TCNJ

32 The College of New Jersey Magazine institutionalized racial segregation that existed until the early 1990s. The collection's contents — more than 20 years' worth of materials — were strewn across storage units in multiple states and were bound for the landfill. Nieves' sister stepped in and asked Jaksch to make sense of what may be valuable to the historical record. So Jaksch took a van to gather the boxes, which sat in her garage and then in Bliss Hall, until she could figure out what to do with them. ALTHOUGH RILEY WAS EAGER to contribute to the arduous project of recording each item that existed in the various boxes, her studies had mainly focused on analyzing text on a page, not digitizing and archiving a disparate collection of historical materials. Thankfully, Jaksch gathered a team to train Riley (see sidebar, left). Cassie Tanks, a scholar who was working with Nieves when he passed, taught Riley how to use a light box to capture images of artifacts IT TAKES A VILLAGE The team who built an archive: ÁNGEL DAVID NIEVES A professor and researcher with a collection of artifacts from Apartheid South Africa. When he died, that collection was passed on to Marla Jaksch to make sense of the contents and preserve its history MARLA JAKSCH Chair of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at TCNJ and close friend of Nieves who inherited his collection of South African materials EBONY RILEY '26 Double major in English and in women's, gender, and sexuality studies who is learning how to accurately tell the story of Apartheid through Nieves' collection CASSIE TANKS A world history PhD candidate at Northeastern University who helped Riley learn digital skills and the nuances of language used when recording data DEBRA SCHIFF TCNJ's archivist and special collections librarian who made sure Riley knew how to handle the objects with care

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