When processing the papers of Luther Gulick, the longtime director/chair of the IPA, yesterday, we encountered this leather case:

It says: “City of Atlantic City, Thomas D. Taggart, Jr., Mayor.” At first we thought it was eyeglasses, or perhaps a checkbook. When we opened the case, this is what we found:

It’s a key to Atlantic City, New Jersey! Some research confirms that Mr. Taggart was the Mayor of that city from 1940-1944. The (faded) inscription reads (as far as we can guess):

“To Luther Gulick, in appreciation of your contributions to the success of UNRRA [United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration] Please use our key often & come- Tom Taggart Mayor Atlantic City 12/5/43.”

Gulick was heavily involved in government postwar rehabilitation and reparations initiatives, and served on the staff of UNRRA as a division chief. Mayor Taggart’s involvement, however, is not immediately clear.

They are the lowliest of office hardware, scattered through the IPA collection. But what stories they could tell of their interactions with famous fingers! Didn’t Albert Einstein, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the Hoovers (Herbert and J. Edgar) handle some of these very pages? I speak, of course, of the mundane paperclip. The rusting paperclip, bane of archivists. Now, after decades of joining what was not to be torn asunder, it’s time to retire these stationery workhorses, in the interest of protecting fragile onionskin and other brittle papers. (Don’t even get us started on staples, which are even more commonplace and damaging to remove, so we often leave them there.)

A little research turned up the fact that the ubiquitous, rounded-corner, double-rectangle spring clip may (or may not) have been invented by Norwegian patent clerk Johann Vaaler in 1899.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29139536

But there’s a world of paper fasteners beside paper clips, we found in processing our collection:

And we even found a site for the Early Office Museum that has a section devoted entirely to…fasteners!

http://www.officemuseum.com/staplers.htm

In this post, I’ll talk about what happens in the life of a collection after it’s moved to our offices.

After the project archivist surveyed the IPA Collection, he developed a processing plan. In it, he arranged the large banker’s boxes into rough “series”: similar or related materials that should be kept together and processed as a group.

Generally, archivists try to keep together material that comes to us already arranged in an order or filing system. This principle, called “original order,” supports archivists and researchers in establishing context for the materials. For example, a letter may include an abbreviation like S.W.P.C., but no explanation of what this abbreviation stands for; a letter next to it in a folder may explain that S.W.P.C. stands for “Smaller War Plants Corporation,” a group focusing on military manufacturing during World War II. If these materials were not kept together in the final arrangement, this information would be lost. Archivists often process all the boxes in a series before moving to the next series, to maintain a sense of the context of the material.

When we process a box, the first thing we do is open it and make a quick assessment of its contents. Boxes can be neatly arranged and clearly marked:

Or, they can contain a wide array of materials in no discernable order:

We take note of whether the contents are arranged in folders, because that lets us know whether the materials have already been sorted into groups; if the box has mostly loose material, we may have to create a filing system to organize them. The box below is similar to many boxes in this collection, in that it contains groups of materials wrapped in parcels and tied with string, along with materials grouped in folders:

For a box like this, we will make sure to maintain the groupings marked by the folders and parcel wrappings. These wrappings show us how the IPA used the materials, because they indicate what goes with what.

We also take note of what kinds of material are present in the box. Are there books? Bound reports? Newspapers? Photographs? Typed or handwritten letters? Are there large or oversized materials, such as maps, folded in among the papers? Each of these formats should be stored differently, and the IPA Collection contains all of these formats and many more. Once we have a handle on what we’re dealing with, we can proceed to the next steps.

In the late 1990s, when the Institute of Public Administration sold its building at 55 West 44th Street, a large portion of their papers was transferred to a storage facility deep in the hinterlands of Queens. A few years later, the rest of the collection was moved to the same location where it resided for over a decade. Before the processing part of the project could begin, the collection had to be transferred to the Baruch College Archives and surveyed.

Over the course of two weeks, the entire collection was moved to Baruch and placed in a previously designated location. Next, in order to keep track of the contents of the collection, as well as to document the various issues encounter during the survey process, the project archivist created a Microsoft Access database that was to be used in the creation of a processing plan – a set of instructions on how the collection was to be organized in order to make it usable to researchers.

Over the following month, each and every box in the collection was opened, the general contents of each described in the database. Some of the boxes were neatly organized with each folder clearly labeled while others were completely disorganized. Right away a number of problems were discovered that called for immediate action. At some point in the past, part of the collection was exposed to water and left untreated, leading to mold growth and general water damage. To prevent the mold from spreading to unaffected items or impacting the health of persons coming in contact with the collection, items showing mold damage were separated and quarantined for the time being.

Some of the more mundane problems discovered in the collection were rolled up items, including photographs, that will need to be flattened, dust covered items that will need to be cleaned, and broken glass that fused to photographs. How these problems will be handled will be addressed later on in this blog.

Four weeks after beginning the surveying process, we were ready to embark on the next step.