In the basement of Young Research Library, rare manuscripts that
have sat untouched for sometimes over 40 years are being discovered
by graduate students working in the Center for Primary Research and
Training.
E.J. Kim is one of ten students in the grant-funded program
founded in July. The program pays wages competitive with teaching
assistantships to graduate students who reorganize and catalog the
library’s collections of manuscripts to make them more
accessible to future researchers.
The center is one of the first on campus to address the growing
need for graduate student financial support, while fulfilling a
need on campus to explore the backlog of rare research
materials.
Kim, a third-year graduate student in the Near Eastern languages
and cultures department’s modern Hebrew program, has been
working on the Feldman collection of medieval Hebrew manuscripts
since the beginning of the quarter.
She said after hearing about the center in an e-mail from her
department, she applied in order to gain experience with Hebrew
literature and because she needed a job.
“As a student, I always try to get more exposure to
anything in Hebrew,” she said.
“My specialty is more so in ancient and modern (Hebrew),
so I thought I’d try my hand out at medieval,” she
said, referring to her reasons for applying to work at the
center.
“And it was a job.”
Kim said she looks outside her department for funding because
the department has limited funding for TAs. She tried to look in
other departments for TA positions, but those departments gave
positions to graduate students in their own departments.
For her first two years at UCLA, Kim took out student loans and
worked off campus.
The center has allowed her to quit her job off campus and
research a subject related to her field of study.
Kim said she loves working in her field rather than in unrelated
jobs like tutoring in English.
“A lot of times students just want to make money,”
she said.
“But if you’re making money and it’s
contributing to your overall academic goal, that’s a priority
for graduate students.”
Kim began studying Hebrew while she was an undergraduate student
because she said spirituality was important to her, and in studying
different religions she thought she should read the Bible. As she
began reading it, she realized a lot gets lost in translation.
After beginning to study Hebrew, she decided to study abroad in
Israel, which she described as a life-changing year.
Kim enrolled in a graduate Hebrew program because it was the
first subject she had ever enjoyed studying, and she realized there
was nothing she would rather do than study Hebrew, she said.
Though her interest is in modern Hebrew and Israel, she said
studying the medieval manuscripts has not only improved her Hebrew
but also broadened her background of Hebrew literature.
“When I come to a piece of modern (Hebrew) literature
right now I understand that it has this vast history, this vast
heritage behind it. What I read now, I really read it in a
different way,” she said.
Kim added that working with the manuscripts has given her a
deeper respect for Jewish tradition.
“My respect and just overall admiration for Hebrew
literature has exponentially grown in seeing these medieval
manuscripts and seeing Jewish tradition. The heritage of writing
things down so meticulously ““ I’ve never seen anything
like it. It’s fascinating,” she said.
The research has not been easy, she said. Though she knows
Hebrew, much of the material she deals with at the center is in a
different script and requires meticulous translation.
“It’s a lot of detective work,” she said.
Kim said she enjoys working for the center because of the
research as well as the atmosphere, and said that if she were not
leaving for Israel in January, she would continue working there in
the coming years.
Eric Gudas, a second-year graduate student in English, began
working at the center as a summer job and continued because his
project ““ the papers of 20th century poet Kenneth Rexroth
““ was so large.
Gudas said that while he is lucky the English department fully
funds graduate students for five years, it does not include the
summer, which is the main reason Gudas started work at the center.
He found the center helpful in securing summer employment in his
field.
Graduate students in English often teach through the department
in the summer, but Gudas had just started graduate school and chose
working at the center over tutoring or other desk jobs because the
position in the center was in his field of 20th century American
poetry.
The new parent now works part-time as a teaching assistant and
works at the center ten hours a week.
He said working at the center was helping him develop valuable
research skills and has given him insight into the period his study
focuses on.
“It’s also helpful for anyone who works in
literature to kind of see the different stages of writing a
book,” he said. “It’s a good chance to see how a
piece of writing comes together out of a lot of different
layers.”
Gudas added that he was excited about his upcoming opportunity
through his job to work with material even Rexroth’s
biographer did not get to see.
This material was recently made available.
Laurel McPhee, the center’s coordinator who supervises
students and trains them in archival methods, said she shares the
excitement of her students about the materials they are
researching.
McPhee said she was working on a collection purchased by the
UCLA library in 1957, and several students were working on
collections acquired in the 1960s that were forgotten when the
Library Special Collections moved from Powell.
Manuscript collections that were still being examined had to be
boxed up because there was no room for them during the move.
“When that happened, a lot of things were in process
““ challenging items such as Near Eastern manuscripts,”
she said.
“We’ve never had enough staff to really be able to
catalogue these Arabic, Persian, Turkish manuscripts. People just
kind of forget that they’re there when they’re not
catalogued.”
But the benefits of the center’s research extend beyond
simple cataloguing. McPhee gave an example of how her
students’ research in examining an author’s
correspondences revealed about the author’s influence.
“You don’t discover gems like that unless you go
through it piece by piece,” she said.
Archival work is very different from other work that students
do, and the first-hand experience is valuable, McPhee said.
“It’s really hard for students to grasp the depths
of what’s really here until they start working with
it,” he said.
McPhee said the founder of the center, Head of Special
Collections Victoria Steele, believed the center would be a great
way to bring students into the archival process and to solve the
problem of the library’s backlog.
Steele was excited that the center had become an attractive
employment option for graduate students and that it was competitive
with TA-ships, she said.
McPhee cited insufficient graduate student funding as one
possible reason for the creation of the center.
“I do think there’s a correlation there between
making it another opportunity for grad student to get paid,”
she said.
Administrators say they are aware of the financial challenges
facing graduate students, and are turning more toward private
sources for the support necessary.
John Richardson, the associate dean of the UCLA graduate
division, said decreasing funds from the state mean the university
needs to increasingly seek external funding to support its graduate
students and remain competitive.
Graduate students, especially nonresidents who are paying
continually rising tuition, turn more to private grants, he
said.
“I don’t think anybody thinks we have enough
money,” he said.
Richardson said the university’s administration is aware
of the need for greater graduate student support on campus, and
that both the chancellor and the Academic Senate are taking action
to combat the problem of insufficient funds for graduate
students.
“I don’t think we’re going to look to the
state for the solution,” Richardson said, adding that
obtaining private funds was a more likely solution to the
university’s budgetary problems.
Richardson said the center could serve as a model for the campus
to establish other programs using private funds to support graduate
students.