Libraries preserve cultural heritage from notes to napkins

I have the very satisfying job of applying order to chaos. As head of Collections Services for the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives, I oversee the team of library specialists who make incoming collections of unique materials available for research. These collections range from the lecture notes of award-winning Northwestern faculty to the screenplay drafts of famous alumni like Garry Marshall (read more in this issue).

Perhaps your own desk drawers and attic boxes are orderly and tidy. Even so, an entire career’s worth of documents, photos, memorabilia, and hard drives would overwhelm an outsider. Those materials must be cataloged and housed so that future researchers can make sense of the contents and find what they need quickly.

Take Marshall, for example. Last year we finished processing the archive of the beloved Northwestern movie director and comedy writer. His papers comprise a huge variety of material: typed jokes, drafts of screen- plays, scripts for roles he played, photographs, and other memorabilia of his career. We structured this array in a way that made organizational sense. Combined with the meticulous labeling of nearly 90 archival boxes, our final finding aid increases the ease of discovering Marshall’s materials. Want to see the gags he wrote for numerous Emmy presenters in the 1960s? No problem—we can put our fingers on the precise folders you need.

Doing this work requires reflection and care. While processing the collection of musician and performance artist Charlotte Moorman, we came upon a box of what appeared to be crumpled bits of fabric. We discovered these were the remnants of a performance art composition titled “Cut Piece,” first performed by Yoko Ono in 1964 and one of the earliest and most significant works of the Fluxus movement. The conservation lab created a housing for these items, and now future scholars can use them in their research.

Why do we work so hard to save typed jokes and crumpled bits of fabric? Libraries play a crucial role in preserving cultural heritage and providing primary-source materials for all kinds of education. As in Moorman’s case, we sometimes even preserve the story of an entire cultural moment. And we revisit older processed collections to make them as accurate and discoverable as possible, such as our incredible Frederick Douglass Collection, which until recently hadn’t been described in a manner that made it easy to find.

When I see a class visiting the Library to view a primary-source document, or a faculty researcher crafting new knowledge from a collection discovery, I’m reminded of how essential—and satisfying—this work is.