#SoCaltech: Loma Karklins — Caltech Magazine

“The reading of correspondence from the past is probably more interesting than it is from today. Nobody's going to write an email like they wrote a letter in the old days. Not every email's going to be interesting. A lot of it is, ‘Meet me for coffee.’ If you look at some of our older collections, people took effort in what their letter was going to say, and it could be very official in the beginning, very detailed, because they knew it was going to take several days to get there and get an answer back. For historians, that can be interesting, because you get more of a feeling of the personal side.

One of our larger collections is the personal papers of Gerald Wasserburg [the late John D. MacArthur Professor of Geology and Geophysics, Emeritus]; we got received a grant to organize it and to process it. We each took a section, and I did his personal correspondence. Many years later, he took several of us archivists out for lunch as a thank you, and I thought, ‘This is exactly who I thought he would be.’ I felt like I'd known him all my life.”

Reference archivist Loma Karklins is retiring on September 2 after 44 years at Caltech, during which she has played many roles in the Caltech Archives: processing collections, conducting and editing oral history interviews, curating exhibitions, assisting researchers as reference archivist, and even decorating offices across campus with historical photographs. Her recent curatorial work can be seen in the architecture and campus planning portions of Becoming Caltech: Building a Research Community, 1910–1930, and Gone But Not Forgotten, its related photo/digital exhibit on the first floor of Caltech Hall, for which she was lead curator and project manager.

#SoCaltech is an occasional series celebrating the diverse individuals who give Caltech its spirit of excellence, ambition, and ingenuity. Know someone we should profile? Send nominations to magazine@caltech.edu.