The Byrd Archives, now open to the public, give visitors and scholars access to 57 years of political history.
The archives started in 2002 when Senator Robert Byrd moved his personal papers nearer to Washington, D.C. It houses everything from newspaper clippings to baseball bats and shovels. Byrd served West Virginia as a senator from 1959 to 2010.
The various styles of formats in which Byrd’s records have arrived at the archive express the long length of time stored there. The records have arrived as DVDs, cassettes, and even beta.
The archive is located upstairs in the Byrd Center for Legislative Studies. Any students or community members wanting access to the archive should contact Marc Levitt, the Byrd Center’s director of archives.
The various antiquated formats will eventually be sent to external companies to be digitalized, furthering the amount of readily available knowledge at the archive.
Some of the items will be heading to an exhibit at the Charleston Museum, but there is still a lot going in the Shadow of Scarborough Library. In addition to Byrd’s papers, the Center also houses Scot Faulkner’s papers. Faulkner was the first chief administrative officer for the U.S. House of Representatives. The Center is also home to the papers of Harley Staggers Sr., West Virginia’s democratic representative from 1941 to 1981 and Harley Staggers Jr., who served five terms in the House of Representatives.
Rows and rows of clean and neat gray boxes represent the whole of the processed papers. Behind that order is another large room filled with unprocessed papers, paintings and other artifacts from Byrd’s life.
The Byrd Center for Legislative Studies is a separate entity from Shepherd, although it is located on campus. The archive is funded by the Congressional Education Foundation, a non-profit organization, and its employees are not Shepherd staff. The center is still well integrated into Shepherd life and has hosted events and allowed access to Shepherd’s community.
Levitt said that he hopes that they can become a center for “student research” and believes it is important for students to have access to a congressional collection. The Byrd Center has employed seven Shepherd interns, three of whom were long term, with two new interns this semester.
Kimberly Ballard, a senior education major, was excited to hear the archive had opened.
Ballard said, “Byrd was an awesome congressional scholar, and this is a huge asset for Shepherd.”
Levitt does advise that students seeking to utilize the archives visit the xenter’s Web site, www.byrdcenter.org, and take advantage of the “what to expect” section to be properly prepared to visit an archival system. Marc Levitt can be contacted either at the center or at mlevitt@shepherd.edu