{"id":77,"date":"2026-08-02T22:33:30","date_gmt":"2026-08-02T22:33:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/summer26chaot\/?p=77"},"modified":"2026-08-02T22:53:41","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T22:53:41","slug":"inspiration-report-riding-through-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/summer26chaot\/2026\/08\/02\/inspiration-report-riding-through-memory\/","title":{"rendered":"Inspiration Report: Riding Through Memory"},"content":{"rendered":"

Riding Through Memory<\/strong><\/span>
\nThe Power of Stories in a Public Transit Special Library and Archive<\/span><\/p>\n

Focus Area: The Power of Stories<\/span>
\nPrepared for: Library Director & Archives Leadership Team<\/span>
\nINFO 287 \u2014 The Hyperlinked Library<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/span> Pacific Electric Streetcar. Image from Wikimedia Commons.<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Objective<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

This report is a proposal for a storytelling and oral history initiative for a public transit agency’s special library and archive. This falls under the Power of Stories focus area and applies this course’s narrative inquiry and participatory service themes to a setting not typically associated with either.<\/span><\/p>\n

Executive Summary<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Every transit system carries two kinds of records. The official institutional records, made up of things like ridership data, engineering drawings, board minutes, and contracts. And the human ones, made of the operators who drive the last streetcar on a decommissioned line, the riders who met their spouse on a certain bus route, and the neighborhoods reshaped by new lines\/stations. Special libraries and archives inside transit agencies are great at preserving the original records, which often times is crucial in the operation of the agency. This report was written to argue that there is a massive, underutilized opportunity for the library and archive to preserve the second kind of record. This report will propose a phased program, tentatively called The Transit Voices, that takes directly from this course’s narrative inquiry method and from the “keep, share, make” model of library story telling work. My recommendation: pair the archive’s existing mission with a structured oral history practice, starting small with retiring\/retired staff and in the future expanding to riders and community members.<\/span><\/p>\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/span> Reading room of the State Library of Massachusetts. Image from Wikimedia Commons.<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I am drawn to special libraries and archives because they sit close to a single institution’s memory, and transit agencies interest me specifically because almost everyone in a city touches the system at some point, whether they ride it daily or only notice it when a new line changes their commute. In the exploration of the “keep, share, and make” framework, it gave me a more concrete way to think about what a transit agency’s archive could do beyond storing just institutional records. If libraries are, at their best, in the business of collecting and returning stories to a community, a transit archive is an obvious and largely untapped place to practice that. This report introduces the concept, grounds it in a real transit library, and proposes a strategy a director could act on.<\/span><\/p>\n

Body<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Definition and Origins<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/span> Video recording of an interview India. Image from Wikimedia Commons.<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A special library or archive mainly serves a single parent organization rather than the general public, focusing on a narrow but deep collection tied to that organization’s history and operations. Transit agencies often (but a lot less now as many have closed) maintain one of these to manage engineering records, planning documents, and institutional photographs going back to the earliest streetcar and rail companies a modern agency absorbed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Narrative inquiry, as this module described it, is a flexible interview-based method for capturing personal experience that a survey cannot reach. It shares roots with the oral history movement and with organizations such as StoryCorps, founded in 2003 with a mission to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people. Pairing narrative inquiry with an existing special archive means applying a familiar library skill, collecting, to a new kind of material: the spoken memory rather than the filed documents.
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Context and Relevance<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/span> LA Metro Bus 205. Image from Wikimedia Commons.<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Transit systems are well positioned for memory kind of work because they are shared infrastructure. A bus route or rail line touches operators, mechanics, planners, and generations of riders, and its history includes contested chapters, such neighborhood displacement from new construction, alongside everyday chapters, such as a commute a rider took for thirty years.<\/span><\/p>\n

Two reasons make the timing relevant now. First, institutional memory is retiring. Employees who operated decommissioned lines or lived through major system changes are aging out of the workforce, and their knowledge exists nowhere in the official record. Second, transit agencies are actively working to represent voices that standard archival collecting historically miss. Los Angeles Metro’s own library and archive, for example, has in the past partnered with an internal employee association to research and exhibit the career of an African American transit worker whose story was absent from earlier records, a sign that agencies already recognize the gap this report addresses.<\/span><\/p>\n

Impact and Application<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Primary stakeholders fall into two groups. Internally, archivists, communications staff, and agency leadership benefit from a richer, more human record and from capturing institutional knowledge before it retires with an employee. Externally riders, journalists and researchers gain access to a fuller picture of the system than engineering documents and timetables alone are able to provide.<\/span><\/p>\n