What do you do with the collection of a nobody?

One of the most active archival institutional blogs is Historical Notes from OHSU, the blog of Oregon Health & Science University's Historical Collections & Archives. I'm in awe of the frequency and the quality of the posts on this blog, which attest to some serious blogger discipline. I was struck by this recent post about the desirability of collecting "the great" versus collecting "nobodies," because I had been thinking along similar lines as the result of a collection we surveyed recently.

This particular collection consisted of the papers of a Pennsylvania man who appears to have worked in middle management in some sort of factory or plant. This man was a frustrated writer and inventor, as evidenced by the reams of unpublished manuscripts he left behind -- for poems, plays, essays, and novels (often accompanied by rejection letters), as well as notes on inventions and many politely worded declines from a range of companies of this man’s ideas for "the next big thing." Correspondence in the collection indicates that its creator had contacted a number of repositories in a desperate bid to have it placed somewhere, anywhere, so that his life's work wouldn't be for naught. Correspondence in the collection from the holding repository suggests that the curator took pity on this person, and agreed to take in the collection as "storage." (The collection arrived in the early 1970s, likely at a time when stack space was at less of a premium.) So, this collection has survived and made it into a repository, but to what purpose?

Certainly there is a now fairly longstanding trend of looking into the lives of ordinary people, particularly ordinary women. I don't know if this collection is that reflective of the experience of an "ordinary" man, however – it seems fairly unordinary to leave behind 18 feet of unpublished manuscripts and a raft of letters to various companies suggesting improvements to typewriter efficiency and renewed marketing of the hula hoop. If we approach it from the angle of literature, and place this collection in contrast to the papers of many successful, "great" writers in this repository and other PACSCL repositories, is it a worthwhile juxtaposition? Are bad writers, to paraphrase from Tolstoy’s observation on unhappy families, all bad in their own way? And does that make them worth studying?

Jenny has a category that she's jokingly asked to be added to the survey – whether the collection is good source material for a novel or a movie. This collection certainly fits the bill. I can definitely see the makings of something like American Movie in this person's frustrated aspirations to fame and fortune. But whether this collection could be anything more than that, I just don't know.

Back on the archival track, in the RLG-sponsored "Digitization Matters" forum last summer, Yale's Bill Landis suggested in a talk on mass digitization for archives that it's perhaps best suited for our not-so-great stuff (sound file; if you prefer to read some similarly provocative thoughts along these lines, check out OCLC’s report Shifting Gears: Gearing Up to Get Into the Flow). Why not put up an undistinguished collection in its entirety with minimal metadata and see whether anyone uses it, he queried. This collection would certainly make for an interesting experiment in that vein.

Klingons at Temple

I'll begin this post with the caveat that I'm not a big science fiction fan and what I don't know about Star Trek and Cons and so on could fill a decent sized library. That being said, one of the sci-fi collections that we surveyed recently at Temple University has really stuck with me. (Temple has a great science fiction collection, by the way, if you're interested. Check out their page describing the Paskow Science Fiction Collection.) The one we looked at the other day is the Sue Frank Klingon/Star Trek collection of fanzines and organizational newsletters. These were assembled by Dr. Frank from groups within and outside of the U.S. -- fan groups are to be found in Britain, New Zealand, and Italy, among other places. The titles include "Klingon Assault Group Force Recon," "The Pillage Voice," "Engage!," "Disruptor," and "Something Else." The newsletters reflect the range of Klingon-related activities afoot in the terran world. They contain drawings, photos, recipes, letters, poems, stories, technical information, and analyses of many aspects of Klingon language and culture. And lots of pearls of information; did you know, for example, that the species of cocoa bean grown on earth is inferior to that grown by the Klingons?

The collection consists of about six linear feet of material, so I'm sure it's just a drop in the bucket of the total Star Trek fan literature that exists in the world. Even so, when you see it all together, it seems like a great resource, both for those looking for the facts and the flavor of Klingon life and for those interested in the phenomenon of Star Trek fandom. What the collection as a whole conveys is the extent to which this piece of popular culture has worked its way into people's everyday lives. It's impossible to tell from the fanzines what proportion of their lives the fans spend as Klingons; I assume that for at least some of the fans, the Klingon identity is pretty central.

At any rate, the production of all this Klingon-related material is a nice illustration of the theme of the "dedicated collector" that crops up again and again in our surveying. (With this collection, I think both Sue Frank and the creators of the fanzines count as dedicated collectors). The collections we see that were created by this kind of devoted, focused person are almost always compelling, if not always as obviously interesting as the Klingon stuff. When a collection is visibly a labor of love, it inspires a certain respect, regardless of the research value of the information contained within.

And for a summary of science fiction collections around the country (including plenty of Star Trek materials), see the Research Resources at AboutSF.

Chess by telegraph, Quaker golfers, and Philadelphia numismatists...

Is this the answer to a Carnac riddle?* Possibly, but it's also a sampling of the subjects of collections you might uncover when searching our database of unprocessed and underprocessed collections. These are the results of a search for collections related to the PACSCL-designated theme "Leisure activities" (full results can be viewed here), but there are plenty more waiting to be found. Our database currently features 1,000 collections from eight repositories, and more collections and institutions will be added regularly.

This database is the first step of many toward improving physical and intellectual access to the collections surveyed for this project. It's also our small contribution to the increasing push in the archives and special collections community to provide researchers with information about our collections -- both processed and unprocessed -- in a timely fashion.

There are a number of other interesting approaches to providing information on unprocessed collections. For example, Yale University’s Beinecke Library has a searchable database of uncataloged acquisitions online, and its blogs often highlight particular collections from this queue.

The American Heritage Center, under the leadership of Mark Greene of "More Product, Less Process" fame, undertook a massive reevaluation of its holdings (the majority of which were unprocessed) and created MARC records in OCLC’s WorldCat for all the collections it decided to retain (you can read a press release about this project at here).

Princeton University's Mudd Manuscript Library provides multiple access points for both unprocessed and processed collections; within the last eighteen months, the staff have created collection-level MARC records for every previously uncataloged archival collection in its holdings, then used the freeware program MarcEdit to convert them to collection-level EAD finding aids that are web discoverable, like this one. The catalog records go into Princeton’s online catalog and Worldcat, and the finding aids are contributed to Princeton’s own EAD website and OCLC’s ArchiveGrid.

Lastly, but certainly not leastly, our very own University of Delaware provides preliminary descriptions of many of its unprocessed collections and lists them on its manuscript collections web page (see one for landscape architect Armistead W. Browning Jr. here). It's a simple, but effective, way of calling researchers' attention to these collections' existence.

Telling the world about our unprocessed collections is certainly not without its challenges, but our researchers will certainly benefit from it, and I’m confident that we will too.

* Yes, I know this is an incredibly dated reference, but even more than 15 years after Johnny Carson vacated the airwaves, there’s still no more recognizable trope for linking seemingly unrelated items!