This is the first in an occasional series that looks behind the scenes at the work of Manuscript Division staff.
When researchers visit the Manuscript Reading Room to consult our collections, they are most likely served archival containers filled with neatly organized acid-free folders, identical except for the numbers on their labels, containing precious historical documents. They request these archival boxes after reviewing a finding aid, the guide to the collection that describes its contents and provides a list of the folders contained in each box. What they do not see is the many hours of work conducted before the collection is made available for research use.
The archivists, technicians, and catalogers of the Preparation Section are responsible for arranging and describing the personal papers and organizational records acquired by the Manuscript Division. There are many stories to tell about the processing activities that make the often disorganized, dirty, or smelly collections accessible and ready for research.
A glimpse behind the scenes at the start of this process reveals containers that are much more varied in size, age, and condition than the standard archival boxes presented to researchers when our work is complete. The reasons for this are as varied as the circumstances surrounding the creation and acquisition of each collection. Before they landed here, some manuscript collections may have been shipped directly from the offices where they were created, while others spent years stashed in a closet, attic, or basement, or perhaps stowed in a garage or a barn. As a result, they arrive packed in anything from file cabinets and storage containers to liquor boxes and trash cans.
We often encounter manuscripts in receptacles that are vestiges of the lives and times of the people who created them. Some papers of military officers arrive in footlockers. Letters, diaries, notes, photographs, and keepsakes may still be in the worn suitcase, dress box, taffy box, or plastic bag where their owner kept them safe or perhaps put them away, only to be forgotten. We find book drafts inside boxes that once held the blank typing paper on which they were written and work papers in the very briefcase used to carry them to and from the office.
On the other end of the spectrum, in collections generated in recent decades, we find piles of floppy disks and CDs that hold documents in digital formats. Even when labeled