31 - Preserving History | Jonathan Nelson - The Wisconsin Historical Society

Have you ever found yourself wondering what you’ll leave behind? As the saying goes, you can’t take it with you, but it might be worth archiving, or something like that. Our guest today is Jonathan Nelson, a collections development archivist with the Wisconsin Historical society. He also has the privilege of working with the collection recording the history of Organic and Sustainable agriculture.
Today we’ll discuss how Jonathan became an archivist, what the job entails, how archives work, how Wisconsin started a collection on Organic history, and much more.
We recorded this conversation at the 2018 MOSES Conference, so there will be more background noise, but it’s a great conversation, so without further ado, enjoy this episode with Jonathan Nelson.
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Show Notes:

Jonathan Nelson started out as a lawyer, worked at a bookstore, studied library sciences.
Worked at the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma as an archivist, and then started working at the WI Historical society when the job opened up.
An archivist is an information professional that deals with unpublished material from various people.
A librarian works with published resources, an archivist works with one of a kind documents and information.
Rather than hoarding (collecting everything), archivist’s cultivate usual information.
The WI Historical Society is a State Agency, that is actually older than the State of WI.
Anything the Society collects is something they are committed to keeping in perpetuity.
Jonathan Nelson became involved in the Organic and Sustainable collection in 2013, because the Society surveyed what was within their collection and found they were lacking in Organic and Sustainable records.
More show notes @ https://intellectualagrarian.com/jnelson

 
Links:
WI Historical Society Organic Collection - 
https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS4440
Farmer's For Forty Centuries - 
http://a.co/cbrlq8q
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