Mainebiz

V O L . X X X I I N O. X X I S E P T E M B E R 2 1 , 2 0 2 6 26 A U G U S TA / WAT E R V I L L E / C E N T R A L M A I N E F O C U S "If your great-grandfather fought in the Civil War and wrote a great collection of letters to your great- grandmother, we don't collect that," Cotz says. "But we do have [Col.] Joshua Chamberlain's letters back to the Adjutant General. We have collections that go back to the 1600s and the original land grant from King Charles I to Lord Gorges. "e lion's share starts in the 1820s and runs through present time, and includes all kinds of things you wouldn't think about" ranging from the evocative — Civil War muster rolls and black-and-white carte de visite photographs — to the mundane — hundreds of boxes of Maine Department of Environmental Protection wastewater treatment plant records. "ings really run the gamut," he says. Every collection arrives processed to different degrees, some well organized and easy to integrate into the online catalogue. Conversely, when the archives were created in the 1960s, "agencies swept filing cabi- nets into boxes and they haven't been processed much beyond that since." One of the biggest tasks these days is to digitize as much of the collection as possible. In 2020, transferring materials out of the build- ing took about a year to plan and move, says Kate McBrien, the state archivist at the time. It was an opportunity to put together a complete inventory and install new high-density storage shelving. With everything back in place, the archive is now open to the public by appointment. But these days, most queries can be handled online. "We answer 500 to 600 email or phone reference requests per month," says Cotz. ere are countless stories sitting in the archives, waiting to be discovered. "at's one of the challenging parts of being a historian and working in an archives," Cotz wryly says. "We're trained to want to go down every rabbit hole and do the research ourselves. But the archives mission is to process and catalog the collection so that other people can come in and do the research." L a u r i e S c h r e i b e r , M a i n e b i z s e n i o r w r i t e r , c a n b e r e a c h e d a t l s c h r e i b e r @ m a i n e b i z . b i z » C O N T I N U E D F RO M P R E V I O U S PA G E P H O T O / J I M N E U G E R The Cultural Building in Augusta, housing Maine's state library, museum and archives. We have collections that go back to the 1600s and the original land grant from King Charles I to Lord Gorges. — Christian Cotz Maine State Archives

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