There are countless opportunities on campus for student voices to be heard, but NC State’s archival project Wolf Tales goes one step further in preserving those voices. With this program, students can share their campus experiences openly and freely via video or audio to be archived and accessible forever.
Wolf Tales is an initiative to gather oral stories and experiences, no matter how small. Students can sit down by themselves or with a friend to record a 10-minute video or audio story of their experiences on campus and submit it to the Wolf Tales portal to be added into the University’s archival collection.
Virginia Ferris is the lead librarian for outreach and engagement for Special Collections.
“[Wolf Tales] really grew out of a kind of institutional documentation project that the University Archivist, Todd Kosmerick, drew up years ago,” Ferris said.
Kosmerick said the archives house valuable historical records.
“[University Archives] is comprised of, for the most part, records created in University departments and other campus units, that are determined to have some kind of historical value or some value that would require their permanent retention,” Kosmerick said.
Student experiences are included in that bucket, despite their stories being the hardest to get ahold of.
“The archival collections don’t always do a good job of documenting student experience on campus, so we have used Wolf Tales to try to capture student voices,” Kosmerick said.
Traditionally, archival collections start by gathering available physical evidence or documentation about a topic. Throughout this collection period, archivists start to see gaps developing in areas where documentation is sparse or not easily accessible.
“Archival collections tell you something about what happened in the past, but they don’t necessarily tell you everything,” Kosmerick said.
These gaps are easy to spot but not as easy to fill. These areas of silence in archival history often affect marginalized communities or the communities most at risk of being forgotten — NC State is not an exception.
“It’s an unfortunate reality that we face as archivists that large parts of our history as a campus were not documented or were not deemed valuable to preserve at different points in history,” Ferris said. “We saw the need for [Wolf Tales] when we were looking at some of those silences in University history [as] an opportunity to bring voices into those silences.”
History cannot be unwound and lost documentation cannot be recovered. NC State needs student voices to speak into those silences and fill in those gaps as every experience is valuable — no matter how small they seem.
“It is totally understandable that people don’t think that anything, any documentation, no matter how [they] may be creating now, whether it’s photos or YouTube videos, whether it’s just my emails or my chats, that those all have potential of becoming archival collections,” Kosmerick said. “I would like to get people to start thinking about them that way. They are a documentation of some aspect of student experience, and they are all things that we would be interested in collecting as part of the record in Special Collections.”
