Confessions of a SF Curator 1
The collecting and archiving of SF literature in academic libraries is not often discussed. Not between libraries that are doing it, nor between libraries and the larger SF community. Sooner rather than later, librarians, archivists and SF writers need to start talking about archiving.
There are numerous SF collections in academic libraries. The most well-known in the US are at the University of Kansas, which includes a research collection at Spenser Library, the official archives of the Science Fiction Research Association, SFWA, the Science Fiction Oral History Association, and the Eaton Collection at UC-Riverside. A full listing, accurate through 2004, of libraries that collect SF is available on the About SF website.
Academic libraries become SF collectors in a couple of different ways, but most of those ways involve donations. For ten lucky libraries, there is the SFWA Circulating Book Plan, which circulates books that are donated by publishers through a circle of SFWA member-readers for Nebula consideration. When the last person in the circle for a particular region is done with their books they send them along to one of ten participating libraries:
The University of Dayton
Northern Illinois University
The Williamsburg Regional Library
Michigan State University
The Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University
The USIS Library Division, the Reed Library at SUNY in Fredonia
The Ruben Salazar Library at Sonoma State University
The Pollak Library at Cal State Fullerton
The Eaton Collection at UCRiverside
Much of the time SF collections begin with the gift of one particular author, publisher, or collector. Collections are often named for their major donor: the Eaton Collection at UC-Riverside, the Gunn Collection at Kansas, the Jack Williamson Collection at Eastern New Mexico State, to name a few.
Soliciting donations, and managing gifts, is a large part of my job as a Curator.
Every curator has a different philosophy, approach, and set of criteria for their particular collections. These criteria (which we call collection development policies), are based upon the particular history of the collection in question, space needs, money devoted to purchases (if any), and staff resources for processing, and the priorities of the curator in charge of the collection. Individual libraries cannot collect everything, so we tend to divide and conquer. Kansas, for instance, focuses on published SF before 1950. UC Riverside is more comprehensive, and is now expanding their interests to ancillary SF areas like manga, film, and early utopian literature, to further flesh out their core collection of SF, fanzines, and manuscripts.
The SFWA collection at NIU seeks the archives of SF authors, with a particular focus on those who are on the “midlist” or early in their careers, to supplement our SF book and magazine collections. This is a segment of the SF market that, if overlooked for archiving, may be lost over time. We want to ensure that early works, whether paper or electronic, are not lost in the next move or computer upgrade. This is especially important for future scholars that wish to track the evolving careers of authors that they study.
Here’s another secret: you don’t have to be dead to be archived. (Unless, of course, you have figured out the whole undead thing, and are willing to answer email.) Archiving materials while you are alive means that you retain more control over your materials as they are processed and used. You continue to retain all of your copyrights, and any and all reproduction requests are referred directly to you as the copyright holder (our lawyers prefer this, too). You are able to answer questions that may become unanswerable after your demise, since you know your own work better than anyone else. Our goal is to document the writing process for our authors—from great-idea-on-cocktail-napkin through to finished product. Materials suitable for archiving may include notes, world-building maps, research materials for describing technology, any and all drafts of creative work, blog entries that talk about your writing process, critiques from beta readers and other materials germane to the creative process for you as a writer, including correspondence with agents and editors. Archiving can be approached as a process, rather than as a single, massive act. NIU happily accepts materials in stages; you can archive what you are ready to part with, say, after finishing a series, but retain your current works in progress. If you find that you need copies of materials after archiving them, NIU is happy to provide them.
Every library has a different set of needs and wants for their collections—it’s important for authors and SF librarians to communicate so that materials end up where they would best fit. While libraries deeply appreciate donations of materials, we also have to consider other factors before accepting them. We still have to organize them (classification), mark them as being ours (physical processing), let the rest of the world know that we have them (cataloging and finding aids), thank the donors (donor relations), make them available to our readers and promote them (public services), learn more about them (research) so that we can answer questions about them (reference), and make sure that they are available for as long as possible (preservation) on the shelf (building and environmental services). If you would like the materials available online after they’ve been given to us (digitization), well that involves more equipment (physical processing), and lawyers (copyright clearance), not to mention servers (Information Technology folks). These activities cost money and staff time. When libraries accept gifts of materials, they have to take all of these additional costs into consideration.
Although libraries like NIU deeply appreciate gifts of books and archives, another great way to support SF archiving is to build endowments that financially support the collections that you care about. Over the long term, collections that have dedicated funding always grow and prosper more consistently than collections that do not. Endowments can be used not only to pay for acquisitions and processing, but also to fund fellowships, conferences, symposia, and publications devoted to SF research. Over time, those are the kinds of things that will ensure posterity for future generations of SF readers, collectors, and writers.
We’ll talk a bit more about the politics of posterity in my next post.
LYNNE M. THOMAS is the Head of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, IL. She is responsible for a collection of over 110,000 volumes, with a focus on popular culture materials, such as children’s books, dime novels, comic books, and SF literature. This includes an SF collection that archives the papers of Jack McDevitt, Tamora Pierce, E.E. Knight, Kage Baker, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, Tobias Buckell, Kelly McCullough, Caroline Stevermer, and Donald J. Bingle, along with promises from over 30 more SF authors, which will become “official” upon delivery of materials. Blogging both personally and professionally, she is also currently co-authoring a book about web 2.0 technologies and special collections in libraries. Lynne has also published scholarly articles about cross-dressing women in dime novels. The title of this series of posts are a variation on her professional blog, Confessions of a Curator, where she discusses the joys, challenges, trials, and tribulations of curatorship.
