I, gollum

My new job title is collection manager/archivist for a museum here in New York. I haven't done museum science, and I've never managed an archive, but I've done research in plenty of them.

I remember that for this paper I wrote last year, I needed to do research on Aby Warburg, the eminent art historian and private scholar whose library ended up at the University of London. I was researching the man himself, who went nuts, but in a very interesting way... which is a story for another time. For the paper I was writing, I had the choice of researching from a letter that his secretary typed about his illness, which was in the archive of the Warburg Institute, or the handwritten notes from a lecture given by a professor of mine.

Initially I opted for the typed letter. Then I learned that in order to gain access to look at this document...

1) I needed a letter from my supervisor to be let into the Warburg Institute in the first place so I could use the library, even though I was a student at the University of London.

2) I needed ANOTHER letter from my supervisor, and a document that explained the nature of my project, in order to get permission from the institute's director to get into the archive.

3) Because the document was about Warburg's illness, I also had to apply in writing for permission from the Warburg family to look at it.

4) Then I would need to approach the archivist... by email... and request an appointment... which would be granted at the earliest in two weeks. After which I guess maybe she would think about letting me see it. British bureaucracy and academic abstruseness at it's best.

I did eventually get the paper written... but had to do so without the typed letter. It ended up being easier to decipher the professor's chicken scratch lecture notes. (This, by the way, took DAYS. Luckily, I had about 25% of it on microcassette, so it was like having the Rosetta Stone.)

It amuses me that I am an archivist myself now. Privately, I'm already referring to the archive as The Precious. When people call to inquire about it, I hear myself thinking in the back of my mind, "Nasty little academicses... what wants they with the Precious?"