On a Friday night, beneath glowing Art Deco chandeliers, Carolyn Alam serves popcorn and drinks from the concession stand inside Detroit’s historic Redford Theatre. A floor above, a 35-millimeter film reel spins through a projector that hasn’t changed much since the 1950s. 

By day, Alam is an archivist for university collections at the Bentley Historical Library, supporting U-M’s Inclusive History Project. Since November 2025, she has worked to preserve the university’s institutional records and the broader history of the state of Michigan. But the mission that guides her work feels remarkably similar to what draws her to volunteer nights at the Redford: keeping stories alive and accessible.

“The end goal is always the same,” Alam said. “It’s to make sure that the stories live on for people to learn from.”

Alam began volunteering at the Redford in 2022 after watching films there for most of her life. Initially hoping to learn how to run the projector, she began helping out in concessions, where every volunteer starts, and found herself drawn to both the building and other volunteers.

“The atmosphere of coming early and getting to be in the empty theater is very attractive to me,” she said. “But the thing I really love is meeting the other volunteers because they also love movies and are really passionate about the Redford, going to the movie theater, and keeping places like this open.”

That sense of living history is what gives the space meaning for her.

“The Redford is beautiful in a very literal sense. It’s a gorgeous building, and a lot of work has been done to make sure it is still a gorgeous building,” Alam said. 

“But to meet somebody who is coming to see ‘The Wizard of Oz’ there in 2025, who also saw ‘The Wizard of Oz’ there in the ’50s or ’60s, makes the space real in a way that just being in it and looking at it doesn’t.”

Before joining the Bentley, Alam worked as a digital archives fellow at the Detroit Sound Conservancy, a community-based archive that helps Detroit residents preserve their own cultural collections. There, she saw how preservation could extend beyond institutions and into neighborhoods, homes and community spaces.

“With the Redford and the Detroit Sound Conservancy, there’s a lot in common because we relied so heavily on the work of the community to assist in the archiving,” she said. “Not just in the act of donating their materials at Detroit Sound Conservancy, but also in the actual archival work.”

That hands-on preservation work helped shape her professional path. A year after beginning her volunteer work at the Redford, Alam enrolled at Wayne State University, where she earned a master’s in information and library science with a certificate in archival administration in May 2025.

Now, in her role at the Bentley, Alam’s days are spent processing collections — organizing materials, identifying sensitive information and preparing records for public access.

“I’ve always been really interested in the fact that people in history were people, just like me,” Alam said. “Even as you go back hundreds of years. Maybe not in a literal way, they were doing similar things, but psychologically, they were also human.”

Alam’s work at the Bentley also reflects a broader commitment to inclusive historical narratives. One of the first projects she worked on involved a collection documenting a lawsuit brought by the Children of the Chippewa, Ottawa and Potawatomi Tribes against U-M’s Board of Regents.

“Something really essential about Michigan history, University of Michigan history, history in general, is that it didn’t start in 1817 or 1776 or 1609 or when the settlers came here,” she said. 

“So much of what we love about Michigan, or what I love about Michigan, the beautiful landscape, the water, and the feeling of the people, comes from what it was then and the Anishinaabe tribes and the other Native Americans who stewarded the land.”

For Alam, archives are not just collections of documents, but living records of human experience.

“I think that’s just what brought me to this because archives are that contemporaneous history,” she said. “You’re reading what these people were thinking and what they were going through.” 

That philosophy shapes how she thinks about preservation itself, particularly in a digital era.

“With digital, something really fragile never has to be touched again and it can be preserved, and you can use the digital copy as much as you want,” she said. “But I will say with film, I’m always thrilled. I’m always thrilled to go see a movie on film. I do think it makes a difference.”

Alam traces that feeling to an idea she’s carried with her from her humanities training.

“I think about Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘aura’ a lot,” she said. “The idea that there is something lost when you take away the original object that has been imbued with the gaze of millions of people and with history.”

Alam’s connection to preservation is also deeply tied to place. A lifelong Michigander, she grew up in Grosse Pointe, attended U-M as an undergraduate, lived in Detroit and Hamtramck for a decade, and now lives in Ypsilanti.

“I’ve never really felt compelled to live anywhere else,” she said. “Honestly, I’m very biased, but every time I go anywhere, I think I live in the most beautiful place in the world.”

She sees Detroit and Ann Arbor as two cities navigating different versions of preservation.

“I think there’s a fine line between making sure everyone has a place to live, which is important, and destroying the character of the city,” she said. “And I think Detroit’s doing a pretty good job of walking that line.”

Whether she’s processing archival collections at the Bentley or serving concessions beneath the Redford’s glowing lights, Alam’s work is guided by attention to the human stories.

“I’m always looking for that story,” she said, “so I can understand what’s happening in greater context.”

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