American Rambler With Colin Woodward

Tom Camden is head of special collections at Washington and Lee University. His career has taken him from Virginia to New Hampshire to Georgia and back again. But Tom is a native Virginian and W&L graduate, who grew up in the historic community of Buffalo Forge, not far from Lexington. As he tells Colin, working at W&L has opportunities as well as challenges. Going to Italy--as he recently did--courtesy of W&L is nice, but the university has a historical reckoning going on. That reckoning involves two large figures in American history: George Washington and Robert E. Lee. Whatever the daily news cycle, Tom's work shows that archivists can no longer be gatekeepers, but people dedicated to involving students, faculty, and the public in what they do. And for Tom and W&L, such an approach is working.