Like many Las Vegans, Su Kim Chung moved here for a job.
“I had never been to Las Vegas before my interview,” says Chung, now head of public services in UNLV Special Collections and Archives. “I was a California girl. I loved living in L.A., and I couldn’t imagine ever leaving. ”
But a faculty position in Special Collections and Archives at UNLV ultimately lured her away from the coastal California breezes and into the arid desert of Las Vegas.
“At the time, I wondered what I would do in this town that, I perceived, had no culture and no history,” Chung says. “I had studied British and European history in college, so at that young age, Las Vegas was barely a blip.”
Fast forward 25 years, and Chung is now one of the leading historians and cultural archivists on Las Vegas history. And she can’t imagine wanting to work anywhere else.
“It really shows how naive I was about this city,” she said. “People ask me now if I’m a native because I know so much of Las Vegas history. I take it as a compliment, because I’ve grown to love this city so much.”
Here Chung shares some of the career moments that helped her discover that Las Vegas did, indeed, have a rich history — a history she’s had a role in preserving.
The Jerry Jackson Papers
In her early days in Special Collections and Archives, Chung developed an interest in documenting the city’s entertainment history.
“Jerry Jackson was a name that kept popping up as someone I needed to connect with, [because he was] someone who had considerable influence on entertainment in Las Vegas,” she says.
At the time, Jackson was working on the legendary DZ-è at the Tropicana Hotel and Casino. Chung arranged for Jackson to visit Special Collections and Archives to see some costume design treasures that had already made their way to the archives. “He wasn’t ready to donate just yet, because the show was still in production,” Chung says. “But we kept in touch and struck up a friendship.”
After DZ-è closed in 2009, Chung met Jackson at his home in Los Angeles to again discuss donating his papers to UNLV. “I remember that meeting well,” Chung says. “Jerry was in his kitchen reading his production notes and doing some of the choreography from his shows for me.”
After a seven-year “courtship,” Jackson agreed to entrust Special Collections and Archives with a piece of his professional history.
The remain one of Chung’s favorite collections because it represents so many elements from an iconic Las Vegas show, including costume sketches, show reviews, programs, sheet music, lyrics, and other production documents that cover every aspect of Jackson’s creative endeavors.
“It’s rare to find someone who can do it all, but that’s Jerry. He’s a multihyphenate,” Chung says. “After he donated, I ended up doing a with him to help understand his creative process.”
The Growth of Special Collections and Archives
At the turn of the millennium, Chung was one of just five full-time staff members in Special Collections and Archives.
“It was wonderful to get new collections, but it was challenging because we didn’t have the staff to process and make them available to researchers," Chung says. "We had all this wonderful material, but people struggled to access it.”
Unlike today, materials were not available digitally. Instead, researchers often had to rely on nothing more than captions in a photocopied reference book to determine if materials would be relevant for their article or book.
Over the years, Special Collections and Archives has received additional manpower and today features more than a dozen faculty and staff, as well as student assistants and project-centered staff. Former directors Michelle Light and Peter Michel made a concerted effort to grow the technical services staff, which ultimately helped eliminate the major backlog of unprocessed collections.
“The technical services team makes everything possible through their processing work,” Chung says. “These colleagues do fabulous work arranging and describing collections for finding aids used by researchers. What we’re able to do today, we could only dream about when I started.”
Another major change was the incorporation of the Digital Collections department within Special Collections and Archives. This team digitizes the unique materials from collections and makes them available .
“So many new researchers around the world are able to access and learn from our collections because of the work Digital Collections does to make these materials discoverable, open, and connected,” Chung says.
Dazzling Showgirls
One of the first collections that Chung processed as a young archivist: the . Arden had a prolific entertainment career, which includes producing a number of large-scale productions in Las Vegas, such as Jubilee! and Hallelujah Hollywood.
“Through that work, I started developing personal friendships with showgirls and fell in love with Las Vegas production shows,” Chung says. “I made a wide network of friends who were performers onstage and in the back of the house.”
One weekend, while taking a CPR class at UNLV, Chung happened to meet Sara Orrells, a showgirl who had just relocated from Paris to dance in Jubilee! The pair’s shared connection to Jubilee! morphed into a lifelong friendship, with Chung eventually becoming godmother to Orrells’ son.
“It is such a Vegas story of how I met one of my closest friends,” she says.
Eventually, Chung’s interest in Vegas entertainment and her connections with performers led her to create the popular Fishnets and Spotlights series in partnership with the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District.
“This is one of my favorite events to put together, because it’s a way to give these entertainers a chance to share their stories and experiences of working on a Las Vegas show,” Chung says. “These shows are a lot of work, but worth the effort.”
Diversifying the Historical Record
Throughout her career, Chung has worked to add more diverse voices to our region’s historical record, including the archives at UNLV.
In addition to her interest in entertainment collections, she serves as curator for the Nevada Women’s Archives, and has worked to strengthen the LGBTQ+ collections originally established by her close friend, historian and UNLV alumnus Dennis McBride.
“UNLV is one of the nation’s most diverse universities, so I try to make sure that my instruction sessions are meaningful for students of color by selecting collections that will speak to their experiences or heritage,” said Chung. “To do that, we need to have collections that are representative of our community.”
To that end, Chung helped coordinate the annual Community Archives workshop offered by Special Collections and Archives. This annual full-day event provides guidance and training to help community organizations effectively preserve their records.
Also, in the wake of the George Floyd murder and subsequent protests in 2020, Chung created the discussion series in collaboration with Claytee White, the founding director of UNLV’s Oral History Research Center. Now in its fifth year, the series continues to examine systemic discrimination and injustice and seek solutions for the future, with past conversations covering topics such as inequities in health care, anti-Asian hate, and American Indian lands.
“We Need To Talk has been the most meaningful program,” Chung says. “It’s a platform to educate people about systemic racism and discrimination, while showcasing the expertise of our outstanding faculty members. It has allowed UNLV to shine by sharing our knowledge with our students and the community.”
Saving History
The , an instrumental leader in the Civil Rights movement in Las Vegas, was an early donation to Special Collections and Archives in 1978.
“I have used his papers in many instruction classes because they contain correspondence from his time both as president of the Las Vegas chapter of the NAACP and head of the Economic Opportunity Board, and they document historical instances of discrimination in Las Vegas,” Chung says. “Students have always had a strong and positive response to these records and to learning about the impact of Rev. Clark’s work.”
When Clark died in 2017, his daughters visited Special Collections and Archives to review materials to write his obituary. When Chung shared how the collection had impacted students over the years, the family asked if she would speak at his memorial service.
“Many of the attendees had never heard of the university’s Special Collections and Archives division, and had never been to UNLV’s campus. But as I told that story, I got a lot of ‘amens’ and I felt truly honored to be there talking about the power of archives in shaping someone’s legacy,” Chung says. “In my 25 years of being an archivist and librarian, that is truly the most meaningful experience I’ve ever had.”
At Your Service
Another area of the job that Chung finds rewarding: assisting scholars in their research on Las Vegas and Southern Nevada.
“An archivist’s depth of knowledge about our collections is what makes the research experience more fruitful to students and researchers,” Chung says. “That’s true in most repositories, but there’s something special about Las Vegas. Our city has been portrayed a certain way in popular culture, but we are so much more. There’s so much variety in life here, and I love helping researchers discover that.”
Over the years, Chung has developed her own special collection of books authored by archive visitors. These works (available to view in Special Collections and Archives) represent a lifetime of helping people discover the magic of Las Vegas.
Of particular note are works from Larry Gragg, a recently retired history professor from the Missouri University of Science and Technology who has published extensively on the development of Las Vegas and is a frequent visitor to Special Collections and Archives.
Chung also treasures A Lot of World to See, a memoir by Judith Lee Jones, a friend and former Copa Girl at the Sands Hotel.
Chung herself is the author of the popular coffee table book, Las Vegas: Then and Now, which pairs vintage photos of the city with modern-day snapshots of the same views. The book is now in its fifth edition. She's also contributed numerous UNLV News Center articles over the years,
So what has inspired Chung to return to her job, day after day, for a quarter century? She credits UNLV’s students, her colleagues and friends, and the researchers who depend on her work.
“I try to remind myself of the human side of working in a library,” she says. “What we ultimately do is in service to our users, patrons, and researchers — we’re in service to people.”
