Wendy Hagenmaier
Archives, Records, and Preservation in the Modern World
INF 386C • Fall 2010
Dr. David B. Gracy II
12/2/10

“‘You can always get the book. Get the manuscript!’” a
—Harry Huntt Ransom, as recalled by John Kirkpatrick
“The Department of Manuscript and Archives, created in 1990, bears almost no resemblance to its predecessor, the manuscripts cataloging section that was part of the HRC library…The huge backlog of uncataloged, inaccessible collections at HRC demanded an abrupt change from the traditional item-level cataloging that had been done for thirty-odd years.” b
—Kris Kiesling, “Department of Manuscripts and Archives, Status Report, October, 1992.”
According to one legend, sometime in the mid-1970s, a student walked through the doors of what was then the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at
Austin and politely requested to borrow a copy of one of Graham Greene’s novels.
Breathless to share the riches of the Center’s Greene Collection, the reference staff asked whether the student might want to inspect a set of galley proofs, or perhaps a journal or a selection of correspondence. When the student replied that he merely wished to read a published copy of the finished novel, the staff attempted to procure one for him from the stacks, only to return empty-handed.
c
The story of the encounter made its way to the
Center’s former director, Harry Huntt Ransom, the “great acquisitor,” who offered this retort: “‘You can always get the book. Get the manuscript!’ ” d
While some might question the details of this legend and the many tales that comprise the mystique of what is now the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the story reveals a core of truth that speaks to the conflicted, emergent identity of this renowned institution in the years following its foundation in 1957—an identity characterized by a clash between vision and reality, theory and practice. Ransom supplied a Michael Barnes, “Harry Ransom: The Great Acquisitor,” Austin American-Statesman (Austin, TX),
February 17, 2002. Accessed November 27, 2010. URL: http://www.statesman.com/specialreports/content/specialreports/ransom/17profileransom.html. b Kris Kiesling, “Department of Manuscripts and Archives—Status Report—October 1992” (Internal
Report, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 1992), 1. c Tim Taliaferro, “Oh, the Humanities: How Tom Staley Took the Ransom Humanities Research Center form Good to Awesome,”
The Alcalde , (Mar-April, 2009), 31-35. Accessed November 20, 2010. URL: http://www.texasexes.org/alcalde/feature.asp?p=4169. d Michael Barnes, “Harry Ransom: The Great Acquisitor.”
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the vision: the Center would serve as a “Bibliothèque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation.” e Eschewing the precedent set by more established repositories with unmatchable collections of early manuscripts and rare books, Ransom sought to build the finest library of modern literary manuscripts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cohesive archival collections that would emphasize the evolution of the writing process rather than the published product. In the words of current Ransom
Center Senior Archivist Joan Sibley, “instead of just acquiring collectible items,”
Ransom “was interested in acquiring the whole thing, to be able to show, ‘this is what the work looked like in the beginning on a cocktail napkin, and here’s the completed, final version,’ through all the different drafts, so you could trace what happened.’ ” f
Reality, however, complicated Ransom’s dream: a deluge of acquisitions arrived, and record-keeping and cataloging fell by the wayside. Former Art Collection curator
Kathleen Gee Hjerter recalled hallways that were “‘stacked to the ceiling with so many cardboard boxes that you had to walk sideways to get around. It was coming in so fast that they could barely keep up with it.” g
In the mid-1960s, at the same time that archival theorist T. R. Schellenberg’s
The Management of Archives inaugurated the modern
American method of arranging and describing manuscripts and personal papers according to the archival principles previously reserved for public records (a practice that soon took root in manuscript repositories across the nation), Eugene Lillard and his staff established the Ransom’s Center’s first manuscript cataloging department. Arranging every author’s manuscript materials into three general categories—correspondence, drafts of literary e Harry Huntt Ransom, “Speech to the Philosophical Society of Texas,” December 8, 1956. Accessed
November 27, 2010. URL: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/about/mission/. f Joan Sibley, Ransom Center Senior Archivist, interview by the author, November 18, 2010. g Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books ,
328-329.
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works, and “miscellaneous”—and describing every single piece in each collection on item-level catalog cards, Lillard and his crew created a system for arranging and describing literary manuscripts that, purposely or not, seemed as far away from
Schellenberg’s model as one could imagine.
h
Indeed, it was not until the retirement of former Ransom Center director Decherd Turner and the arrival of current director
Thomas F. Staley in 1988, along with a torrent of manuscript acquisitions and the hiring of archival expert Kris Kiesling in 1990—nearly thirty years after Schellenberg’s pivotal publication—that the Ransom Center began to adopt modern methods of arrangement and description for authors’ papers. As Megan Barnard described in Collecting the
Imagination: The First Fifty Years of the Ransom Center :
The great influx of collections in the 1990s perhaps inevitably led to a renewed focus on cataloging. Manuscript cataloging practices at this time had become unwieldy and outdated, resulting in a growing backlog of uncataloged manuscript materials. Kris Kiesling, a rising star in the field of archives and manuscripts, was hired to address this problem. She redefined manuscript cataloging practices for the Center, creating collection-based descriptions that were far more manageable and efficient.
i
What rationale did Ransom Center manuscript catalogers from the period of its foundation in 1957 through 1990 offer for maintaining such “outdated” arrangement and description practices? What unique characteristics or philosophies of the Ransom Center and its leadership inspired the Center’s staff to cling to archaic techniques? Was there something inherent in the perceived nature and significance of authors’ papers, or in the way researchers utilized them, that invited certain arrangement methods? Although the majority of its peer institutions at universities across the U.S. chose to apply archival arrangement and description practices to manuscript collections long before the Ransom h Kris Kiesling, former head of the Ransom Center’s Department of Manuscripts and Archives, email message to author, November 15, 2010. i Megan Barnard, Collecting the Imagination . 96.
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Center made this change, the conflict between vision and reality, theory and practice, and the inertia that the leadership and staff exhibited with respect to this change were by no means unique to the Ransom Center: as an analysis of the professional literature on manuscript arrangement and description in the period from the mid-twentieth century to the early 1990s underscores, the Ransom Center came of age in an era of archival change and began to mature with the profession itself. While the Center entered its adolescence, manuscript curators and archivists debated multiple cataloging conflicts in professional publications: the public archives model versus the historical manuscripts tradition, library cataloging methods versus archival practices. At the same time, research reached unprecedented levels in postwar universities, typewriter technology led to increasingly voluminous modern archives, and literary collectors attempted to presage which works might one day constitute the modern canon.
j The Ransom Center’s delayed transition from outmoded cataloging methods to modern archival practices serves as an illuminating case study of the disjunction between theory and practice in the archival profession and the way leadership priorities, tradition, and inertia—even in the most eminent repositories—often hinder institutional vision.
Series I. Theories of Arrangement and Description of Manuscripts: Before Schellenberg
As early as 1938, University of Michigan William L. Clements Library archivist
Howard H. Peckham advocated the practice of using catalog cards for “multiple cataloguing” in the
American Archivist , promoting the concept of arranging and describing manuscript materials in “bundles” in order to conserve time and to circumvent what he saw as the fundamental limitation of the historical manuscript tradition of itemj Cahoon, Herbert, “Literary Manuscripts and Autographs.” Library Trends , 9 (Spring 1961), 433.
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level description in calendars.
k
He argued that the researcher should accept the responsibility of filtering through these bundles, “to dig through a peck of chaff to reach his grain of wheat,” and that the “insurmountable difficulty” in calendaring (or item-level description) “is that what may seem unimportant to the person making the calendar may be of significance to a particular research worker.” l
One year later, Curtis W. Garrison of the Hayes Memorial Library in Fremont, Ohio, echoed Peckham when he criticized manuscript curators for classifying the single item as the unit of description and value and urged curators and researchers to consider individual manuscript items in the context of their entire collections.
m
Mattie Russell and E. G. Roberts of the Manuscript Department of Duke University Library also characterized their processing and description practices as a compromise between simplicity and specificity, with catalog cards at the collection level and a subject card file that served “as an index to collections and never to individual items within a collection.” n
In her reflection on manuscript arrangement and description at the Library of
Congress, Katharine E. Brand emphasized the problems of “bigness” and backlog inherent in modern manuscript collections as a result of typewriter technology and the tendency of modern authors to donate materials earlier in life.
o Where the Library of
Congress had carried out arrangement and description on a piece-by-piece level with older, smaller manuscript collections, they now had to transition to ideally “preliminary” k Howard H. Peckham, “Arranging and Cataloging Manuscripts in the William L. Clements Library,”
American Archivist , 1 (October, 1938), 222, 226. l Ibid., 226, 228. m Curtis W. Garrison, “The Relation of Historical Manuscripts to Archival Material,” American Archivist , 2
(April, 1939), 102. n Mattie Russell and E. G. Roberts, “The Processing Procedures of the Manuscript Department of Duke
University Library,” American Archivist , 7 (October, 1949), 376. o Katharine E. Brand, “Developments in the Handling of Recent Manuscripts in the Library of Congress,”
American Archivist , 16 (April, 1953), 99-104.
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(but often permanent) arrangement and description practices that emphasized preexisting arrangement and the outlining of series, box, and folder contents in more general descriptions.
In the early 1950s, the Library of Congress’ efforts to spearhead a nationwide movement toward a National Union Catalog for manuscript collections intensified the debate about the proper arrangement and description of manuscripts. While emphasizing the need for scientific and uniform processing of manuscripts, R. H. Land maintained the importance of preserving the library tradition of card catalogs in his 1954 article on the
National Union Catalog in the American Archivist : he acknowledged that manuscripts
“[were] the most refractory materials with which custodians [had] to deal,” that the
Catalog would contain very few entries for single manuscripts (it would represent most manuscripts at the collection level), and that the system would align with library cataloging methods so that a library could “provide in one place its total cataloged holdings of the writings of an author, whether published or unpublished.” p
(Interestingly, the University of Texas responded to a request for feedback on the initial rules by declaring that they lacked the staff to comply with the proposed cataloging requirements.)
University of British Columbia Librarian Neal Harlow reflected that such efforts at standardization in manuscript processing—the Library of Congress’s project and others—offered a compromise between library practice and archival methodology, reinforcing the card catalog’s supremacy in dealing with manuscripts, while establishing efficient processing practices: “The influx of new material and the emphasis upon use; the tendency to treat manuscripts in groups rather than by piece; the adoption of similar p R. H. Land, “The National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections,” American Archivist , 17 (July,
1954), 199.
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record forms…and the amalgamation of archival techniques of record description with library cataloging procedures illustrate present day trends.” q
While D. V. Martin of the Detroit Public Library’s Burton Historical Collection advocated the creation of analytical card catalog entries to describe significantly valuable manuscripts at item-level r
, P. S. Dunkin of the Folger Shakespeare Library warned against detailed description, or “elaboration,” like that used in the library tradition of book cataloging. With particular emphasis on literary manuscripts, Dunkin promoted the transition from card catalogs to “finding lists” and revealed that E. W. B. Nicholson and
Falconer Madan had argued about the relative merits of thorough description or efficient cataloging at the Bodleian as early as 1890.
s
Although Dunkin acknowledged that the archivist might wish to record a specific detail or two about extremely rare manuscript items, he protested heatedly against detailed item-level description as a default practice, contending that catalogers and researchers often disagree about the details that make a manuscript significant and “no scholar worth his salt will take at face value anything that any other scholar—let alone a mere cataloger—may have written of the appearance of the manuscript or any abstract he may have made of its contents.” t
Series II. Arrangement and Description of Manuscripts at the Ransom Center, 1965-1989
Despite the fact that this movement away from treating manuscripts at item-level and toward arranging and describing them as groupings had already become common in professional literature, and despite the fact that several university library manuscript departments had already commenced the transition away from item-level processing, q Neal Harlow, “Managing Manuscript Collections,” Library Trends , 4 (October, 1955), 204. r D. V. Martin, “Use of Cataloging Techniques in Work with Record and Manuscripts,” American
Archivist , 18 (October, 1955), 333. s P. S. Dunkin, “Arrangement and Cataloging of Manuscripts,” Library Trends , 5 (January, 1957), 353. t Ibid., 353-354.
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when the manuscript cataloging unit of the Ransom Center library began in the mid-
1960s, it established a pattern of strict adherence to cataloging methods that had already begun to go out of style. The first head of the department, Eugene Lillard, brought with him a library science degree from the University of Texas, and the processes of arrangement and description that he instituted resembled the practices for book cataloging (item-level treatment of materials as discrete units) and historical manuscripts
(creation of calendars) rather than the emerging archival techniques. Indeed, despite the fact that Schellenberg himself taught an Institute on Archival Management at the
University of Texas in the summer of 1960 u
, Lillard established a system of arrangement and description which, according to current Ransom Center Senior Archivist Joan Sibley,
“was very artificial.” v
The manuscript department staff divided every collection that arrived into correspondence, works, and “miscellaneous,” often combining manuscript materials from multiple sources into artificial collections regardless of provenance, and created an individual descriptive catalog card for every single item. As a result, “the process of organizing a large collection of an author's papers sometimes took several years,” if, that is, those papers evaded consignment to the dreaded backlog.
w
In its section on the history of cataloging, the current Ransom Center archives and manuscript department manual compares Lillard’s scheme to a system in use at the New
York Public Library at the time. As current Ransom Center Head of Archives and Visual
Materials Stephen Mielke reflected on Lillard’s system, “it’s been my impression that it was more of a traditional manuscript librarian approach, or at least, something that u Hardesty, William W., “‘A Proper Function of Library Schools’: T. R. Schellenberg at the University of
Texas,” Libraries & the Cultural Record , 42 (2007), 129-150. v Sibley, interview by the author, November 18, 2010. w Barnard, Collecting the Imagination . 55.
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researchers had expected at the time.” x
Former head of the Department of Manuscripts and Archives Kris Kiesling affirmed that Lillard’s arrangement and description of literary manuscripts “was a common practice in collections of literary materials, and pretty much followed the historical manuscripts tradition, except they used card files instead of calendars.” y
And indeed, the websites of the New York Public Library, and, for example, the Yale University Library Archives and Manuscripts division and the New Jersey
Historical Society, do reference the fact that manuscript cataloging took place at the itemlevel earlier in their histories.
z
It seems, then, that these manuscript repositories (and not the manuscript departments of Duke University, the Universities of Michigan and British
Columbia, or the Library of Congress) may have served as Lillard’s models, regardless of the popular trends in professional literature on manuscripts and archives: perhaps in its early years the Ransom Center’s cataloging department embodied the common disconnect between theory and practice. The idea that manuscripts could be treated as archives and arranged according to archival practice had not yet entered the department’s mindset, as Kiesling underscored: “They really didn’t think about archives. Basically they treated all of the manuscript collections like manuscripts.” aa
Why the department clung to its methods for thirty years—until long after its model repositories had embraced modern archival practice for manuscript processing—however, demands a closer look. x Stephen Mielke, Ransom Center Archivist, Head of Archives and Visual Materials, interview by the author, November 18, 2010. y Kiesling, email message to author, November 15, 2010. z “Archival Materials,” URL: http://www.nypl.org/collections/nypl-collections/archival-materials .
“Manuscripts and Archives Tutorial,” URL: http://www.library.yale.edu/mssa/tutorial/departmental.htm
.
“Guide to Using the Catalogs of the New Jersey Historical Society,” URL: http://www.jerseyhistory.org/lib_cardcatalogs.html
. Accessed November 28, 2010. aa Kiesling, interview with the author, November 22, 2010.
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Series III. Theories of Arrangement and Description of Manuscripts:
Schellenberg and Beyond
When he wrote in The Management of Archives in 1965 that “the principles and techniques now applied to public records may be applied also, with some modification, to private records, especially to private manuscript material of recent origin, much of which has the organic character of archival material,” T. R. Schellenberg sought to formalize and legitimize what had, according to the literature before 1965, already become accepted practice in some manuscript repositories—and was soon to define modern manuscript practice at large.
bb
In advocating the arrangement and description of manuscripts according to archival standards—arrangement into series based on provenance and original order and description in finding aids—Schellenberg sought to combat the
“library practice” of treating manuscript materials at the level of the individual item and the “prodigious number of catalog cards” that resulted.
cc
He emphasized the trend within manuscript repositories of viewing archival practice as the superior method of attaining control over an unprecedented volume of modern manuscript material:
In recent years, many large repositories of the United States have discontinued cataloging single pieces. Among them are the Manuscript
Division of the Library of Congress and the Henry E. Huntington Library.
The curator of the latter library frankly admits that its holdings are ‘so large that elaborate cataloging is impossible’…[and] while older manuscripts ‘are undoubtedly well suited to…individual indexing, cataloging, or calendaring,’ the mass of modern manuscripts cannot be dealt with in that way’…there [should] be substituted therefore other kinds of finding aids, such as guides and inventories.
dd
Along with his peers at the Library of Congress and the Huntington Library, Richard C.
Berner of the University of Washington Library’s manuscript department mirrored bb T. R. Schellenberg, The Management of Archives , Preface, IX. cc Ibid., 28, 50. dd Ibid., 112-113.
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Schellenberg’s views in arguing that the “manuscript librarian has behaved too frequently like a frustrated historian or an antiquarian inclined to founder in a quicksand of details” and a “reverence for the single piece.” ee
Jean L. Finch of Stanford University Library further revealed that Berkeley’s Bancroft Library had by 1964 abandoned the idea of detailed analytic catalog cards for single pieces of correspondence in favor of collective description on a broader level, housed in a loose-leaf binder.
ff
In his 1969 discussion of academic manuscript repositories, historian O. Lawrence Burnette reinforced the observations of Berner and Finch, remarking that “the traditional forms of bibliographical service to scholars using manuscript materials, such as calendars, indexes, and printed guides, have largely given way to a brief citation of the location of collections in a central union list.” gg
By the time Burner reflected on the history of manuscript arrangement and description again in 1978, he had come to embrace Schellenberg’s concept of applying archival principles to manuscripts even more fully. In “Arrangement and Description:
Some Historical Observations,” he characterized modern manuscript arrangement and description as an uneasy fusion of traditions, a product of the dialectic of item-level library practices perpetuated by the earliest iterations of the National Union Catalog of
Manuscript Collections and the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules and collection-level archival methods championed by the National Archives’ Historical Records Survey,
Margaret Cross Norton, and Schellenberg.
hh
“The library card catalog,” he wrote, “tended ee R. C. Berner, “The Arrangement and Description of Manuscripts,” American Archivist , 23 (October,
1960), 396. ff Jean L. Finch, “Some Fundamentals in Arranging Archives and Manuscript Collections,” Library
Resources and Technical Services , 8 (Winter, 1964), 30. gg O. Lawrence Burnette, Beneath the Footnote , 226. hh R. C. Berner, “Arrangement and Description: Some Historical Observations,” American Archivist , 41
(April, 1978), 169-181.
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to shape our thinking not only about description but about processing and arrangement as well.” In adhering to these library cataloging methods, manuscript librarians ignored
“provenance, the cardinal principle of archival theory and practice.” According to
Berner’s analysis, “[o]nly in the past generation has provenance become an accepted principle of manuscript processing…most manuscript curators [now] recognize that modern manuscripts have essentially the same qualities as archives,” as products of
“extended activity.” ii Berner called for manuscript curators to desert item-level treatment except in the highly unusual scenario that a repository lacked a substantial backlog, aimed to collect only select individual manuscript items, and operated on a budget generous enough to allow for the financing of such excessively detailed processing.
jj
Series IV. Arrangement and Description of Manuscripts at the Ransom Center, 1990s
Meanwhile, the Ransom Center had entered its adolescence. After acquiring three-quarters of a million books and an incredible volume of manuscripts, Ransom officially left the directorship in 1961 (although he continued to influence collecting at the Center), and his duties passed to F. Warren Roberts, his “right hand man.” kk
Ransom died in 1976, and in 1979, the University issued an audit censuring the Center’s leadership for its history of uncontrolled spending and “questionable dealings” in acquisitions.
ll When Roberts retired in 1976, control of the Center fell to two interim and acting directors in quick succession, John Payne and Carlton Lake, until Decherd Turner of Southern Methodist University’s Bridwell Library took the helm from 1980 to 1988, ii Ibid., 181. jj Ibid., 180. kk “Mission and History,” Harry Ransom Humanities Center Website. Accessed November 30, 2010. URL: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/about/mission/ ll Barnes, “Harry Ransom: The Great Acquisitor.”
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and controversy surrounding the Center’s leadership deepened.
mm
In the cataloging department, John Kirkpatrick succeeded Lillard in the early 1970s and perpetuated the division of all manuscript materials into the three categories of correspondence, works, and miscellaneous, as well as the item-level description on catalog cards.
nn
And then, in
1988, University of Tulsa Provost Thomas F. Staley’s tenure as director of the Center began—Staley, a man who, in Kiesling’s words, “is probably as close to Harry Ransom as a person could get, as far as their drive to acquire”—and our story reached its turning point.
According to Kirkpatrick, by the time Staley arrived, the backlog in unprocessed manuscripts that began with Ransom’s ambitious pace of acquisition in the 1960s had spiraled out of control. Staley spearheaded “eye-opening” studies of all of the Center’s departments and concluded, with the support of Kirkpatrick and his staff, that a change in arrangement and description practices was long overdue.
oo
Current Associate Director
Mary Beth Bigger served on the search committee that hired Kris Kiesling, a recent
University of Michigan MLIS recipient and archivist in that University’s Rare Books and
Special Collections, with a mandate to lead those changes. Bigger reflected that
Kiesling’s arrival as the new head of what was then renamed the Department of
Manuscripts and Archives signaled “a change in mindset from cataloging manuscripts to cataloging archives.” pp
Two years into her leadership of the Department, Kiesling issued an internal status report on the adjustments in practice, which she characterized as a “shift to collection-level cataloging” using finding aids and “the addition of automation,” as a mm Clifford Endres, “Paying the Price,” Texas Monthly , (May, 1988), 26-28. nn John Kirkpatrick, former head of Ransom Center’s cataloging department and Curator of British and
American Literature, interview by the author, November 19, 2010. oo Ibid. pp Mary Beth Bigger, Ransom Center Associate Director, interview by the author, November 18, 2010.
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result of which the quantity of material processed by each cataloger increased by over
9400%.
qq “We immediately stopped cataloging at item level,” she recalled, “and implemented archival arrangement and description practices on collections receiving initial processing (both new collections and…backlog). Collection level catalog records were loaded into RLIN.”
In addition, she and her combination team of longtime Ransom Center catalogers
(including Kirkpatrick) and newly hired, archivally-trained staff “implemented an accessioning procedure, whereby incoming collections were rehoused and preliminary finding aids were created upon arrival.” rr
A member of the fresh cohort of archivists hired by Kiesling, Sibley described the transformation of practice to archival methods— respecting provenance and original order, and describing materials at the collection level—as “a sea change.” ss
Kiesling, Kirkpatrick, Sibley, and Bigger concurred that the Center staff embraced the new methods—aside from some temporary hesitation on the part of the reference staff about how the decrease in descriptive detail might alter their responsibilities to researchers—and the status report manifested the success of the new methods in accelerating productivity. Why, then, did the Department wait nearly thirty years—until 1990, when, according to Kiesling’s recollection, only the Poetry Collection at SUNY Buffalo and the Special Collections department at Pennsylvania State were still using these outdated artificial arrangement and item-level card catalog description methods—to make the changes?
tt qq Kiesling, “Department of Manuscripts and Archives—Status Report,” 1. rr Kiesling, email message to author, November 15, 2010. ss Sibley, interview by the author, November 18, 2010. tt Kiesling, email message to author, November 15, 2010.
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How did the Ransom Center, which with its world-renowned collections enjoyed such a celebrated status in 1990 that Kiesling assumed she “wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the job” there, allow its internal practices to remain so out of step with its cutting edge external reputation? In fact, every member of the search committee had already eagerly interviewed Kiesling by phone before she travelled to
Austin for her formal interview, and when she did, they hired her on the spot. “I applied thinking that they probably had a strong internal candidate” she recalled, “[but] I think I was perhaps one of the only candidates…who had the background that I did” in the practice and technology of modern archival methods.
uu
Without training in archival techniques, Kirkpatrick and the members of the cataloging department were cognizant of the need for changes in practice but unaware of exactly what those alterations would entail and how to institute them.
Perhaps most fundamentally, the delay in updating methods and the eventual instigation of the changes in 1990 reflected a profound conflict in the vision of the
Ransom Center leadership regarding acquisition, institutional philosophy, and internal priorities. Bigger emphasized Ransom’s initial dream that the Center’s collections should document the writer’s evolving imagination, that they should enable “the researcher to see the entire archive, to understand the creator’s process.” vv
While Ransom hoped to assemble such cohesive collections, the materials he and Roberts acquired often came from numerous diverse sources—typically from dealers, rather than from the authors with whom the papers originated. As the Manuscripts and Archives Department’s processing uu Kiesling, interview by the author, November 22, 2010. vv Bigger, interview by the author, November 18, 2010.
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manual relates, Lillard’s system “was developed in the early ‘60s to accommodate the numerous author collections that were being put together from many sources.” ww
When Turner came to the helm in 1980, he steered collecting practices away from the strengths Ransom had established (often much to the chagrin of University observers who honored Ransom’s precedent, and no thanks to Turner’s mercurial, fiery demeanor xx
), acquiring materials according to his own personal interests and beliefs.
yy
Although he brought several major archival collections to the Center, including the
Gloria Swanson and David O. Selznick archives, Turner’s passion for rare antique bindings and livres d’artiste
books, rather than modern manuscripts, drove his collecting strategy, and his dedication to establishing a top tier conservation program absorbed much of his energy and financial resources.
zz
As Kirkpatrick reflected, in situations in which Ransom might have been first in the acquisition line, Turner “let some collections go” for which he deemed the market prices exorbitant and instead focused on setting up a
“fine” preservation program to protect the materials the Center had already acquired.
aaa
Turner’s emphasis on rare book collecting no doubt reinforced the library aspects of
Lillard’s system. And when the cataloging department attempted to tackle the unprecedentedly massive Swanson and Selznick archives, they quickly realized that itemlevel processing proved unfeasible with modern archival collections.
bbb
These two archives foreshadowed the types of literary materials Staley began to acquire during his directorship—cohesive, modern collections, acquired through active ww Sibley, interview by the author, November 18, 2010. xx Clifford Endres, “Paying the Price,” Texas Monthly , (May 1988), 26. yy Basbanes, A Gentle Madness , 348. zz John and Cheryl Halton, “The First 25 Years at the HRC,” Alcalde , (May/June, 1982), 26. aaa Kirkpatrick, interview by the author, November 19, 2010. bbb Sibley, interview by the author, November 18, 2010.
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solicitation of the writer himself. He also adopted a philosophy of “nodal collecting,” intentionally gathering interconnected materials from circles of related writers.
ccc “In part,” Kiesling analyzed, “the item-level cataloging that had been in place reflected the way materials were acquired” before Staley’s time—“a few items or a few boxes at a time.” Staley began approaching “individual authors themselves and then acquiring their entire body of papers as opposed to a few manuscripts or a few letters at a time. So that was the big change…archival arrangement and description methods made a lot of sense.” ddd
Kiesling observed that the Center staff had paid very little attention to developments in professional archival circles before her time, and posited that no one in a leadership position before Staley had cared to confront the inertia and complacency that pervaded the cataloging and reference departments after so many years of Lillard’s method. “Dr. Staley had very different ideas than his predecessors,” she reasoned, “and changed the Ransom Center from being a very insular institution to one that was more forward thinking.” eee
Thus, the move to archival practice coincided with and facilitated the realization of Ransom’s initial vision through Staley’s efforts—a vision of collections of modern manuscripts that document the author’s imagination.
Kirkpatrick, Kiesling, and Sibley also stressed the impact of acquisition volume on arrangement and description practices. Berner contended that item-level treatment of manuscripts could only remain feasible in the rare case that a repository acquired items largely individually, collected materials at a relatively low volume, and maintained a high ccc D. T. Max, “Letter from Austin: Final Destination,” New Yorker , June 11, 2007. Accessed November 20,
2010. URL: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/11/070611fa_fact_max?currentPage=all ddd Kiesling, interview by the author, November 22, 2010. eee Kiesling, email message to author, November 15, 2010.
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budget for processing.
fff
To a certain extent, then, the Ransom Center fulfilled these unusual requirements at the very beginning of its history. As acquisitions rolled in, however, the Center quickly violated the second condition, about volume: the backlog burgeoned even in the 1960s, and as it continued to swell, item-level description no longer served as an efficient practice for making collections available for research.
Similarly, Kirkpatrick, Kiesling, and Sibley all emphasized the way the sophistication of technology by 1990 facilitated the transition from decades-old cataloging practices to easily executed modern methods: the time was ripe for computer-based cataloging, and
Kiesling’s technological expertise enabled the staff to tackle voluminous modern archival collections.
In addition to leadership differences and an arrival at turning points in volume and technological capability, was there something about the way the Center’s staff viewed literary manuscript materials that contributed to the protracted legacy of Lillard’s method? Kirkpatrick attributed the longevity of item-level description to the need for protecting the value of a rare item, should it have gone missing (as, indeed, materials occasionally have over the course of the Center’s history): “When you think of the value of one letter of Edgar Allan Poe and one Byron manuscript, a little better description would help if the item were lost or stolen. The archival description wouldn’t be as full— wouldn’t necessarily include the date and content and detail of every single letter.” ggg
Sibley and Mielke also offered this explanation for the endurance of Lillard’s method, recognizing it as a significant argument in favor of item-level description. Conservation and protection of the physical condition of rare materials and rapidly-decaying fff R. C. Berner, “Arrangement and Description: Some Historical Observations,” 180. ggg Kirkpatrick, interview by the author, November 19, 2010.
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nineteenth- and twentieth-century paper went hand-in-hand with the safeguarding of items against theft, and the detailed card catalog also arguably limited the excessive handling of each physical item by enabling researchers to pinpoint in advance the precise manuscript materials they needed to view. These arguments for Lillard’s methods can hardly be restricted to literary materials, however; many manuscript genres contain immense value and demand physical protection.
Perhaps the intense philosophical and academic interest in literary materials on the part of the Center’s leadership somehow trickled down to the cataloging staff and encouraged them to engage in scholarship of their own in preparing item-level description? Kiesling argued the opposite: “It was really more of a rote kind of exercise I think, just getting the information in the catalog so that people could find it.” hhh
Or perhaps an uncertainty about the future value of literary manuscript items—about which authors would maintain popularity and ascend to permanent positions in the canon— inspired item-level description as a way to ensure the discoverability of every potentially treasured item in the Center’s uniquely modern holdings? If this motivation played a role,
Kiesling and the rest of the Center’s staff seemed to have remained unaware of it. Could it be the case, then, that Lillard’s methods of arrangement and description had little to do with the nature of literary manuscripts, in particular? While ingrained habit seemed to have created the atmosphere of inertia within the cataloging department, the genuine reluctance of the reference department to the change in description methods may have reflected a particular institutional view about the way researchers interacted with literary materials, specifically. In his 1968 essay “The Scholar and the Archivist,” academic researcher Philip D. Jordan wrote from the manuscript user’s perspective, entreating hhh Kiesling, interview with author, November 22, 2010.
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archivists to create more detailed descriptions and guides to collections in order to facilitate discovery of documents that would lead to epiphanies in research: “An archivist, to my way of thinking, is a trained person who assists a researcher to swim in a bottomless sea of endlessly fascinating records. The wise archivist knows, as does the sagacious scholar, that the researcher does not define his research topic but that the documents dictate the subjects to be researched.” iii
Nearly thirty years later (right around the time Kiesling and her team embraced finding aids), L. M. Overbeck, research associate with Emory University and editor of The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett , echoed Jordan’s position, and cited the overwhelming volume of modern literary manuscripts and the unknown future canonicity of modern materials in urging archivists to ensure access, to serve as active collaborators with literary researchers in document discovery, and to create more detailed descriptive guides to meet the researcher’s needs.
jjj
“The papers of persons who have made their living and reputation through their writing,”
Overbeck argued, “may offer special circumstances not usual for materials in other types of archives. In literary research, all written products are potentially related to the evolution of the texts that define an author’s canon.” kkk
Indeed, both Kiesling and Sibley acknowledged that Lillard’s detailed card catalog facilitated certain kinds of connections in the research process: Kiesling cited the unique interrelatedness of the Center’s modern collections, arguing that many of the writers referred “to each other all the time” and that “cross-references in the catalog” iii Philip D. Jordan, “The Scholar and the Archivist—A Partnership.” American Archivist , 31 (January,
1968), 64. jjj L. M. Overbeck, “Researching Literary Manuscripts: A Scholar’s Perspective,” American Archivist , 56
(Winter, 1993), 62-69. kkk Overbeck, “Researching Literary Manuscripts: A Scholar’s Perspective,” 64.
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always noted the existence of one author’s letter to another author across collections.
lll
Sibley concurred with Kiesling that the item-level card catalog descriptions illuminated links between related materials and collections.
mmm
At the same time, however, the inherent subjectivity of description limits its accuracy—what appears significant to the cataloger may not interest the researcher and vice-versa—so a finding aid may end up serving a researcher just as well as item-level description, and a written guide at any level of detail may in fact limit the researcher’s access or discovery. Overbeck proposed close collaboration between the scholar and the archivist in the reading room as the solution to the simultaneous conundrums of the researcher’s need to locate specific literary materials in modern collections and the inherently interpretive nature of description at all levels of manuscript processing.
nnn
While they praised the suitability of Lillard’s methods for research in certain ways, Kiesling and Sibley also warned of the potential research discoveries frequently lost as a result of the old systems of arrangement and description: most fundamentally, literary archives must be processed and open for research in order for scholars to utilize them, and the crawling pace of Lillard’s method hindered efficient processing.
Furthermore, the artificial arrangement of literary collections into the three blanket categories “lumped together a lot of things that were important,” and many materials
“that went into that miscellaneous category really were more important” than the category’s name implied. Kiesling underscored that the researcher’s plight of piecing together the separated information in the artificially divided collections “became a humongous task…a lot of connections were lost…taking collections apart the way they lll Kiesling, interview with author, November 22, 2010. mmm Sibley, interview by the author, November 18, 2010. nnn Overbeck, “Researching Literary Manuscripts,” 65-66.
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had done for so many years really destroyed information that might have been crucial to someone. And it really is making a decision for the researcher about what’s important.” ooo
From the perspective of the reference staff, the card catalog may have empowered researchers to locate necessary materials without excessive assistance from librarians, but the need to photocopy and mail offsite researchers every single catalog card potentially related to a particular topic (rather than a photocopy of a finding aid) created a different form of excessive work. After the transition to finding aids, the reference staff necessarily became more active in helping researchers to make connections, but Kiesling and Sibley both observed that the reference team adjusted quickly and soon came to appreciate the new system. Researchers grew to embrace the archival mindset, as well.
Overall, then, Kiesling and Sibley asserted that the benefits of archival arrangement and description far outweighed any advantages of Lillard’s system.
Provenance and original order served Ransom’s vision of revealing the natural unfolding of the writer’s process, and description in finding aids offered the best solution to the problems of providing the researcher with quick access and transparency of discoverable information.
In her 1992 report, Kiesling concluded by remarking that she felt “very pleased with the great strides this Department has made toward national standards in cataloging.” ppp
In fact, this fundamental shift to archival methods of arrangement and description for literary manuscripts proved so successful that the Center soon began processing its photography, performing arts, and ephemera collections according to ooo Kiesling, interview with author, November 22, 2010. ppp Kiesling, “Department of Manuscripts and Archives—Status Report,” 3.
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archival practice, in addition to a portion of its book collections. It had taken thirty years, but the Ransom Center finally realigned its practices with Ransom’s vision—and with the theories that manuscript curators and archivists had espoused and debated in the professional literature for decades, even long before Schellenberg outlined steps for the application of modern archival practice to manuscripts. Practice once again mirrored professional theory, and institutional reality came closer to reflecting institutional vision.
A manuscript repository and library metaphorphosed into a modern archive.
Was the Center unique in clinging to Lillard’s methods for so many years?
According to the relatively rapid evolution in cataloging at its peer institutions, yes, the
Center was undeniably unique. But, as Burnette reflected in Beneath the Footnote , very few such quasi-public manuscript repositories escaped some degree of idiosyncrasy in practice:
…the heterogeneity of the content of the quasi-public repositories is matched only by the variety in the conditions under which these collections have been built and made available for public use. Like sociologically isolated communities, each of these manuscript repositories has its own traditions, mores, and practices…Of all historical research material, manuscripts get out of hand most easily, yet they are also the richest ore a library can store for the research scholar.
qqq
In its attempts to define the best means of offering that “ore” to researchers and its attempts to facilitate discovery in modern literary research and to honor the irreplaceable value of literary manuscript materials; in its stubborn inertia, it’s insularity and sociological isolation; in its twin impulses of forward-thinking and close-mindedness, the
Ransom Center epitomized the tumultuous maturation of the modern literary archive.
Alternately unaware of, or out-of-step with professional theory on manuscript processing at various points in its development, the Center embodied the common chasm separating qqq Burnette, Beneath the Footnote , 225-226.
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theory from practice, the gap that pivotal figures such as Kiesling sometimes manage to bridge, and the real-life struggles that keep theory and its innovation of novel solutions relevant and vital. If, as modernist scholar Hugh Kenner posited, the literary manuscript is a “continuum of intention,” a static object breathed to life by the attention and interpretation of the researcher, then the Ransom Center’s manuscript cataloging department faced an unusual, almost paradoxical, archival challenge: the discrete arrangement of the fluid imagination and the description of items which, in their living, evolving state, can only be momentarily described through fleeting, evanescent interpretations.
rrr
According to another legend, Staley once whispered that the most important thing in the world “‘isn’t the cyclotron, and it isn’t all of those other things. It’s the humanities.’” sss This absolute belief in humanities archives has empowered Staley to secure innumerable acquisition deals. Get the manuscript, he seems to say, and then by all means, arrange it and describe it—swiftly—so fervent researchers can breathe the record back into life. rrr Hugh Kenner, “The Scholars’ Attic,” Library Chronicle , 23 (1983), 51-61. sss Taliaferro, “Oh, the Humanities.”
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