This site was built by two volunteers at the Cambridge Historical Society. Katrina Morse, then a graduate student at Simmons College, designed the project, conducted and transcribed the interviews, and provided the images and audio clips. Kristen Saucier, an undergraduate at Emmanuel College, designed the website and made all of the audio and visual material available.

Katrina Morse completed an internship with the Cambridge Historical Society as part of her training in archival practices through the Simmons College MLS program. In this internship, she processed the Betsy Siggins Collection through which she learned about Cambridge’s role in the folk music revival of the 1950s and ‘60s. This experience, coupled with her love of music, inspired her to take on an independent project collecting the oral histories of musicians, booking agents, record producers, and club owners in Cambridge as her final project for her MLS degree.

In Katrina’s archival internship she undertook the organization of a collection of manuscripts, photos, printed material, and miscellaneous objects that had recently been deposited by Betsy Minot Siggins. This material primarily fell into two categories: material related to the folk music scene in Cambridge in the 1950s and ‘60s, and the family papers of Betsy Minot Siggins. In her work processing this collection, Katrina met repeatedly with Betsy Siggins; created an organizational plan that was consistent with the standards of the Cambridge Historical Society; properly housed a diverse set of materials that included everything from eighteenth-century manuscripts to twenty-first-century newspaper clippings; and created an original finding aid for the collection.

In her work on this project, Katrina continued her exploration of music and its relation to Cambridge history. She conducted oral history interviews with individuals who are associated with some of the diverse music venues in Cambridge. She independently researched these institutions, contacted owners and booking agents, set up interviews, and recorded oral histories.

Kristen Saucier worked on this project as a part of a design internship with the Historical Society. This is the first site she has designed with CHS, but we anticipate that there will be many more.