Archives and Digitization
Special Collections at Oregon State University is best known for the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers. OSU Special Collections is now making a name for itself as an innovator in digitization and accessibility. Clifford Mead, Associate Professor and Head of Special Collections, discusses the past and present of OSU’s Special Collections (and the secret of the Pauling safe), as well as the general future of digitization.
Pauling, OSU, and the Safe
Linus Pauling first noted his intentions to give his papers to Oregon State University in 1986. This was the culmination of more than 20 years of efforts by four different university presidents to persuade Pauling to give his papers to his alma mater. In 1986, we received the initial delivery of 125,000 items. During the next eight years Pauling sent us a few thousand items each year. By time of his death in August 1994, we had approximately 150,000 items in the collection. After Pauling’s death, a codicil to his will instructed that an additional 350,000 items go to Oregon State University. We had no room on campus to store this influx of materials, so we had to rent a warehouse for two years while a new addition to the library was being built.
While Pauling was alive, I would get telephone calls from Peter Pauling (Pauling’s second child; also a chemist and an office mate of Crick and Watson when they made their discovery of the double helical nature of DNA). He would say, “Pop has got a safe in the garage whose contents no other family member has ever seen.” Peter thought it had to do with secret work that Linus had done in World War II when he worked for the Office of Naval Research. He said, “It’s very important that you get this safe when Pop dies; you may even need to get a security clearance to look at some of the documents.”
When Pauling died, we were curious about whether or not we would get the safe mentioned by Peter. I had the manifest of the warehouse deliveries, but there was no mention of a safe. About two years after Pauling’s death, I was in contact with Pauling’s youngest son, Crellin, the executor of the estate, and I asked him what the family had found in the safe. He told me, “You know, we looked all over for the combination for the safe [and didn’t find it.] We finally agreed to ship it to you with the other material.”
Naturally, I was discouraged and distraught. I thought that something might have happened to the safe. I called the manager of the moving company we had employed, and asked him to look for this object. He told me there was no safe in the shipment. I reiterated that the family had said that there was. A few hours later, he telephoned and said, “Yes, we have found it!”
I asked them to deliver it to us at Oregon State immediately. Initially, I had the idea of calling up the New York Times and the major television networks to announce this discovery; but, as I thought through this, I decided maybe there was a reason Pauling had never allowed anybody, including his own family members, access to the safe. We hired a safecracker (found through the Yellow Pages). The safecracker came the next morning. He worked for about half an hour, but couldn’t crack the combination. Eventually, he drilled the lock and opened the heavy safe door. Inside, there were four filing cabinet drawers. Inside the first drawer was a large cache of letters – nearly 1,000 love letters to his wife, Ava Helen. The letters spanned nearly 60 years, from when they first met to when she died. He wrote to her every day initially – and always whenever he took a trip.
The second drawer contained a number of items that Pauling deemed sensitive. These included communications with John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, Ho Chi Minh, Bertrand Russell, and many others. Drawer three contained his WWII work for the Office of Naval Research, and other war departments. Included were a formula for rocket propellant, diagrams for an oxygen meter, and information on how to make a blood plasma substitute. The fourth drawer held hundreds of pocket diaries, where he recorded meetings – people he met, and things that were discussed. There were also a few hundred Dictaphone belts.
Special Collections and Digitization
There was no special collections department at Oregon State University until Pauling decided to give his papers to his alma mater. I came here in October 1986; since then, we’ve used the Pauling papers as a cornerstone to build a history of science and technology in the 20th century. We began with just a large room – now, we take up two-thirds of a floor in the library.
Thanks to digitization, no one has to physically come to the collection any more. The Special Collections staff (Chris Petersen, who had the initial vision, Ryan Wick, and myself) foresaw what could be done with the digitization of the collection, and then it was just a matter of persuading the administration to allow us the freedom to make this thing work. Over the past eight years, we’ve put up a series of award-winning Web sites and given lectures around the country on how doing digital documentary histories with narrative allows people much greater access to the collections. For example, we did our DNA Web site for the 50th anniversary of the Watson and Crick discovery (Pauling was a major player). A recently produced documentary is entitled “Linus Pauling and the International Peace Movement.” This digital collection includes archival documents and audio and video footage. Our approach has been cited as a prototype of how other special collections and archives might present their manuscripts and papers so that they are more widely available. One can also follow Pauling’s life day-by-day. The last six years we’ve spent going through every item in the collection; letters to or from Pauling, newspaper articles, photographs etc, and putting it into a matrix. By the summer of 2009 we will have completed nearly 50 years of Pauling’s career.
When we first started, people said such an undertaking was crazy—there were just too many documents. It is feasible, but you have to target your area. This means finding and getting permission from key players—individuals who own the intellectual property rights of important scientific letters to Pauling. There is also a time element involved—you must have staff people who will go out and get the permissions. Many people think there are daunting financial issues associated with putting up sophisticated digital Web sites. That’s not the case.
There is a wealth of history at nearly all archives and special collections not seen by the people who need to see them, either because of perceived expense or because people don’t know these resources exist. Even now, many people have the idea of archivists as hoarders of unique primary materials. However, as digital collections are being put up, we are now bringing in new groups of people who have never used such collections before. Institutions that control these collections are now realizing what treasures they have. Institutions entrusted with archival papers now see a responsibility to make them as widely accessible to researchers as they can, and that is through the Web. It’s a change in philosophy.
For further information, go to: http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollections/.