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Date: 8/23/2023
WESTFIELD — The Westfield Athenaeum is hosting a new event called I Spy Westfield on Aug. 30. Members of the community are invited to help them identify the people, places and buildings in the Athenaeum’s photograph collection. Most of these photos are older portrait photos that people had taken around the mid-20th century. Also included are photographs of buildings around the community, streets or different locations. The photos will be displayed in the Elizabeth Stewart Reed Room from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m.
Archivist and reference librarian Max Vivacqua said, “It’s a good eclectic collection of the Westfield community. We’re working between the archives photo collections and the local history photo collections.”
He continued, “This event is one we thought about for a while. We are fortunate to have a lot of photograph collections here at the Athenaeum. We’re hoping it’s a successful event we would love to run more in the future.”
A lot of the photos have been donated over the last 50 years by families and patrons of the Athenaeum. Some of the older families, like the Loomis family had a couple of photo albums they donated that were already listed as unidentified. Vivacqua added, “We have a lot of these collections that are just floating around that we would love to make accessible to people, but we didn’t have a way to identify how they would be helpful to our patrons.”
In the past, the Athenaeum has run smaller photo identification campaigns on social media. On “Throwback Thursdays,” librarians will often post a photo from the archives and ask if anyone can identify the subject. Athenaeum staff have been thinking for a while about a way to reach the larger community, so they wanted to have more of an open house-style event where people could come in at their leisure and have a fun time looking through several images.
Once the photos are identified, they will return to their initial collections. Athenaeum staff have what they call “finding aid,” a small writeup attached to each collection describing what’s in it and its potential use for research. The librarians would love to be able to update their finding aids with some more names and location information. Then, when a patron comes in looking to research a specific topic, a family or a person, the Athenaeum will have a much easier time finding resources that could help.
“We love to foster a sense of involvement with the local culture heritage and the memory of the community,” Vivacqua said. “People being able to just take a look through a larger amount of photos will hopefully allow them to connect a little bit more to Westfield, and especially for some of our older patrons connect with a lot of those memories.”
He went on to say, “We also want people involved in what we have here learning more about our collections. We in the archives wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful as we’re able to be without the support of the community. Whether that’s through donations or through events like this helping us identify things, storing community memories or personal narratives with the archives.”
The Athenaeum is located at 6 Elm St., Westfield.