One of the most overlooked jewels of this institution is the Folsom Library. In this age of the Internet, it is easy to forget about the resources we have available to us in the library, from books to CD’s to movies, everything you could ever want and more can be found within its doors.
Many students simply see the library as a place that they know they can find a quiet place to study. But the library is much more than that. The library has, or can get for you, almost any book or any topic imaginable.
My experience with our library has been rather limited but overwhelmingly positive. Aside from the normal research that everyone occasionally needs to do, this year, primarily because of my position as Grand Marshal, I have found myself in the Institute Archives on a handful of occasions.
Early on in my term, I made the observation that the events of today often are very similar to what has happened in the past here at RPI. The Institute Archives has records on almost everything you can ask about the RPI’s history, with one glaring exception: the history of student government and the student Union.
One idea that has been brought up before, that is percolating to the top of the Student Senate’s agenda is the idea of an ombudsperson either for the Institute as a whole, or for the students within each of the different schools. Student Senator Michael Goldenberg has been spearheading this idea and has been working with the Provost to lay the groundwork for this new initiative.
On a whim, Student Senator Robert Fishel and I went to the archives to see what they had on previous attempts at this idea. We were able to locate two previous attempts; one by Phalanx, and one by a previous Grand Marshal. It appeared to us that the fatal flaw at both previous attempts was that the program’s creators seemed to designate the people interested in creating the position as the people responsible for filling the position of student ombudsperson. One interesting part of Senator Goldenberg’s initial reports is that the positions will be institutionalized, rather than evaporating when the students who created the positions graduate.
Similarly, knowledge of what student programs have been implemented also disappears. This is why this year’s Student Senate had started the process of saving and archiving our records and archiving what we have done. Hopefully, with the newly created position of Senate Historian, we will no longer find ourselves in the position of trying to piece together the past, we can simply focus on moving into the future.
