This summer brought new challenges: I have the chance to revisit the seven Paige-boxes containing Mark Keller’s papers donated to CAS by his daughter after Keller passed away in 1995.
We called Keller an “academic hoarder” in the best possible sense of the expression, proven by the content of these boxes at the first glimpse: in addition to his extensive work on editing the Journal and various other publications, Keller was a frequent flyer, pun intended, in conferences, symposia, workshops, advisory board meetings, and ad hoc groups on alcohol-related topics all over the world. As such, the newly established “Conferences and Organizations” series alone serves as an unparalleled resource for alcohol historians.
Organizing content into series
The picture above shows how we started the process with sorting the content of the boxes into bins organizing the content around eight topics. The final set-up contains the following series:
- Personal: biographies, cvs, life events, awards, obituaries
- Journal: content related to Keller’s work at QJSA/JSA in his various editorial roles, including correspondence
- Center: other tasks at Yale and Rutgers CAS, including related correspondence
- Editorship: outside Yale/Rutgers, including mentorship and related correspondence
- Conferences and Organizations: speaking engagements, invitations, trips, advisory and other leadership roles in national and international organizations
- Writings and Manuscripts, including the Dictionary and any related work.
These are not clearly defined categories, and the TBD bin also kept filling up quickly.
Surprises so far
Not yet down to the nitty-gritty, the two-week process already resulted in five new lines to be added to the Keller bibliography, mostly republished works. Also resurfaced, to my great pleasure, quite a few, hard-to-find copies of his publications or reprints. I scanned them at the end of week two, to be uploaded to the Digital Alcohol Studies Archives in RUcore. No need to ILL them or to ask my SALIS friends for favors.
A little known biographical detail was also verified: Keller suffered a myocardial infarction in May 1967. There is a whole folder with letters, notes, cards, and telegrams wishing him speedy recovery. Two of these are worth mentioning: one from Charles Jackson, the author of the famous The Lost Weekend, whose wife, Rhoda, worked for CAS.
The second was sent to Keller by his good friend since the early 1940s, the legendary Marty Mann, who organized the National Committee for Education on Alcoholism (NCEA) in 1944, based on the inspirational conversation as a student at the Summer School of Alcohol Studies with faculty.
For a librarian who grew up with print journals and card catalogs, the archaic process of article delivery is no big news. You don’t have a subscription? Send a request directly to the author! The same professional courtesy that researchers successfully practice on scholarly social media sites such as ResearchGate or Academia worked like a charm in the print world too, as demonstrated by the requests for reprints of Keller’s articles arriving from all over the world.
What else is the Keller Collection are hiding? Stay tuned as we process the folders on the way to create the Finding Aid.