issues and people — stepping in as its official archivist and “institutional memory” on Jan. 2, 2001.

“That summer of 1992 really motivated me to think about archives as a field to consider,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is cool work that they're doing.’ It really excited me to the point that by 1993, I was beginning to prepare to apply to graduate programs.”

McCartney’s route back to his home state was circuitous, transporting him from Anchorage to Portland, Ore., to Maryland in 1994 for a master’s in history and library science from the University of Maryland. After graduating, McCartney landed contracted archive and records positions in the Washington, D.C., area.

And that’s where he stayed until the UI position opened in 2000 — bringing a 44-year-old McCartney and his husband closer to his parents.

“One of the most joyful phone calls I made was to tell them that I had been accepted to work here,” McCartney said. “They did not know I was applying.”

'My terminal job’​

Twenty-one years after stepping into what became his dream job, McCartney, 65, on March 1 officially hung up his elastic archival gloves and put away for a final time the university’s waterproof, acid-free, flip-top document boxes.

“I had no idea that this would be my terminal job,” he said, but conceded that university archivist proved a natural fit for him due to its “incredibly wide range of responsibilities.”

McCartney not only developed and processed collections, organizing and cataloging them so researchers and professors could use them. But he answered reference queries from library patrons.

“And I did not expect to do so much instruction,” he said. “For an introvert like me, it was a bit of a wake-up call to get with the program. But I loved it. Working with students and helping them find a path to something that they may be looking for.”

Beyond one-on-one instruction with students who came in looking for something specific, McCartney said he taught a course in archives administration and a library science program. He also gave numerous class presentations across a range of disciplines on campus — from history to journalism; from non-fiction writing to political science.

“When I came here, I realized there was a stereotype of archivists who work back in the corner, at the far end of a range of boxes, silently toiling away and organizing papers,” he said. “And I was disabused of that very quickly. That's one part of what we do. But it's certainly not the entire picture.”

Of course, much of McCartney’s teaching came through the collections and galleries he helped curate — including the one on display in the UI Main Library now.

“We Are Hawkeyes: Celebrating 175 Years of Student Life at the University of Iowa,” is a Jan. 18 through July 3 exhibit highlighting the many ways students charted the campus’ course through time.

The exhibit, according to McCartney, sets out to illustrate the student experience “in all its flavors, from athletics to academics, from parties to protest.”

“Our staff enjoyed selecting these materials, and we hope you enjoy or appreciate the stories they tell,” he wrote in a note about the exhibit. “Not all of them are pleasant; some are difficult to absorb. But all of them are, we hope, compelling in some way.”

‘Signed in blood’​

Using his journalism skills, McCartney for years has written an “Old Gold” series published in the UI Center for Advancement’s “Iowa Magazine” — covering the history of all things UI, like Hancher, vaccine research, the Herky mascot and influential students, faculty and staff.

About Frank “Kinney” Holbrook — born in the 1870s in Tipton to a former slave before becoming UI’s first African American football player — McCartney in December 2020 wrote, “His timing couldn't have been worse.”

“SUI's football program, entering its seventh season, was facing closure due to a lack of funds and, consequently, the lack of a coach,” he wrote. “Iowa posted a 2-5 record that season.”

After publishing an award-winning article on the life of UI student Stephen Smith — who in 1965 stood before a crowd and burned his draft card to protest the Vietnam War — McCartney organized the “Historical Iowa Civil Rights Network” to unite related collections from across the state.

He also consulted for many smaller archives and libraries in the Midwest and volunteered for nonprofit organizations — holding posts in the Midwest Archives Conference and contributing to the Big Ten Academic Alliance University Archivist Group and the Consortium of Iowa Archivists.

In a statement, UI Special Collections & Archives Director Margaret Gamm praised McCartney for tying together “research questions and historical threads across campus, from the College of Medicine to the School of Art and Art History.”

“He has such a passion for constantly learning more about the people and events represented in our collections and for uniting materials with those who need them,” Gamm said.

When asked whether McCartney had a favorite collection or project over the years, he told The Gazette that’s like asking a grandma if she has a favorite grandchild.

But then he pointed to one part of the “We Are Hawkeyes” display that involved an element of mystery — in that it started with just a small box of identical anti-war petitions, all signed with unusual-looking signatures.

After some sleuthing, McCartney determined they were tied to a UI protest in November 1967 in which students demanded the university stop a defense contractor from coming to campus. His investigation also uncovered the story behind the signatures.

“We learned from the news accounts that the petitions were signed in blood,” he said. “There was a group that gathered on the steps of the Old Capitol, and they either pricked their fingers there and signed on site in blood or obtained blood that had been gathered by group of sympathetic nursing students.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com

 
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A lot of institutional knowledge leaving the UofI. David has helped me with a number of questions over the years about the history of the university.



IOWA CITY — It was 30 years ago, outside his northern Iowa hometown of Charles City, that a dilapidated 156-year-old redbrick home — and efforts to restore it — compelled a then 35-year-old David McCartney to make a change.

Up until that point, McCartney had been in radio news — earning a journalism degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1979 and going on to work at stations in Iowa, Wisconsin and Anchorage, Alaska, where he met his now-husband of 37 years.

He liked that work just fine.

“But, at the time, I felt that it really wasn’t my muse,” McCartney told The Gazette. “In my mid-30s, I was thinking back on what I found to be my muse when I was much younger. And it was history.”

Growing up, his parents instilled in him a love and appreciation for history. But around the time McCartney was primed for a career change, his mom was digging into a specific historical project to save and preserve the girlhood home of Carrie Chapman Catt — a famed coordinator of the women’s suffrage movement who grew up in rural Charles City.

“My mother became very involved in that project,” McCartney said. “And she really influenced me in terms of how a local preservation project can become a source of education and inspiration for people of all ages.”

A nonprofit that McCartney’s mom and friends organized bought the Catt home and in 1992 began the long process of restoring the 1866 Victorian-era farm home, while McCartney got involved on the document side.

“I became interested from the standpoint of learning more about collections of papers around the country that had any pertinence to Carrie Chapman Catt,” he said. “I learned that she was a very prolific author and public speaker. She left quite a substantial trail of papers around the country because she corresponded extensively with other women’s rights leaders.”

'It really excited me’​

McCartney eventually went on to do the same thing for the University of Iowa — on many different levels involving many different topics and issues and people — stepping in as its official archivist and “institutional memory” on Jan. 2, 2001.

“That summer of 1992 really motivated me to think about archives as a field to consider,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is cool work that they're doing.’ It really excited me to the point that by 1993, I was beginning to prepare to apply to graduate programs.”

McCartney’s route back to his home state was circuitous, transporting him from Anchorage to Portland, Ore., to Maryland in 1994 for a master’s in history and library science from the University of Maryland. After graduating, McCartney landed contracted archive and records positions in the Washington, D.C., area.

And that’s where he stayed until the UI position opened in 2000 — bringing a 44-year-old McCartney and his husband closer to his parents.

“One of the most joyful phone calls I made was to tell them that I had been accepted to work here,” McCartney said. “They did not know I was applying.”

'My terminal job’​

Twenty-one years after stepping into what became his dream job, McCartney, 65, on March 1 officially hung up his elastic archival gloves and put away for a final time the university’s waterproof, acid-free, flip-top document boxes.

“I had no idea that this would be my terminal job,” he said, but conceded that university archivist proved a natural fit for him due to its “incredibly wide range of responsibilities.”

McCartney not only developed and processed collections, organizing and cataloging them so researchers and professors could use them. But he answered reference queries from library patrons.

“And I did not expect to do so much instruction,” he said. “For an introvert like me, it was a bit of a wake-up call to get with the program. But I loved it. Working with students and helping them find a path to something that they may be looking for.”

Beyond one-on-one instruction with students who came in looking for something specific, McCartney said he taught a course in archives administration and a library science program. He also gave numerous class presentations across a range of disciplines on campus — from history to journalism; from non-fiction writing to political science.

“When I came here, I realized there was a stereotype of archivists who work back in the corner, at the far end of a range of boxes, silently toiling away and organizing papers,” he said. “And I was disabused of that very quickly. That's one part of what we do. But it's certainly not the entire picture.”

Of course, much of McCartney’s teaching came through the collections and galleries he helped curate — including the one on display in the UI Main Library now.

“We Are Hawkeyes: Celebrating 175 Years of Student Life at the University of Iowa,” is a Jan. 18 through July 3 exhibit highlighting the many ways students charted the campus’ course through time.

The exhibit, according to McCartney, sets out to illustrate the student experience “in all its flavors, from athletics to academics, from parties to protest.”

“Our staff enjoyed selecting these materials, and we hope you enjoy or appreciate the stories they tell,” he wrote in a note about the exhibit. “Not all of them are pleasant; some are difficult to absorb. But all of them are, we hope, compelling in some way.”

‘Signed in blood’​

Using his journalism skills, McCartney for years has written an “Old Gold” series published in the UI Center for Advancement’s “Iowa Magazine” — covering the history of all things UI, like Hancher, vaccine research, the Herky mascot and influential students, faculty and staff.

About Frank “Kinney” Holbrook — born in the 1870s in Tipton to a former slave before becoming UI’s first African American football player — McCartney in December 2020 wrote, “His timing couldn't have been worse.”

“SUI's football program, entering its seventh season, was facing closure due to a lack of funds and, consequently, the lack of a coach,” he wrote. “Iowa posted a 2-5 record that season.”

After publishing an award-winning article on the life of UI student Stephen Smith — who in 1965 stood before a crowd and burned his draft card to protest the Vietnam War — McCartney organized the “Historical Iowa Civil Rights Network” to unite related collections from across the state.

He also consulted for many smaller archives and libraries in the Midwest and volunteered for nonprofit organizations — holding posts in the Midwest Archives Conference and contributing to the Big Ten Academic Alliance University Archivist Group and the Consortium of Iowa Archivists.

In a statement, UI Special Collections & Archives Director Margaret Gamm praised McCartney for tying together “research questions and historical threads across campus, from the College of Medicine to the School of Art and Art History.”

“He has such a passion for constantly learning more about the people and events represented in our collections and for uniting materials with those who need them,” Gamm said.

When asked whether McCartney had a favorite collection or project over the years, he told The Gazette that’s like asking a grandma if she has a favorite grandchild.

But then he pointed to one part of the “We Are Hawkeyes” display that involved an element of mystery — in that it started with just a small box of identical anti-war petitions, all signed with unusual-looking signatures.

After some sleuthing, McCartney determined they were tied to a UI protest in November 1967 in which students demanded the university stop a defense contractor from coming to campus. His investigation also uncovered the story behind the signatures.

“We learned from the news accounts that the petitions were signed in blood,” he said. “There was a group that gathered on the steps of the Old Capitol, and they either pricked their fingers there and signed on site in blood or obtained blood that had been gathered by group of sympathetic nursing students.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com

It's a shame when an institution loses somebody, an archivist or historian, with so much knowledge of its past. But to be fair they deserve to retire too. Especially at 68 with 30 years on the job.
 
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