Amy Parsons: Hi, I am Amy Parsons, president of Colorado State University and host of The Next 150 podcast. We have so many remarkable people in our community, and this is where we’re going to hear their stories. We’re going to get their perspectives on CSU’s next 150 years, and gather their very best advice for today’s CSU students. Let’s get started, Rams.

Hi, Rams. Amy Parsons here. Thanks again for joining us for this episode of The Next 150, where we’re doing things a little bit differently today. Typically on The Next 150, we look ahead for what’s going forward for Colorado State University. Today we’re going to be focused a little bit about the last 150, right? And as Colorado approaches its anniversary of 150 years, and our nation approaches its anniversary of 250 years, and the archives at CSU, where we just came from right before coming into the studio, is celebrating its 50 years, we wanted to take the special moment to talk a little bit about CSU’s history and especially about the amazing archives collections that are in Morgan Library.

So with all of that convergence, we’re really excited to be here with two people who know CSU’s past and our archives as well as anybody. Mark Shelstad and Clarissa Trapp. Thank you both for being here with me today. Thanks also for the great tour of the archives that we just had a little bit ago. So excited for so many people to be able to see the archives this year, everything that you have on display as we celebrate these anniversaries. So let’s start with you, Mark. You’re the head of digital and archive services at CSU Libraries.

Mark Shelstad: Correct, yeah, I am.

Amy Parsons: Overseeing the archives, right? Water resources, that archive, special collections. You’re an associate professor. Tell us about your work and what brought you to this position.

Mark Shelstad: I came to CSU 11 years ago. I first got my start in archives working in graduate school and created that actually by a graduate internship at the Minnesota Historical Society back in the day. I did some work with Mark Green, who was one of the field’s leading practitioners in terms of acquisitions and thinking about why we actually use and acquire these materials. And so I’ve worked at the University of Wyoming, the Wyoming State Archives, as well as the University of Texas at San Antonio.

So very different areas in universities and focus and needs and users. And what really draw me here is that the collections and CSU’s land-grant mission are so critical to the entirety of the state is something I feel very, very at home with. I grew up on a farm and so the land-grant mission is really striking to me, but working with Clarissa and eight other wonderful people over in archives and special collections, we manage CSU’s institutional memory, collections relating to Colorado agriculture and water, special collections that was built from a collection we acquired in the 1960s from a group in Colorado Springs, and more recent collections ranging from this podcast, for example, commencement videos, all the stuff from the Spur, which is born digital, and other areas around campus that we are acquiring daily to manage and save CSU’s institutional history.

Amy Parsons: Yeah, well, CSU predated the state, right? So I mean, CSU really helped inform the development of Colorado and Colorado to CSU, and so much of that is captured in your work and what we have in the archives.

Mark Shelstad: Yeah, absolutely.

Amy Parsons: We’ll get into that a little bit. Clarissa, you’re Morgan Library’s instruction and outreach archivist, correct?

Clarissa Trapp: Correct, yes.

Amy Parsons: Correct, yes? And also an assistant professor?

Clarissa Trapp: Correct.

Amy Parsons: So you arrived at CSU as a grad student?

Clarissa Trapp: I did, in 2009.

Amy Parsons: Been here ever since?

Clarissa Trapp: I have been here ever since. I’ve been really fortunate to be able to do that. So yeah, I came here because I wanted to study history. I was going to get a master’s degree in history, a great program here, and I had started my career in a museum where I dressed up and talked to people. It was a living history museum, and CSU’s program is really friendly to public history. So I was like, I’m coming here, this is going to be great. I thought I was going to be a history professor. My plans changed while I was here and I got a summer job in the archives working for Patty Reddick, who we met while we were over there in the archives. And I discovered that I really like helping people get their research done. It’s fun to do the research myself, but I get more fulfillment professionally out of working with those people who come in and have their own agendas and I get to learn more in the process because I’m learning their research as well as anything I’m working on.

So I figured that out pretty quickly and I was able to join the staff as a state classified person who digitized archival material in about, I think it was about 2016. And then I finally decided to go back and get my master’s in library and information science a few years ago during the pandemic, honestly. And this job came open and at the time I’d been unable to stop making connections between campus folks and the archives. And so it was a really good fit to get to do instruction, which is something that I’d started out to do when I first came here to CSU. And I’m able to realize my goal of being a professor in a different situation and at the same time get to support people as they pursue their research and to become an expert on Colorado and CSU history of all things. It’s kind of fun.

Amy Parsons: You really are the experts in that, which I love having you here, especially because it’s an anniversary year. Lots of anniversary years, right? The 150, 250 and the 50, so importantly 50 years of archives at CSU. Talk a little bit about how that started 50 years ago, to create the archives in the first place. Because that means that there’s a lot of years where we weren’t preserving things necessarily and actually caretaking the archives. So what changed 50 years ago?

Clarissa Trapp: That’s a great question. Mark, do you want to start?

Mark Shelstad: Sure, I can jump in. Yeah. We really got our start with the work of Dr. James Hansen, who was a history professor here, a specialist in higher education in the United States. And he was asked to write a volume, which you’ll see on the cover on your side over here, is to write a history of CSU’s first 100 years. And he found out-

Amy Parsons: So the centennial celebration is really where it started.

Clarissa Trapp: Yes, the centennial.

Mark Shelstad: Centennial celebration leading up to it. And there’ve been others in the past that have gone about acquiring collections for CSU, including James Miller who was secretary of the board in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, I believe. And then Dr. Ruth Waddles from English was asked to write a 75th anniversary of CSU in 1946 that was completed. And so both of those were going about inquiring some of the earliest materials, but it was really up to Dr. Hansen to go about in digging out the collections that were stored over in Old Main and other buildings around campus that had never really been part of a formal program to document CSU’s history, to document the decisions made, the policies that were enacted, and the underlying reasons for those.

And also to document CSU’s traditions through the college newspapers, student organizations, reports, self-studies, electronic theses and dissertations that we’re collecting right now, but these were the reasons that Dr. Hansen went out and acquired the materials to make sure that we have transparency around our decisions and to be able to celebrate anniversaries and other events. But a lot of our work revolves around Dr. Hansen. We owe a lot to him.

Amy Parsons: Amazing.

Clarissa Trapp: Yeah, absolutely. One of my favorite stories that sort of comes out of his early stuff is them hiring him. “Hey, we want you to write the history.” And he’s like, “Great.” And he’s like, “Where’s your archives?” And they’re like, “We don’t have one.”

Amy Parsons: We want to make those.

Clarissa Trapp: Yeah. So then he goes around and acquires it, and as part of writing the book, he organizes the collections, he brings them together, and then the library dean at the time, LeMoyne Anderson, gives him a little time and space to unofficially start the archives in the library on the first floor on north side, which today is classroom space. But anyway, so he does that, and they’re finally able to get the State board of Agriculture to fund it July 1st, 1975. And so that’s why we’re celebrating-

Amy Parsons: 1975.

Clarissa Trapp: -50 years this year. So we’re almost at the full year of the end of that celebration.

Amy Parsons: What are some of the oldest artifacts that you have in there? I think when we were over there earlier today, there’s certainly things from the 1800s. Can you peg what is the oldest artifact in there?

Clarissa Trapp: I can. I am so sorry I didn’t pull it out. We have a piece of cuneiform from 2350 BCE, which is pretty cool.

Amy Parsons: Oh. I did not expect that as an answer.

Clarissa Trapp: Right? It’s a transaction recording sheep and cattle being sold in a temple in the city of Ur. So Babylonia.

Amy Parsons: Oh my gosh. No kidding.

Clarissa Trapp: We don’t have a lot of that kind of material. We have stuck, our collections primarily stick to the 19th and 20th century and the time that CSU was around, but we do have some very cool old stuff, especially in our special collections, rare books, and some of those early pieces. That oldest piece was acquired by Charlotte Baker, who was a librarian in the 1930s here, actually. So before the archives even existed, she was out here acquiring things.

Amy Parsons: It’s amazing what you can learn about the entire state of Colorado through what we have in the archives at CSU and really how CSU was formed as a land-grant institution. I’m interested in hearing more of your perspective on that. You mentioned it, about how unique it is to be a land-grant institution and to archive the work of a land-grant institution. How is that different, in your mind, to other places and other types of artifacts?

Mark Shelstad: Yeah. And certainly talking from my own experience working at two other public institutions of higher education, too, with very different programs and priorities. One was trying to go from a commuter college to an R1 in a city that didn’t have access to public higher education. The University of Wyoming is, of course, the only institution in the state, but I think about CSU’s roles in serving the state through Extension and the role in which we play in touching the lives of Coloradoans every day. I think that is really…strikes CSU a part in terms of the work of our faculty and the work of our staff to make that happen, whether it’s talking about canning demonstrations or food drives, but also talking about folks like Bill Gray, who founded the National Hurricane Weather Forecasting Center. One of our most famous alums, of course, is Ralph Parshall, a 1904 graduate who developed the Venturi flume and modified it later, known as the-

Amy Parsons: Partial flume, right?

Mark Shelstad: Partial flume, excuse me. To measure water flow that is still used around the world. And so documenting that is a long line stretching back to Elwood Mead who founded for the first irrigation courses in the country in 1883, to talk about canal construction, to talk about evaporation and how you manage a scarce resource that you can tie together right through now with the work that the Colorado River Compact is still being renegotiated because we can’t agree on how we’re going to manage this water.

Amy Parsons: Always will be, probably, subject of negotiation.

Mark Shelstad: Exactly. And so, for me, it’s very, very unique in terms of what is our land-grant mission and how do we serve the citizens of Colorado is something that really strikes me as being unique about our archives and we are unique in other institutions in the state in that our focus is on ag and water, and no other institution in the state really does that.

Amy Parsons: Yeah, it was amazing today just to see some of the material that you have from Temple Grandin, from Johnny Matshushima. I mean, it’s just amazing to have those artifacts that anybody can see. It makes you so proud of the work that happens at CSU. How do we make sure that our students today and students coming into CSU know that we have these archives and know that they’re part of this amazing tradition and history that we have at CSU?

Clarissa Trapp: That’s a great question, and my job. We have a couple different tactics that we take, and, of course, we see a lot of students in the building. So one of the things that we do is try to make sure that archival materials get put on display in exhibitions so that people coming through will see those materials and may be pulled in that way. I and my colleagues visit a lot of classes or bring a lot of classes into the archives, especially our humanities and social sciences folks. And I’m always happy to do more of those instruction sessions. So that’s one of the other ways. Listen, I appeared on Ramboozled to try and promote it.

Amy Parsons: Very good. Yes.

Clarissa Trapp: So we show up in spaces. We try to help the various departments and offices around the college and in the community celebrate their anniversaries, especially. And, of course, you were talking about anniversaries. We have a couple of Cultural Resource Centers that are going to celebrate 50 years this year, El Centro and the Black/African-American Cultural Center.

Amy Parsons: Really important.

Clarissa Trapp: I spend a lot of time talking to students whenever I can get in front of them about how they are creating the history and they shouldn’t just be thinking of history as the past and students in the past, but that they themselves are part of that and active creators.

Amy Parsons: We’re creating it right now, right?

Clarissa Trapp: Absolutely.

Mark Shelstad: And for me, for sort of a basic management guideline, has been every collection should have an online access point.

Amy Parsons: Absolutely.

Mark Shelstad: This has been something that I’ve worked on for the last 25 years of my career, just to make sure that collections are accessible and not to have somebody come in and say, “I didn’t know about this collection sitting in the back, and so I can’t write this book.” We want to make sure that everybody has an online access point because that’s where students live. That’s where faculty live. We know that. We want to be able to make ways in which we can make our collections available through scanning or making sure that the materials we capture are available online because so much of it is ranging from conference proceedings, theses and dissertations. All the work that’s being done in articles published by faculty are available online in our digital repositories as well, too. And we try to do that through an active scanning program, but we still only have maybe 5% of our collections available online.

Amy Parsons: Is that right? I know we saw some of the old tapes when we were over there today that are in process of digitization. Very delicate work.

Clarissa Trapp: Yeah, absolutely.

Amy Parsons: It’s great to make those available.

Clarissa Trapp: We do try to do our best there. It does really help. It helps with our reference and outreach as well. But yeah, Mark is right. The digital world and that making sure that people know it’s available, that they can search online for it, is a really important part of it as well.

Amy Parsons: Yeah. So you mentioned Old Main, which obviously burned down at one point in history. I was on campus in the flood in ’97, which I know-

Mark Shelstad: Oh, I didn’t know that.

Amy Parsons: …had a huge impact on the library. Did we lose archives in that flood, or how did we recover from that? Or what are we doing differently now?

Clarissa Trapp: Great news, we didn’t, but it was relatively close. I said the materials were on the first floor, and while they weren’t in the basement, they didn’t actually get inundated. They had moved upstairs to the second floor, where we went today, just a few months, literally maybe two months before the flood hit.

Amy Parsons: Really?

Clarissa Trapp: Yeah. And because of the moisture that did still hit the first floor, they would’ve been affected if they hadn’t moved upstairs. So it’s a great story in that-

Amy Parsons: Oh my gosh.

Clarissa Trapp: …we can tell you that we didn’t lose the history of CSU in 1997, but it was kind of a wonderful accident, not…it could have been bad.

Mark Shelstad: Very lucky. And we still get offers from alum and other folks around the state offering us yearbooks or copies of the Collegian because they think they need to fill in the back files of something that got damaged in the flood. And so we always are very polite to thank them for their offer about that. But yeah, we still get calls almost weekly from offers, thinking about the flood.

Clarissa Trapp: We do. Yep.

Amy Parsons: So give me a sense for how big the archives are today. How many artifacts do you have in them? Where do you keep them?

Clarissa Trapp: That’s a great question. So we have about 550 archival collections, which can range from just a few file folders to a couple hundred boxes of material, banker-sized boxes of material. We have about 24,000 rare books. I think it’s about 150 terabytes of digital files as well. But if you’re trying to think about the physical stuff, the room we were in, you would fill that up about 20, 30 times in order to do that. It’s absolutely massive. We have storage at the libraries, and then we have about two to three times as much storage off-site here on campus in another building.

Amy Parsons: Okay.

Mark Shelstad: Yeah. So think about 10,000 photocopy boxes, roughly. That’s the amount of physical stuff that we have, plus all the digital that we’ve been either acquiring as born digital from departments or that we’ve been actively scanning for the last 30 years. And so that’s really our challenge in managing not only the paper stuff that’s deteriorating quickly, or we have all these obsolete formats that we need to manage, but also the born digital content that we’re finding across campus because folks are running out of space and also they’re figuring out, well, we do need to keep some of this stuff. We had a very good project with the faculty council, for example. So we work on a project with Sue Doe and Amy Barclay over there to actually make sure that we get a regular transfer of the faculty council minutes and decision making. And so it takes a lot of work, not only from us, but also from around campus, to actually make sure that the stuff comes to the archives and is going to be around for the long term.

Amy Parsons: Wow. Well, thank you for doing that work, right? Because it really is important to the history of CSU and in some of the artifacts we were looking at today, the old faculty council minutes written by hand and who was there and what they were talking about. And again, it’s what classes to teach and things like that. And it’s just great to see some of that continuity all the way through the 150 years.

Clarissa Trapp: Absolutely. I think one of the fun things, at least for me, is that we have that September 1st, 1879, the very first entry, and usually our newest material comes from faculty council as well, because they’re so regular in transferring it, that the newest stuff is from 2025, right? So it’s that entire history is there.

Mark Shelstad: That book also has our only known earliest commencement booklets.

Clarissa Trapp: Oh yeah, that’s right.

Mark Shelstad: It was a lucky find that we actually found these things. Somebody had pasted them into the minute books, and so we have a complete run of the commencement things, but now we’re doing video. I was recently working with your office and with Advancement on capturing, I think, almost half a terabyte worth of commencement videos since 2013.

Clarissa Trapp: Oh my goodness. And so those things were on Vimeo, they were on YouTube, they were in various network drives. But again, this takes an active effort for us to think about what do we want to save, and how do we do it, and where do we store it and make it accessible.

Amy Parsons: Maybe we have to look back at that very first commencement for inspiration for the next one. There’s some gems in there. I’m absolutely sure of it. So tough question, You know, we’ve been thinking about the last 150 years and how we’ve been capturing that for the archives. What do you see going forward for the next hundred years and the future of library science and the archives and how we’re going to be able to capture, display, and work with this important material?

Clarissa Trapp: Great question.

Mark Shelstad: It’s a very changing historical record. I mean, of course, our career has probably overlapped from the physical as well as to the important digital. You think about all the social media that’s going on out there, all the different formats. We’re using AI tools to provide transcriptions of 19th century handwritten materials as well as audiovisual materials, all the audio tapes that we don’t have a transcript for.

I think the challenge is going to be us as an institution to think about what are the ways and structures and systems that we have to support these things over the long term. I really think that we need to think about what is important and how are we going to go about getting there, because the idea of something showing up in a box in somebody’s closet when they retire is going to be pretty rare because they’ve been sitting on a network drive and no one decides, “Oh, Bob left, and so we can go ahead and delete his files away.” So it takes a lot more active discussion and interaction with folks to make sure that the stuff is going to get saved.

Amy Parsons: Just the volume of stuff that’s out there and trying to understand what needs to be archived and what doesn’t.

Clarissa Trapp: I don’t know.

Amy Parsons: It’s going to be a challenge.

Clarissa Trapp: I’m not super good at curating my photos on my phone. And so we have a lot more stuff, in some ways, to try to sort through and think about how we’re going to save. And most of it is digital, and digital is, I can’t even call it a new frontier. Archivists have been wrestling with it for a while, but it’s definitely one of the things that we’re thinking about. I also think about trying to make sure that we’re always capturing student voices in the archive. I think that it’s actually, in some ways, harder to get students to buy into the idea that they’re making history now than it used to be. And I think some of that actually is the format thing. They’re not as likely to make a scrapbook and have printed out the photos ahead of time. So thinking about saving physical materials, they’re thinking they’ve got a new phone, they may or may not keep some of their photos in the cloud, and may not decide to label them the same way that they might have in the past. So just a very practical memory-keeping change.

Amy Parsons: Interesting.

Clarissa Trapp: But it’s not all bad news, I’m just saying.

Amy Parsons: It’s not all bad news.

Clarissa Trapp: It’s a new challenge. It’s just a new challenge.

Amy Parsons: Well, let’s talk about the students a little bit. Obviously, I mean, we exist for student success, and we want students to be able to not just contribute to the archives and to our history, but to go into this as a profession, what you both do as archivists and working with the library. So what advice might you have to students? I know you employ students, I just met a lovely student who works in your office, who works in the archives. How do you inspire students to go into this work, to think about history, their role in history, and how we preserve it?

Clarissa Trapp: That’s an excellent question. I think that I get to talk to a lot of students in classes, and sometimes I’m invited to talk about my profession in those classes, which is always really fun. It’s not a major we have on campus, but it is something that students are really interested in. I know we have a museum management certificate on campus, and many of those students will seek us out. So when it comes to explain to students why it matters, we have a group of students who already agree that it matters, which is great, and they want to work for us and with us. But every once in a while, you catch somebody who discovers they like it because they do need to do research, and it turns out that the information they need is in the archive, and then they have to come to the archive, and usually they’re pointed there by a professor or something like that.

But I mean, that’s in many ways why I ended up where I ended up after all. But yeah, beyond that, encouraging people, it’s asking folks to identify, do you like organizing information? Do you like helping other people actually acquire that information? Are you interested in being creative in how you think about saving or promoting the past? Do you want to be a collaborator? That’s often the most important question. Do you want to collaborate with historians? Do you want to collaborate with rhetoricians? Do you want to collaborate with folks in doing art or something like that? And usually the answer is yes. We have a lot more advice for folks that centers around making sure that they do internships or volunteer work or find jobs, not just go get a degree. It’s definitely a profession where you want to make sure that you get a bunch of practical experience too.

Amy Parsons: For sure.

Mark Shelstad: And for us, I think too, as Clarissa mentioned, having it to be an invitation. Do we want to have the students the opportunity to say, “Do you see yourselves in the archives?”

Clarissa Trapp: That’s a great point.

Mark Shelstad: And if you don’t, we’d love to work with you because you want to have all as many diverse voices as we can. We had a great experience with the Asian Pacific American Cultural Center students come over. They’re going to do an event for their anniversary. And they came in, and they just had the biggest blast looking through the old records, the old photos, the newsletters, and to think about, “Who am I, and do I see myself in the archives? Am I represented?” To make sure that we have a continuity of voices that are in the archives, to think about how we represent ourselves, and to make sure that we have a way in which everybody feels like they are connected to the archives as well too, because it’s a shared cultural history. It really is.

Amy Parsons: So speaking of shared cultural history, we’ll wrap up in talking about Colorado. Because of course, it’s very convenient we’re celebrating the 150 and the 50 at the same time. What do you most want people in Colorado to understand about this collection and it’s important to the history of Colorado and how it’s grown up over the last 150 years?

Clarissa Trapp: That’s an excellent question. Do you want to go first or do you want me to-

Mark Shelstad: Go for it, yeah.

Clarissa Trapp: Sure. So I think what I most want people to think about is just that we have a shared history, as you have said, and that I think a lot of times when folks think of archives, they don’t think of agriculture and they don’t think of natural resources and things like that. But the history of our political organization and the history of the way that the land has changed or that we’ve spread out over it is actually essential and something that we have in the archives. We are documenting those decisions. We are documenting those organizations and the people that shaped that history.

And I especially love that we have the Experiment Station and Extension collections, that we have proof of the active exchange of ideas between the university and folks on their farms or just in their towns or whatever their activity is. Whether it’s like the Master Gardener program now, or whether it’s, one of my favorites, is something called the Better Sires program in the 1920s, where they wanted to make sure that the cattle that you raised were the best quality cattle they could be, just fun stuff like that. But there’s an exchange of information that’s in the archive, not just people depositing their stuff with us, that you can see the actual exchange between CSU and Colorado.

Amy Parsons: That’s great.

Mark Shelstad: And for me, it’s the use of the collections. We have to think about why we’re collecting this stuff and who it’s going to be used for. And for me, I always make the analogy the archives is similar to Extension and CSU. Our job is to connect resources with collections and information in the public. And so I want to make sure that folks have that opportunity in any way that they can to think about this is their collection, this is how they can come in and use the materials that we have.

Amy Parsons: Yeah.

Clarissa Trapp: Absolutely.

Amy Parsons: Well, and of course, one of the things that we saw in the collection today were the original documents for the Peace Corps, which reminds you that it’s not just CSU and the state of Colorado, it’s CSU and the whole nation and growing up together, and those types of artifacts that really inform as we celebrate the country’s 250.

Clarissa Trapp: Absolutely. Yeah. CSU’s reach is global, right? And there’s certainly a lot of national impact in our collections. The Peace Corps collection, the papers of Delph Carpenter that talks about the Colorado River Compact, those are absolutely essential pieces of Colorado and national history.

Mark Shelstad: In some cases, too, we actually go out and create documentation to supplement what’s not found in the archives. And so we’ve done projects where we’ve interviewed the past directors of Cultural Centers. We did a project with a colleague over in history, Dr. Ruth Alexander, to interview students during their COVID experience, as well as talk about 17 scientists and administrators about the work that went in here in infectious diseases. Because sometimes this information isn’t going to make it or isn’t documented. Scientists are sometimes not so great about documenting their work. And so having that information is a way of commemorating what happened, but also provides a blueprint for lessons learned from this pandemic. And so we want to be able to think about ways in which we can engage with our users and engage with the community to not only share this information, but also create the archives with them.

Amy Parsons: Oh, that’s really interesting. I hadn’t thought about that before. That’s a place that I imagine some students could get really creative. How do you go out and actually create the archives that are going to document what’s going on?

Mark Shelstad: Yeah, and that was great about the COVID project, is that we actually employed three graduate students to go out and actually do the interviews with the students. And so it was peers interviewing peers.

Amy Parsons: Wow. That is great stuff. So in this year, as we celebrate the 50 years of the archives, how can the public engage with the archives? I know you’ve got some great exhibits already set up in the library that we just saw. You walk in and go around the corner. You can see some of the artifacts and some of the amazing photographs, which I love perusing those. I encourage everybody to go over there and see those. Are there other opportunities for the public to come in and engage in this year?

Clarissa Trapp: Absolutely. I mean, first of all, you are always welcome in the archive. All of you, and not just you. Everyone is welcome. We see researchers from all over the world. We had somebody from Australia come in and other places like that. So even though it sometimes feels like maybe it’s in the libraries and it’s probably only for CSU students, we actually welcome people who are interested in history, or, as I like to say, cool old stuff, to come in, no matter what. So that’s an everyday kind of thing as opposed to a specific activity. But I highly recommend that. We’ll be celebrating on March 31st with some of the library’s biggest fans, I think is the best way to say that. We’ll be celebrating that 50th at that point. Unfortunately, I was able to give a few talks, but they were in the fall, so we missed those. But absolutely, those are a couple of opportunities. And anything else you want to bring up?

Amy Parsons: That’s great.

Mark Shelstad: Yeah. We also sponsor three travel scholarships for folks to come in and do the research either on-site or help them support their materials online. One in Colorado water, another in Colorado land history that we just recently offered, and a third in our feminist book collection, which is a set of about 400 materials from second-wave feminism from the 1960s through the 1990s. And so that’s another way for folks to come in and engage and use the collection, to also get some support for using it as well.

Amy Parsons: Terrific. Well, Mark and Clarissa, thank you for spending the time with us, and we’re so grateful for the work that you do. I’m an alum as well, so I’m grateful as an alum and as a Coloradan that you’re able to preserve so much of our important history, make it accessible for people to come in and connect with the past, and think about the future, and to really inspire our students to be part of it all and include them in what you do. Thank you. And this episode that we’re taping is sort of part of a two-part episode, if you will. This, we’re looking back at the archives, and then we’re going to be looking forward to the next 150 years with Extension and Engagement and the work that they’re doing around the state to help shape Colorado’s history going forward, and water and agriculture in other areas as well. So we’re doing it all here at CSU as Colorado’s land-grant institution. So thank you both for being here and thanks for the work that you do.

Mark Shelstad: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Clarissa Trapp: Thank you.

Amy Parsons: Absolutely.

Thank you for listening. I’m Amy Parsons, president of Colorado State University, and you are listening to CSU’s The Next 150, where we explore what comes next for CSU by chatting with changemakers who are already leading the charge and shaping our next 150 years. I’m gathering their very best advice for today’s CSU students. Stay tuned to wherever you get podcasts for our next outstanding conversation. Go Rams.