You notice only one thing: There’s stuff everywhere.
Some of the stuff is stuffed into brown boxes placed on metal shelves. Some of the stuff is piled on top of cabinets. Some of the stuff is leaned against walls. Some of the stuff is stored in a climate-controlled vault, where it is stuffed into boxes, piled on cabinets, and leaned against walls.
This is Lauinger Library’s Special Collections department. Stuff is its business, whether it’s the University’s stuff, stuff the University’s bought, or stuff the University’s been given. It includes papers and manuscripts donated or bought by the University, the University’s art collection, and the University archives.
According to its most recent figures, Special Collections has acquired nearly 700 manuscript collections; 30,000 photographs and slides; 10,000 sound and film recordings; and 15,000 other pieces of art since the department was founded in 1970. Library employees estimate these numbers have grown considerably since compiled in 1996. Almost all of that stuff is stored in an approximately 5000-sq. feet. humidity-controlled room on Lauinger’s fifth floor. In addition, nearly 100,000 rare books are stored in a smaller room downstairs. There, these items wait for students, scholars, administrators, and geneologists to examine them.
About a dozen full-time employees work for the various divisions of Special Collections. Some sit at stations tucked amid the clutter. A few have their own offices, which are generally as full of stuff as the rest of the department. From one office, a large painting of a Teutonic-looking duke in full military uniform leans against a wall, peering out at the stacks.
Assistant archivist Nate Albee has worked in Special Collections for less than a year, but he’s already become an expert at dodging the boxes on the floor.
“The archive is the dumping ground of the University in a way,” Albee said while navigating around book trucks filled with volumes. “If some office has something they don’t use anymore, but don’t want to throw away, the archive takes it.”
Looking at a random selection of items from University Archivist Lynn Conway’s desk, it is hard not to draw certain conclusions. One is that complaints about dorm food are indeed eternal. Take this poem, from an 1867 note passed around study hall by student Warren Chism:
Come rally round your flag boys
In strike for better grub
We’ve stood it long enough boys,
But now we’ll make the rub […]
If the “petition” is not heeded boys,
We’ll all dine out in town,
But we can’t live without eating boys,
And we won’t eat John Brown
An attached annotation from “F.B.” in 1899 notes that “John Brown” was a “horrible kind of dry hash which was served regularly.” It also says, “Poor Chism was shot by his overseer down in La. He was a brilliant fellow and a general favorite.”
Or take this stomach-turning passage from another nineteenth-century student’s journal:
“The dirty dark old kitchen was not only infested with rats and mice, but was also full of enormous roaches. The Prefects said that these insects were brought up from San Domingo in the famous old Spanish reredos [wooden screens placed behind church altars]. It would sometimes happen when pouring out a cup of coffee that the flow would suddenly cease and I have seen a student calmly run his lead pencil down the spout, and dislodge one of these big roaches.”
Conway has worked at Georgetown only nine years, yet her job is to serve as the University’s historical guardian; she preserves the primary records that tell the University’s history.
Under standing guidelines, University departments are instructed to submit by-laws, minutes, reports, proceedings, speeches, correspondence, policies, procedures, audio-visual materials, printed materials, and records of official events, student organizations and financial records (Student and personal records are kept by the Registrar and Human Resources). Boxes come in all the time, most often from the President’s Office and the Provost’s Office. The boxes can sit waiting for more than a year before being processed and catalogued.
Like many who work in the department, Conway fell into her line of work by not much more than chance. A native of Belfast, Northern Ireland, Conway decided she wanted to go into archiving after interning in a public records office during college. She entered archival school, one of four in Great Britain, and became one of 50 archivists trained in Great Britain each year. She came to Georgetown in 1994 after several years at Catholic University.
“I love what I do, it’s a great job,” she said.
It is striking that when many of the department’s employees talk, including Conway, they tend to speak softly and slowly, even though there are no readers to bother wandering back in the restricted stacks.
Is it because they live in the past? Maybe a bit, said Conway in her light Irish accent. “Sometimes I forget what year it is. Once I wrote a check I dated 1957.”
In the 1,700 years paper has been around, virtually all of it has been made by soaking and beating plant fibers into pulp, whether from wood, cotton or other plants, extracting its cellulose. Though that general method has remained the same, mass production techniques and the use of cheaper materials (more wood, less cotton, for example) have made today’s paper much more prone to deterioration. Conway said the Archive’s papers from the 1920s are often in better condition than papers from the 1970s.
The enemy is acid. It eats away at cellulose, transforming the brightest, stiffest cardstock into thin, yellow, brittle sheets. In addition, scholars’ tiny conveniences are the great foes of the archivist: staples and paper clips rust, rubber bands melt into paper, and Post-It notes stain pages. The inescapable fact is that paper deteriorates, and even the most talented archivists cannot stop it from doing so. The digital era has hardly been revolutionary; digitizing documents is so time-consuming, it is only worthwhile for the most-used pieces. But there is good news: “If you can control light, humidity, and temperature, you can really slow things down,” Conway said.
When the archives receives a document, a process called accession, all documents are placed in acid-free file folders, which are in turn placed in acid-free boxes, which keep documents both organized and dark. There they wait, sometimes years of at all, to be entered into the department’s catalog system. When particularly deteriorated or sensitive documents are viewed, they are placed in transparent Mylar film to protect them and to make handling them easier. The humidity of the storage and reading rooms is monitored and controlled. The most valuable or sensitive materials are kept in a special vault for additional security and protection from fire and deterioration.
Behind a door that reads “NO SMOKING ON PAIN OF DEATH,” the insides of the vault, about 20 feet square, are dim and remarkably drab. It is kept cooler and dryer than the rest of the Special Collections area to protect particularly old artifacts. At one end, three-foot-tall University financial ledgers from the 1920s and 1930s sit on the shelves, their leather bindings crumbling onto the floor. Next to them, ornamental wooden boxes hold scientific slides for a Stereopticon, an obsolete Viewmaster-like device. Paintings sit on the ground, lying against the shelves. The books inside include the records of the Jesuit order’s Maryland Province, dating back to 1640, which is one of the department’s most-viewed holdings.
Outside the vault, walking the stacks reveals a few traces of 214 years of University history-stacks of bound student newspapers, old course catalogs and bulletins, yearbooks from the defunct School of Dentistry-but most records lead a hidden, homogenous life. They live in folders inside boxes placed on metal shelves. Some of the boxes are big; some are small; none contains any marking more distinguishing than “Keller Papers 1” or “Bankers Forum 1953-1958.”
The manuscript archives share the same nondescript fate. According to Scott Taylor, a manuscripts processor, the University actively collects primary source documents in specific area, such as the Jesuit order, American history, international affairs, and others. The collections range from the papers of forgotten officials to presidential autographs to audio tapes of interviews with retired diplomats. If the boxes containing its 700-plus collections were lined up in a row side by side, the row would stretch nearly two miles.
Which highlights Special Collections’ most pressing problem: it has run out of shelving space; new records must be stacked on the floor. As a solution, University officials last year announced plans to relocate the department and its holdings to the Wormley School, a building located on the 3300 block of O Street N.W. that Georgetown acquired several years ago, but has yet to put to use. According to University spokeswoman Julie Green Bataille, Georgetown has begun preliminary discussions with its neighbors.
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The archival game has occasional moments of excitement. Early last year, a squabble broke out between scholars researching writer Graham Greene and the Library when it refused to release a portion of its vast collection of his documents, including letters, manuscripts and diaries, per Greene’s final wishes to restrict access until his official biography was published. The Library abided closely to Greene’s wishes, allowing no one but his official biographer access; too closely, said some scholars and family members who wanted access themselves, and vented their frustrations in articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times. But that controversy is over; the biography appeared last month, and as of Oct. 2, the Greene archives are open to the public.
Yesterday was also unusually hectic; the Library released correspondence between Jacqueline Kennedy and her religious adviser, Rev. Richard T. McSorely, S.J. [News, p. 6]. The perpetual fascination with all things Kennedy guaranteed a well-attended press conference and the presence of several television cameras in the normally sedate reading room.
But the everyday business at Special Collections is quite a bit more dull. On a Monday morning, Albee sits at his relatively neat desk and talks about his job. On the wall above his head, a bumper sticker reads, “Archivists make it last longer.”
“I can get lost for hours reading about the history of things,” he says. “I have to be disciplined so I don’t get distracted with all the cool stuff around.”
Albee turns around and faces another desk behind him, where a bizarre device sits, about three feet wide with a film reel attached. It is a vintage hand-cranked eight-millimeter filmstrip viewer; Albee’s latest pet project is going through piles of films taken of basketball and football games in the 1950s, and cataloguing them in between higher-priority projects.
No one’s really ever asked to see them, Albee said; he just found the reels sitting around. In fact, it seems hardly to have even occurred to him that anyone might find them useful. He found them, so he’s cataloguing them.
“If people know this is here, they might be able to use it,” he shrugged.
