It seems like only yesterday that the first shipment of what would be 710 boxes of the historic Institute of Public Administration Collection with its papers of Luther Gulick arrived at Baruch on April 1, 2014. Now after a year of processing, and the generosity of Carnegie Corporation of New York, we met the deadline, posting a finding aid on the Baruch Library website.

Drum roll, please.

http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/library/alumni/archives/IPA.html

Here’s what the beginning looked like.

Many boxes were a mess and needed to be checked for contents and preservation issues.

A project of this size required a massive infusion of supplies, which soon came rolling in by the palette.

The detritus was soon counted in hundreds of emptied old boxes.

Discarded metallic fasteners, paper clips, clasps, rubber bands, and other bindings abhorred by archivists made for quite a collection in itself.

Pencils were ground down labeling thousands of folders.

Finally it was time to put permanent labels on new acid-free Hollinger boxes.

And transport them to their happy resting place in the Archives.

Where they will patiently await their summonses by researchers.

The year flew by. Now we’re looking ahead to digitizing as much of the collection as practicable, and continuing to mine its treasures for this blog.