The next time a Michigan football game is broadcast on ESPN and the commentator makes a remark about the winged helmet’s history, flashes a picture of U-M’s first Heisman Trophy winner Tom Harmon wearing his No. 98 jersey, or puts up a photo of Harrison “Boss” Weeks handing off to Neal Snow in the first Tournament of Roses match and asks what year it was (answer 1902), chances are the Bentley Historical Library played a part in getting the photo and trivia question on the air.
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Major network stations like ESPN and ABC regularly call the Bentley when they need to get Michigan-related images and information. As the head of the Access and Reference Division at the Bentley, Karen Jania often is the one who receives these calls.
Jania is in charge of the library’s Reading Room, where researchers come to access original collections related to the histories of both the state and the University. She was hired as a part time employee almost 20 years ago and quickly decided to attend the School of Information, earn her master’s degree, and work full time as an archivist at the library.
“I literally fell into it and decided that I really enjoyed it. I like working with people every day. No two days are alike, and I learn so much from the researchers coming in. By the same token, I get to teach them how to use the archives.”
The Bentley is home to 1.5 million photographs and other visual material—one of the major reasons so many calls are made to the library when something comes up in the media.
“We get all kinds of calls for people looking for images for TV. When (Dr. Jack) Kevorkian was in the news, they wanted everything and anything we could find about him,” Jania says. The only problem, she says, is that many Michiganders who make it into the news for one reason or another attended the University for graduate school, making it difficult to track down their histories at the Bentley because, unlike undergraduates, they typically are not featured in yearbooks.
“Thirty-one media people were in the library for information on the Unabomber,” Jania says. “All we had was his name in the student directory!”
Sports networks also call the Bentley to request images of a particular player or game footage, and the library complies by providing pictures and silent video recordings of games that are used by coaches for training purposes.
“We do have a lot of other collections that aren’t related to U-M, but most of the broadcasting networks who call usually want something related to the University,” Jania says.
She also is able to assist networks such as PBS that call to gather pictures and primary source information for their documentaries on historical figures like Arthur Miller and Sojourner Truth. Additionally, Jania says she gets interesting requests from people working on various projects, including baseball cards and coffee table books.
“I’ve learned so much about the University through osmosis answering peoples’ research questions,” she says.
In one research request, she came across a U-M class album from the early 1870s with only one woman’s picture in it. Interested, Jania sleuthed through other archives and found out that the graduate’s biography was in a student newspaper called The Chronicle, along with the woman’s height of 6 feet 1 inch.
“The research requests I really enjoy are the ones that involve a lot of detective work. I guess that’s what makes it so fun the ones where you really have to push the envelope. We don’t catalog at the item level, but at the collection level. So sometimes there are golden nuggets of information to be found that don’t exactly fit into a collection.”
Jania lives in Ypsilanti with her dog and two cats. When she is not running the reference division at the Bentley, she enjoys gardening and taking yoga classes.
