On the Second Floor of the Cambridge Public Library’s main branch sits a unique gem. The Cambridge Room is home to thousands of archived materials about Cambridge’s history, curated by Archivist and Senior Librarian Alyssa Pacy.
Pacy is the library’s first archivist, and since 2010, she has been up to the immense challenge of curating the library’s archives from scratch. While the library’s collection previously lived in the turret of the old library building before the library’s renovation, she says there was no real accounting for what was there, and the records were very limited.
“When I got here, everything was boxed up from the renovation and put in storage, and when the building was open, they brought all the boxes in and then I started and there was just nothing. It was incredible,” Pacy said. “I had to figure out what was here. I had no idea what was in the collection. And there were real gaps.”
Immediately, Pacy realized that the existing collections primarily reflected white, male, Harvard-associated residents. There were no collections documenting the Black community, and representation was also lacking for women’s rights groups, immigrant groups, and LGBTQ+ activists. She set out to change this.
“I’m often out in the community building relationships because I have to build trust with these communities because they’ve been overlooked, especially by the library, collection-wise,” she said.
While she says that building trust with communities who have traditionally been underserved can be difficult, it is crucial for the library’s archives to represent the important stories of these communities and the vital roles they have played in shaping Cambridge’s history.
“The Black community in Cambridge has essentially been here from the beginning. It has traditionally been a very small but very powerful community, and it’s very unique in that it’s consistently connected to all the major political and cultural movements in America,” Pacy said. “It’s just a really amazing, small, powerful community, and it’s heartbreaking that it hasn’t been documented and made available for the public. So that’s been key for me, to fill in the gaps there.”
Beyond curating the collections, Pacy is responsible for documenting, preserving, cataloguing, and digitizing archived materials. The vast digital collections include millions of articles from Cambridge newspapers, as well as yearbooks from several high schools and numerous other documents. She also works with hundreds of researchers looking to access the online or in-person collections.
“I answer about 600 long-distance reference requests a year. So that’s like anything from, ‘I want to know the history of my house’ to ‘I need an obituary’ to ‘I need access to the historic newspaper collection that’s online,’” Pacy said. “An interesting one I got this week was, ‘I’m looking for information on grave diggers and resurrection men.’ So it really runs the gamut.”
Pacy also collaborates with other groups and organizations in Cambridge on a number of projects. One of her recent favorites was a project with artist Elisa Hamilton and the Cambridge Black History Project. Hamilton created the Jukebox, a vintage jukebox machine transformed into a work of public art that plays community stories at the Foundry. She wanted to ensure that stories from the BIPOC community were included in this project, and Pacy introduced her to the Cambridge Black History Project, who are frequent users of the archives as they work to research and document the history of Cambridge’s Black community.
