RBS Student Profile: Aaisha Haykal

2015 IMLS-RBS Fellow
RBS Course attended: Developing Collections: Donors, Libraries & Booksellers (2015)

Profile by Anna Patchias

“I’ve known since fifth grade that I wanted to be a librarian,” says Aaisha Haykal, Manager of Archival Services at the Avery Research Center for African-American History & Culture at the College of Charleston.

“Of course, I was too young at the time to know what librarians actually did—I thought they got to read books all day!”

Childhood dreams aside, Haykal has forged a path for herself that has been both laser-focused and intentional. At Syracuse University, she majored in English and Textual Studies and African American Studies, writing a thesis for each major.

Haykal is driven, dedicated, and passionate—she has worked in libraries all her adult life and has learned a great deal along the way, both about herself and about her profession. At Syracuse, she worked in the library all four years; by her junior year, she had the opportunity to work in the African American Studies Library, which dovetailed well with her coursework. It was here that she first began to understand the power of archives and the thrill of working with primary sources. She also began to realize some of the complexities surrounding the archiving of materials—namely, “what was getting collected, and what wasn’t,” and how those decisions are made on an institutional level.

The resonance of primary sources inspired her and became a defining experience in her library career. As Haykal puts it, “I am not offended if you call me a librarian—they do important work—but I usually say that I am a librarian for primary sources.”

Throughout college, in addition to her library jobs, Haykal pursued summer internships across the country, all of which revealed what she really wanted to be: an archivist. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Haykal earned an M.L.I.S. and a certificate in community informatics. In her graduate studies, as well as through internships at the Library of Congress and the UC San Diego Library, Haykal solidified her archival skills, learning about the handling of rare items, digital preservation, and the many complex issues surrounding the donation of materials.

All of these experiences culminated in her first job out of graduate school, a fellowship at the Avery Research Center. She was there for just a few months as part of a program that sent archivists to repositories across the country, but she has recently found her way back to Charleston, taking a position as Manager of Archival Services this past October.

In between, Haykal served for more than four years as University Archivist at Chicago State University (CSU), where she supervised an archival staff while also developing public programs, giving preservation workshops, and creating the department’s social media outreach. She was also in charge of providing reference assistance to the public, developing policies and procedures, working on preservation grants, and advising the University on acquisitions. At CSU Haykal served as the African American Studies liaison with faculty, and she was also charged with acquiring collections for inclusion in the archives, particularly those that documented the experiences of African Americans on the South Side of Chicago.

“Growing up in small-town New York State,” Haykal says, “I didn’t see black librarians.” When she told her family that she wanted to be a librarian, they were surprised—it was an unusual choice. Haykal explains that she knew early on that she wanted to work with African-American people and collections because that was missing in her life as she was growing up.

It is this lived experience of real people that drives Haykal’s work and her passion for all history, including—and especially—black history.

“One thing I wanted to do was challenge people’s ideas about what history could be—a lot of people think history is just old and stale, just old books and photographs, but history is ongoing. It’s being created in this moment. It’s living and breathing, and we need to preserve it.”

Now back in Charleston, Haykal’s passion for the preservation of lived experience has led to some ambitious goals. Many of her tasks are important but workaday, such as supervising the installation of a new HVAC system and instituting policies and procedures for migrating to a new content management system.

Some of her dreams, however, center around her larger vision of engaging the Charleston community, especially African Americans, in the archival endeavor, and empowering people to see their experiences living on through archives. Haykal is collaborating with colleague Barrye Brown, the Avery Research Center’s Reference and Outreach Archivist (and 2016 IMLS-RBS Fellow), to go out into greater Charleston and teach people about the power of archives. But it can be a tricky business, and she vividly describes the challenges involved:

“We can’t make people archive themselves—archivists can’t be too pushy when working with community members.” Rather than any overt pressure coming from an outsider, Haykal prefers to help them ask the question, “Is this something that should be preserved?”

Haykal relates how, at this moment in U.S. history, many people around the country—archivists included—are working on preserving the lives of ordinary African Americans, the struggle for civil and human rights, the Black Lives Matter movement, feminist movements, and all of the myriad issues we read about each day in the news and in our social media feeds. This is living history, and in Haykal’s view it is the archivist’s job to document these experiences.

Haykal would like to see more diversity in her profession, and she credits Rare Book School with giving her and others the opportunity to advance and have a greater impact in their communities. As the recipient of a 2015 IMLS-RBS Fellowship, Haykal attended Developing Collections: Donors, Libraries, & Booksellers, taught by Tom Congalton, Johan Kugelberg, and Katherine Reagan. As she points out, “People of color often do not work at institutions that have the funding to send [their staff members] to these programs,” so opportunities such as the IMLS-RBS Fellowship not only benefit the students, but their institutions and their larger communities too.

Ultimately, Haykal is interested in “actively connecting the past and the present,” and she believes that archives can create a “living” history. She is proud to be teaching people to access this power for themselves. As Haykal puts it, “communities have to be in control of telling their own stories and histories, because otherwise what is remembered can be the product of other people’s imaginations.”