THE NORTHWESTERN ARCHIVES ARE SHROUDED IN MYSTERY. THEY ARE A COLLECTION CONTAINING INNUMERABLE REAMS OF PAPER ACROSS THREE DIFFERENT BUILDINGS. BUT HOW DID NORTHWESTERN COME ABOUT THIS VAST TROVE OF MATERIAL? AND WHO DECIDES HOW IT GETS ORGANIZED? I DID A LITTLE DIGGING TO FIND OUT.
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BENN JOSEPH IS THE HEAD OF COLLECTION SERVICES, A POSITION HE’S HELD SINCE 2019. HE’S WORKED FOR THE SCHOOL IN VARIOUS ARCHIVAL CAPACITIES SINCE 2009. JOSEPH AND HIS TEAM ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR SORTING AND ORGANIZING THE WIDE RANGES OF MATERIAL SENT TO THE ARCHIVES DEPARTMENT.
(JOSEPH) I lead a team of people who do a variety of things that support collection management for our rare archival and unique materials that we have at the library. So for instance, if you were in a room with me here right now, you would see there’s a variety of active processing projects going on right now. And so these would be papers of alumni that we’ve received departmental records. Just a big variety of things. And so what we do, among other things, is we’ll engage in a process of archival arrangement and description. And what that means is we’re kind of preparing an archival collection, to be used by people, researchers in a reading room. And also, you know, preparing it so that it can be used for things like digitization efforts, you know, that sort of thing.
WHETHER OR NOT THE TEAM KEEPS ARCHIVAL MATERIALS IS BASED ON A FEW FACTORS.
(JOSEPH) So like size, complexity, how close it aligns to our collecting policies, how useful it might be, like in…in a class, is there a class somewhere that would be able to make use of this? If there is, let’s do everything we can to get it? If not, then we probably don’t need to devote a ton of resources to it.
JOSEPH ALSO SAYS TIME REQUIRED IS A MAJOR FACTOR IN DETERMINING THE ACQUISITION OF A COLLECTION. EVEN IF ORGANIZATION IS ALL SOMEONE DOES, IT WILL STILL BE A TIME-CONSUMING PROCESS.
(JOSEPH) So I would estimate it probably be like seven or eight hours per linear foot for us to do everything that we need to do with it. So I guess you extrapolate that out to number of linear feet, so 350 times seven or eight or something like that, who’d give a rough count of the number of hours that it would take and then that would be like someone’s position for…could take a year or something like that to do that work.
ONE OF THE PEOPLE WHO’S DONE THAT WORK IS KEVIN LEONARD.
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LEONARD HAS BEEN WORKING IN THE ARCHIVES FOR 43 YEARS, A TIME PERIOD BEGINNING WHEN HE WAS STILL A STUDENT AT THE UNIVERSITY. THE WAY IN WHICH HE GOT THE JOB THAT CHANGED HIS LIFE IS STILL A STORY THAT BRINGS A SMILE TO HIS FACE.
(LEONARD) My handwriting was pretty good. My penmanship was pretty good. And in those days, before we were using computers and whatnot, a lot of the work in the archives was making lists by hand. And so the guy in charge of the archives took a liking to me, and he saw that my penmanship was decent. And his job was to make lists of collections that were coming in and inventory them. There was one, maybe there are two typewriters in the department at that time.
WITH GREAT PENMANSHIP NEEDED, LEONARD WAS AN OBVIOUS CHOICE FOR THE JOB.
(LEONARD) So he put me to work in the archives while I was an undergraduate student and I loved it. I loved doing that kind of work. I loved reading old mail, going through diaries and scrapbooks and old photographs, things like that. And if I say so myself, I did a good job and a couple years after graduating college, I was working downtown, he had an opening he called me up and said, Would you consider applying and I did and I’ve been here ever since.
OVER THAT TIME, LEONARD HAS WATCHED NORTHWESTERN’S COLLECTION GROW TO STAGGERING SIZES. HE ESTIMATES THE FULL COLLECTIONS TOTAL ROUGHLY 25,000 LINEAR FEET ACROSS THREE BUILDINGS. AMONG HIS PROUDEST ACHIEVEMENTS IS THE NEAR-COMPLETE COLLECTION OF NORTHWESTERN’S STUDENT PAPER.
(LEONARD) Well, publications are a terrific record of Northwestern as an institution and, in effect, a log book of the…of the actions and activities of Northwestern students and faculty and staff. It’s…there’s, there’s probably no better single record of Northwestern than in the school newspaper, school publishing newspaper publishing at Northwestern goes back to 1871. So the first newspaper was called the tripod. A few years later, you get a second competing student newspaper called The VA debt. They found that the towel wasn’t big enough for the two of them, they merged into something called the Northwestern and then with a…an uptick in the frequency of publication, the Northwestern became the daily Northwestern. So the…the heritage of the legacy goes back well over a century and that is the most complete record of what was going on on campus or with Northwestern people.
OF COURSE, IN A DIGITAL AGE, A WHOLE COLLECTION OF NEWSPAPERS ISN’T THE MOST EFFICIENT SOLUTION. THAT’S WHY WHAT LEONARD AND HIS TEAM DID NEXT WAS SO IMPORTANT.
(LEONARD) We have been extraordinarily fortunate to work with a company called Newsbank. And through Newsbank, and the very, very the great generosity of news banks founder Dan Jones was at Northwestern, very proud of Northwestern alumnus. We were able to digitize the school newspaper, The Daily Northwestern, the northwestern dividend tripod, so we have a really good run from the beginning. Basically to the present, of digitized text and this is a hugely used resource here is in effect an index to Northwestern history.
BOTH MEN HAVE FOUND TREMENDOUS JOY IN THEIR JOBS. IF IT’S NOT THE JOY OF A NEW FIND, IT’S THE JOY OF BEING ABLE TO HELP OTHERS DISCOVER NEW INFORMATION.
(JOSEPH) Other collections that I personally have experienced, ones that I think are really cool, are one of the Viola Spolin papers. Spolin is considered to be like, they call her the godmother of American improvisational theatre and so she’s the person who’s credited with creating improv, but kind of as we know it, and she did that through developing something that she called theater games. And so like if you’ve ever watched like Whose Line Is It Anyway or something, you know, the host will have a card and we’ll read like, okay, so you can only speak in one syllable words and you can only talk if you’re standing on one foot. And you know, it’s funny, but she created those as she created them in order to help in her work with students. During the Works Progress Administration. It was called the recreational theater project back in the 30s. And so like the collection that we have, has documentation of her work in creating the stuff during the 1930s which is really cool.
LEONARD SAYS HE LOVES ALL HIS COLLECTIONS EQUALLY, AND HIS OFFICE BEARS THAT OUT. NEXT TO HIS DESK, THERE’S A LONG TABLE WITH SHEAFS OF PAPER AND OTHER MEMORABILIA STACKED NEARLY A FOOT HIGH.THAT INCLUDES, AMONG OTHER THINGS, WHEATIES BOXES CELEBRATING NORTHWESTERN’S 1995 ROSE BOWL. WHILE HE IS PERSONALLY A FAN OF PAPER OVER DIGITIZATION, HE ACKNOWLEDGES THAT THE INTERNET AND COMPUTERS HAVE MADE HIS JOB MUCH EASIER AND MORE FULFILLING.
(LEONARD) I was really worried when when we first proposed digitizing the school newspaper I did a lot of trade in the archives. A lot of our visitors were coming in just to go through newspapers. And my thought was, gee, if we have a digitized, they’ll never come in to see me anymore. And I won’t have customers. And it was just the opposite to that. The digitized newspaper allowed people to use other resources more readily and more effectively. So it’s been an extraordinarily positive experience for me and for the department to to get that material digitized and to have it available to our patrons.
BOTH MEN ALSO ENJOY THE PROCESS OF DISCOVERING ARCHIVES OF FAMOUS PEOPLE OF THE PAST WITH NORTHWESTERN CONNECTIONS.
(LEONARD) So I have tried to chase after collections in areas where Northwestern has research or curricular strengths. So looking for alumni in say, field of journalism, of course, who has a very strong program in journalism, we have managed to acquire many collections for people who’ve been noteworthy reporters, Northwestern alumni have gone on to careers as noteworthy reporters, columnists, editors, etc. Business Operations of journalism, Northwestern for example, has strong programs in the performing arts. So we’ve collected a number of bodies of material from Northwestern alumni who have distinguished themselves, in music or onstage on television, and movies.
JOSEPH RECALLS A SPECIFIC COLLECTION THAT TELLS A STORY OF MORE THAN JUST SUCCESS.
(JOSEPH) Another one that I really like is the Patricia Neal papers. And I like that one because it’s just got some really great artifacts that it has to take tickets to the Academy Awards in 1963 or sorry 64. That she got because she had won the Oscar for Best Actress for the film HUD which was with Paul Newman that came out in 1963. And it’s a good, it’s a good film if you haven’t seen it. But she, she won the Oscar. She knew that she had won it. She got tickets to go to give you tickets, and then she had a stroke before she was able to go and was incapacitated as a result of that. And so these tickets are in her papers, but they’re not used. They’re like old, old timey tickets that you tear. But they’re not, they’re not torn. So it’s kind of neat because just the tickets themselves tell a story about kind of what happened and there’s so many things in a collection to do that.
IT IS A JOB OF STORYTELLING, AND WHILE OCCASIONALLY TEDIOUS AND DIFFICULT, AN TASK THOSE WHO UNDERTAKE LOVE. BOTH MEN REPEATEDLY EXPRESSED THE IMPORTANCE OF THEIR WORK AND HOW MUCH THEY ENJOY IT. LEONARD PROBABLY SAID IT BEST.
(LEONARD) It’s…it’s a lot of fun. I’m very grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to do this and to work here. It’s been a wonderful job, suited to my own personality. Met a lot of lovely people doing it. It’s been great.
FOR WNUR NEWS, I’M BRENDAN PREISMAN.
