Distinctly Dutch - New York State Museum

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Memory Keepers
John Pasquini (right) and Ralph
Rataul (center) interview Senior
Historian John Scherer about his
experiences at the State Museum.
The two anthropologists initiated
an oral history project to record
the unwritten history of the people
“who’ve worked at and shaped”
the Museum.
When Senior Historian
John Scherer retired in
April, he took with him
nearly 42 years of firsthand knowledge
of the decorative arts, popular
entertainment, and print collections
as well as information about the
Museum’s history and day-to-day
activities. While it’s impossible
to capture all of a person’s institutional
knowledge, an ongoing
oral history project aims to record
the experiences of longtime staff
members to compile a history of
the State Museum.
Museum anthropologists
John Pasquini and Ralph Rataul
conceived the research project in
April 2006. The 2002 death of
Dr. Robert Funk, who served as
State Archaeologist from 1973
to 1993, had left a void in their
professional lives. They both considered
Funk “a great resource and
friend” and knew he had “a wealth
of tales” about his time working
at the Museum and could provide
the answers to questions about
decisions made during his tenure.
As a result of this loss, Pasquini
and Rataul identified a need to
capture and preserve the first-person
accounts, stories shared among
colleagues, and personal remem-
brances that shape an individual’s
institutional memory.
“Some of this information can
and does live on in the written and
oral traditions that surround us
everyday as friends and co-workers
reminisce about the individuals in
question, but that information is
secondhand and is often altered
through these recollections and
time,” says Pasquini, a director of
the archaeology lab in the Cultural
Resources Survey Program. “The
Oral History Project collects these
memories firsthand and records
them for future generations.”
Pasquini and Rataul, a research
and collections technician for
anthropology, have interviewed
more than a dozen longtime
employees and former staff members.
During the recorded interviews,
topics range from the
general background of the staff
members and how they came to
work at the Museum to details
about how they did their job, who
they reported to, what accomplishments
they are most proud
of, and how the Museum operated.
Oral histories have the advantage
of being from the “insider’s perspective,”
says Rataul, who points
out that neither he nor Pasquini
or the majority of the current
staff were Museum employees
at the time many of the recalled
events took place.
“These insider perspectives,
covering the last half century,
provide a very real conception
of coping and thriving during
periods of massive facility and
management change,” says
Rataul. “Potential blueprints for
how we, the current staff, might
promote and manage pending
changes within our time at this
institution can be found in these
interviews… .”
A key area of interest is past
relocations of the collections, and
many of the Museum’s senior staff
participated in the last major move
[from the State Education Building].
“We suspect the lessons learned
during that effort would be
applicable to any future relocations
of the Research and
Collections department,” say
Pasquini and Rataul.
The oral history initiative is
one of several internally funded
Research and Collections projects.
Pasquini and Rataul were granted
a percentage of time from their
regular positions to work on this
additional project. n
6 n Legacy