An unusual campus job: Documenting history
Students perform important campus tasks such as distributing food, maintaining order in the dorms and even providing security for peers and faculty. However, for Jonathan Stepp, a senior in the College of Arts & Sciences, and about 15 other students working in the University Archives and Special Collections, a campus job is a scholarly pursuit.
When researchers come in looking for specific books or special collections, these students retrieve their requests and occasionally aid in archive projects. Student employees wet their feet with research for which graduate students can only hope.
Stepp said his job entails transcribing the testimonials of Holocaust survivors, a project he undertook in February 2008. As a History and German double major, he said he asked his adviser where he should look for a job. His adviser suggested the library. He was hired by the Special Collections department and soon began working on a project for the archives.
Stepp said he works on transcribing an oral history collection of Holocaust survivors who settled in Milwaukee and the surrounding area. These testimonials were compiled in 1983 by professor emeritus Michael Phayer. Phayer worked with a local Milwaukee group called Generation After. The group included Holocaust survivors’ children working to preserve their parents’ experiences from pre-war Europe and the Holocaust. As a result, they supported Phayer’s ambition to conduct interviews and create an oral history collection honoring Holocaust survivors.
According to Matt Blessing, the director of the department, Phayer interviewed 65 Holocaust survivors. Many of these people were fortunate enough never to have been sent to concentration camps. Their stories focused on the way of life in Europe before World War II.
The interviewees talked about how they ended up in Milwaukee, often a sporadic decision. Stepp said that when these people came to the United States, Milwaukee was a hotbed of industrialization. Immigrants would first arrive in New York City, then hear of jobs in Milwaukee and decide to move. The stories these individuals tell are valuable because they describe how the world was changing as Hitler rose to power. This kind of firsthand account is becoming increasingly rare as their generation ages.
Stepp said that some interviews are only 45 minutes long while others are three hours. He has listened to these tapes in order to create word-for word transcripts. From here he has begun to digitize the transcripts so that an online archive can be created.
It can take as long as 10 hours to complete this process for a single tape, Blessing said. Hiring a professional for this job would be incredibly expensive. Stepp provides a real service to the school, and the research process in general, by working toward this goal.
But Stepp said it’s a two-way street because he is learning a lot about the research world in which he hopes to some day enter. He has also learned a lot about Jewish culture and traditions, not to mention lessons about humanity and the travesties of war.
Once the oral history has been completely digitized it will be available on the Internet for anyone to use. Stepp said the project is so large that he cannot complete it before he graduates this year. But certainly graduate studies will benefit from the time he has put into this project.
Tags: campus jobs, Holocaust, Jonathan Stepp, Special Collections and University Archives
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