College and Research Libraries


By C . K . S H I P T O N 

The Harvard University Archives 
A paper read by C. K. Shipton, custodian 

of the Harvard University archives, before 

the Boston meeting of the Archives and 

Libraries Committee of the American Li-

brary Association. 

BY R E A S O N of age and relatively large size, Harvard University has had 
certain experiences in regard to the ac-
cumulation, the preservation, and the serv-
icing of her archives which may be guides, 
or horrid warnings, to the archivists of her 
younger sisters. T h e Harvard archives 
collection began as a row of record books 
which the president probably kept on a 
shelf in his study; they were there, for-
tunately, when the library burned in 1764. 
T w o generations later President Sparks, 
perhaps as a result of the interest aroused 
by the two hundredth anniversary of the 
founding of the college, gathered such 
loose papers relating to the college as he 
could find and had them bound and placed 
in the library. Some time before the Civil 
W a r the volumes of records were brought 
from the president's house and placed in 
the library beside those gathered by 
Sparks. T h i s shelf of twenty volumes or 
so has in eight years grown into a collec-
tion of twenty-six thousand volumes, 
bundles, and boxes of both print and man-
uscript. H o w many pieces of manuscript 
this collection contains, no man knoweth, 
but it occupies several times as many cubic 
feet as other collections which are esti-
mated by their curators to contain a half 
million pieces. 

T h e Harvard archives consist, pri-
marily, of those records of the university 
which are old enough not to be in active 
administrative use. W h e r e current files 
are placed in our care, the administrative 
office keeps copies for its daily use. T h e 
board of overseers, the corporation, the 
faculty, and each school, division, depart-
ment, laboratory, museum, committee, and 
similar organization, accumulates minutes, 
correspondence, files of routine records, 
and committee records, all of which the 
university archives gathers into its ample 
bosom. T h e older files of minutes run 
unbroken over periods which make the 
lives of civil governments seem transi-
tory. T h e records of the overseers begin 
with the meeting of M a y 6, 1650; those 
of the corporation, on December 10, 1654; 
and those of the faculty, on October 30, 
1725, when that body first began to keep 
minutes. Less complete are the files of 
the correspondence of the presidents, sec-
retaries, deans, and other administrative 
officers. T h e papers of President Eliot, 
the largest file of this character, fill 365 
boxes. T h e series of manuscripts of lec-
tures delivered on endowed foundations 
begins with the first in 1755, and the file 
of exhibition parts and winning prize es-
says begins in 1789 and 1808. Among 
these are the early essays and poems of 
many a lad later famous in American let-
ters; Charles Sumner, as early as 1832, 
was enquiring whether the most important 
changes in society are effected gradually 
or by violent revolution. A l l of the politi-

50 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



cal, literary, and scientific questions of the 
day are argued here with youthful vigor. 

T h e records of commencement exercises 
begin with a contemporary list of the 
theses argued by the candidates of 1643 
and continue through the programs of the 
present day. Step by step these topics 
show the unfolding of every branch of 
human knowledge over almost three cen-
turies. Unfortunately the early presi-
dents did not keep copies of the students' 
commencement parts beside the record 
books on the study shelf, so the earliest 
manuscript text of such exercises is one 
of 1750, but since 1825 the file is nearly 
complete. A sample of the possibilities 
which this collection offers for research 
is that part in which the young Thoreau 
argued the effect of the commercial spirit 
on the character of a nation. O f the ora-
tions with which dignitaries have enlight-
ened the audience on commencement day, 
we have fewer, but the first is one deliv-
ered in 1649. T h e earliest salutatory 
and valedictory orations are those of 1697. 

T h e files of examination questions and 
of doctoral dissertations go back to the 
introduction of these two institutions of 
American college life and are almost com-
plete. O f recent years we have also kept 
the theses for the bachelors' degree as well. 
O f the many university publications which 
grace our shelves in their official files, the 
Nestor is the catalog of graduates which, 
born in 1674, died of its own obesity in 
1930, when the record for the longevity 
of periodicals was within its grasp. 

Criterion of Inclusion 

A s this galloping survey of the contents 
of the Harvard archives indicates, the 
criterion of inclusion is relationship to the 
university; we make no distinction be-
tween manuscript and printed material. 

T h e common custom of lumping all of the 
diverse manuscripts of a library under the 
term "archive" and treating them as a 
single collection has its disadvantages. 
T h e problems of collecting, organizing, 
and servicing a body of institutional rec-
ords, a true archive, are at more points 
different from than like to those confront-
ing the keeper of a collection of miscel-
laneous manuscripts. T h e distinction 
between manuscript and printed material 
becomes unreasonable in a collection of, 
for example, examination questions, where 
the size of the course determines whether 
papers shall be typewritten, mimeo-
graphed, or printed. A t Harvard, we 
annually collect from every office a copy 
of each form it has had printed. O f 
course, we keep the official reserve copy 
of every book which comes from the Har-
vard University Press. 

Among manuscripts as well as printed 
works we insist on the same criterion of 
relation to the university, so we politely 
but firmly decline autograph letters of the 
Presidents Adams and Roosevelt, unless 
they were written while these men were 
students, or otherwise relate to the uni-
versity. 

M a n y colleges make a practice of keep-
ing in their archives a copy of every work 
written by one of their graduates. A few 
such attempts in that direction at Harvard 
have run into insurmountable difficulties. 
Such a policy would require the transfer 
to the archives of a great part of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth century imprints 
now in the Treasure Room—most of the 
Mather items, for example. Indeed, an 
attempt to collect the works of Harvard 
professors failed, for not only was the 
number of such volumes enormous, but 
many of them were so costly and so much 
in demand by the reading public that we 

DECEMBER., 1941 51 



could not afford to withdraw them from 
circulation by embalming them in the 
archives. From the point of view of 
theory, we were unable to see that Har-
vard authorship was a sufficient common 
denominator to justify building a collec-
tion of books upon it. W e do make an 
exception in the matter of a collection of 
the reprints of articles written by profes-
sors, which we keep for the span of their 
authors' lives chiefly because no one else 
does or takes the trouble to catalog them. 
Upon the author's death, his pamphlets 
are bound up together and transferred to 
the general library. 

Biographical Material 

T h e same problems of inclusion or ex-
clusion presented themselves when we 
faced the question of collecting biographi-
cal material relating to Harvard men. In 
general we can afford shelf space and 
cataloging time only to the biographies of 
men, graduates or not, who are known 
chiefly for their Harvard connection, or 
who have been during the productive part 
of their lives, Harvard employees. One 
turns naturally to the archives for a biog-
raphy of a Harvard professor or of Bob 
Lampoon, but not for a life of President 
Hayes. W e do, however, have a file with 
a folder for each graduate in which w e 
drop such clippings and other ephemera as 
are saved nowhere else. W h e n a man be-
comes important enough to fill such a 
folder, we begin to ignore him, for we 
know that someone else will take care 
of his biography. Nine tenths of the bio-
graphical enquiries which come to us are 
for unusually obscure men. 

W e regard a man's private correspon-
dence and other personal papers as bio-
graphical material, and we keep those of 
men whose biographies we would keep. 

W e ask all professors to see that their 
personal papers come to us. Such ma-
terial relating to our teachers of a century 
ago is a very active and useful part of our 
collection. 

O f course, this biographical material is 
not strictly archival in character, for its 
source is not the institution itself. It is a 
good sample of the association material 
which all college archive departments col-
lect, partly for its own sake, partly be-
cause of its value as a supplement to the 
records which compose the records proper. 
O u r collection of this nonarchival Har-
vardiana starts off with histories of and 
contemporary comment on the university, 
followed by material relating to buildings, 
gifts, and other property. For conveni-
ence, duplicate sets of university publica-
tions relating to scholarships, research 
funds, foundations, professorships, and the 
like, are here grouped with clippings and 
other outside material relating to them. 

T h e largest and most useful of the sec-
tions of this Harvardiana collection is that 
relating to the curriculum. T h i s contains 
a file of the teaching announcements of 
the university, textbooks printed spe-
cifically for Harvard, professors' lecture 
notes (when decipherable), and students' 
notes. T h e file of the last begins in 1671. 
Obviously such a collection could assume 
vast proportions, but size has not become 
a problem for us because of the reluctance 
which most former students feel to ex-
pose their youthful efforts, or lack of 
effort. Ideally, we would have a set of 
student notes for each course each year, 
and such a file for the courses of the great 
teachers of the last generation would see 
much use. In practice, we gather in the 
nicely bound and legible notes which some 
graduates preserve in their homes until 
their wives begin to complain. Eighty 

52 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



years ago a professor of English composi-
tion had his students write their daily 
themes on their activities, and wisely de-
posited the file, sealed, in the library. 
Other and similar files will give the social 
historian of the future, source material of 
a kind now unavailable. 

Section on Student Life 

Another Harvardiana section relates to 
student life, with the material grouped 
under such headings as expenses, fiction, 
drama, poetry, satire, concerts, music, 
clubs and societies, and athletics. T h e 
club records begin in 1721. T h e archives 
of all societies which have the reason for 
their being in the connection of their mem-
bers with Harvard are kept with the of-
ficial records of the university. Such 
societies are a vital part of college life, 
but the annual change in their personnel 
assures the destruction of their records 
unless some central agency undertakes the 
care of them. 

W e keep the records of the class or-
ganizations, and store the cuts from which 
the pictures in their reports are printed. 
W e have also records and photographs of 
student dramatic performances, some now 
of a considerable historical interest. In 
the matter of athletic material it is neces-
sary to take a firm stand against becom-
ing a repository for meaningless trophies. 
W e keep one primitive football and a base-
ball uniform of the seventies for exhibition 
purposes, but otherwise we decline offers 
of museum material. 

This, in brief, is what we have in the 
Harvard University Archives. H o w do 
we get it? O u r first principle is that, con-
trary to the belief and practice of Euro-
pean archivists, the administrative officers 
who accumulate records are not the proper 
persons to decide what material will be of 

use to posterity. T h e decisions to keep or 
destroy must be at least reviewed by peo-
ple with training in historical research and 
archive practice. For many years there 
have been rules issued by various adminis-
trative bodies at Harvard compelling the 
transfer to the archives of certain obvi-
ously important materials, such as doc-
toral dissertations, commencement parts, 
and the papers successful in prize compe-
titions. In the case of the last, our bursar 
holds up the payment of the prize money 
until the winner can produce a certificate 
to the effect that he has deposited a fair 
copy of the paper in the college library. 

Ruling on Inclusion 

W i t h the growing complexity of the 
university, more and more important busi-
ness was transacted by departments, divi-
sions, and committees, whose records did 
not ordinarily come to the archives with 
those of the older administrative bodies. 
So on February 6, 1939, the president and 
fellows ruled as follows: 

Voted to adopt the following provisions 
for the preservation of official files, records, 
and documents: 

All administrative officers of the Univer-
sity, including officers of instruction whose 
regular or occasional performance of admin-
istrative duties puts them in possession of 
files, records or documents pertaining to 
their official duties, are requested to observe 
the following regulations: 

1. The archives of the official activities 
of University offices and officers are the 
property of the University. 

2. Such property is not to be destroyed 
without the approval of a committee of 
three consisting of (a) the Secretary of the 
Corporation; (b) the Director of the Uni-
versity Library; (c) the officer in charge 
of the department where the papers accu-
mulate. 

3. The officer in charge of each adminis-
trative office will be the judge as to how 

DECEMBER., 1941 53 



long it is convenient to hold obsolete papers 
in his own office under his direct control. 

4. A l l archive material, when no longer 
wanted in the office to which it pertains, shall 
be sent to the University Archives in the 
College Library. 

Note: The term "archives" in the above 
statement is taken as meaning: (1) files of 
letters, both sent out and received; (2) rec-
ords and memorandum books, ledgers, jour-
nals, cash-books, vouchers, mimeographed 
and similar material; and (3) the files of 
any matter printed for official uses. 

In adopting the above regulations, the 
Corporation have had equally in view 
the importance of preserving material for the 
Archives and the facilities which the Ar-
chives Department of the University Library 
is in a position to render to all administra-
tive officers in relieving their offices of ob-
solete material, in eliminating material that 
does not need to be preserved, and in pro-
viding space and safe custody for everything 
that should be preserved. 

The Director of the University Library 
and the staff in charge of the Archives are 
to be at all times ready to assist officers of 
the University in disposing of archive ma-
terial of which they wish their offices to be 
relieved. 

N o archivist, state or university, who 
wishes to do more than beachcomb for his 
materials can function properly without 
some such authorization as this to back 
him up. 

Under this vote we have not approved 
of the destruction of any correspondence 
or other material containing records not 
duplicated elsewhere. Problems of space 
and handling are not serious, for no ef-
fort is made to rearrange or index modern 
records as they come in. 

Arrangement 

F i f t y years ago the material in the Har-
vard archives was arranged on the prin-
ciple of an ordinary library collection, 
tempered by a dim foresight of what ar-

chive procedure would eventually be. For 
reasons which we cannot go into here, an 
archive cannot be arranged satisfactorily 
like an ordinary collection of library sub-
ject groupings. O u r system was revised 
ten years ago by C . E. W a l t o n , who 
studied archival practice in Europe. T h e 
canons of orthodox archivry are generous 
enough to meet all of the special problems 
which college archivists will meet. T h u s , 
whereas the general rule is that the ma-
terial shall be arranged according to 
source, reflecting the structure of the in-
stitution in the position on the shelf, it is 
still perfectly orthodox to make exception 
in the case of series, the members of which 
have a natural affinity although their 
sources may be different. In our case, 
theses, prize papers, and examinations are 
placed in their own chronological series 
without regard to the departments or com-
mittees to whose archives they technically 
belong. W e have been compelled to make 
one serious departure from standard 
archival procedure because of the uniquely 
complex and unreasonable form of the ad-
ministrative structure of the university: 
instead of grouping the archives of the 
divisions, departments, graduate schools, 
and other major units according to their 
relationships, they have been placed in a 
single alphabetical order. 

In arranging our Harvardiana material 
we have profited by our own experience 
and that of most other collections of this 
type, and have made the groupings just 
as few and simple as practical. Material 
in the collections relating to buildings, 
gifts, scholarships, professorships, and the 
like, has been placed in alphabetical or-
der, while that in collections relating 
to history, commencement, examinations, 
curriculum, athletics, and the like, is chron-
ological. In our experience, a chronologi-

54 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



cal arrangement has been most useful 
even for such collections as student fic-
tion, poetry, and satire. By a little in-
genuity in the assignment of numbers all 
common demands on the material can be 
met. Thus, with an eye to the numbers, 
we can at a moment's notice pull from the 
curriculum collection all material relating 
to a certain year or academic subject, or 
we can produce all outside comment, pro-
fessors' notes, or student notes, either 
for any period or on any subject. 

T h e primary function of an archive is 
to supply the organization whose records 
it keeps with information about its past. 
In practice this takes but a small part of 
the time of the staff of a college archive. 
A t Harvard the greatest part of our work, 
aside from handling accessions, consists of 
answering outside calls for information or 
of guiding the researches of visiting schol-
ars in the material in our keeping. Uni-
versity offices make a practice of turning 
over to us all questions having to do with 
the past of Harvard or of Harvard men. 
Such questions vary from that of a gradu-
ate who, while in a tuberculosis sana-
torium, asked as to his lung capacity in his 
student days, to that of a female member 
of a famous family who wanted to know 
why her Harvard ancestor was ignored in 
the family genealogy. In the latter case 
we could do no more than quote a letter 
from a classmate who reported that the 
man in question had died, drunk, in a 
wheelbarrow being taken to the city jail. 
W e were not thanked for our trouble in 
digging out this particular information. 

Outside Requests 

From outside the university we receive 
many requests for information as to 
the birth or parentage of graduates who 
came from regions where such records 

were not kept or places where they have 
been destroyed. Government agencies and 
insurance companies assume that when a 
boy fills out an admission application he 
cannot foresee any future desirability of 
falsifying such data. In a typical recent 
case, a woman wrote us that a friend of 
hers, the widow of a Harvard man, was 
destitute and suffering from want, al-
though she would be entitled to a certain 
pension if it could be proved that her 
husband had been an American citizen. 
It took us but a few minutes to find the 
record, which the pension agency accepted 
at sight. F . B . I , agents are frequent visi-
tors; we never know why but we always 
hope for the best. 

W e have a comfortable reading room 
in which our material may be consulted 
and where most of the printed Har-
vardiana may be charged out. Naturally 
the use of the archival material is re-
stricted; you can imagine what a happy 
hunting ground the records of the deans' 
office would be for the reporters of sensa-
tional newspapers. T h e general rule is 
that the portions of the archives less than 
fifty years old may be consulted only by 
the proper officials of the university, and 
that the portions more than fifty years old 
may be made available for serious and use-
ful research. Certain portions, notably 
some of the club and committee papers 
are under seal for a longer period. A l -
though the archives, as distinguished from 
the Harvardiana collection, cannot be used 
as a quarry for doctoral dissertations, each 
year some eighty scholars are given access 
to portions of it in order to complete re-
search done elsewhere. Half of these 
scholars are working on literary biogra-
phy, so a very common object is to find 
the list of library books charged out by 
the man being investigated. T h e staff of 

DECEMBER., 1941 55 



the archives is always glad to consult the 
older records in order to find the answers 
for simple and specific questions. 

Year's Statistics 

O u r statistics for the past year may 
give you some idea of the activity of the 
collection and the uses to which it is put. 
From these figures are excluded the ques-
tions answered by mail (about one a day), 
those answered by telephone (perhaps two 
a day), and the fairly frequent use of 
records by university officers for official 
purposes. Excluding this group, the total 
number of daily users for the year past 
was 2756. O n the average, nine different 
individuals each day applied for material 
to be used in the reading room or charged 
out. M u c h the most active collection was 
that of doctoral dissertations, which were 
consulted nearly two thousand times. 
Next most popular was the biography 
group, of which the publications of the 
classes were the most active part. T h e 

third most active group was the univer-
sity records, which were consulted for 
nonofficial purposes less than three hundred 
times. T h e fourth most popular group 
was the prize papers; the fifth was the 
collection relating to the curriculum; the 
sixth, the student and official publications; 
and the seventh, the manuscripts and 
pamphlet reprints of the professors. 

Since the reorganization of the Harvard 
archives on this basis and the establish-
ment of an adequate staff in adequate 
quarters, the use of the collection has in-
creased about tenfold. T o d a y we answer 
in a minute and without undue effort, 
questions which a few years ago went 
unanswered, or in the answering involved 
many hours of research. 

There are few places in the academic 
world where a college librarian can ob-
tain better returns in terms of services 
rendered than he can for a little money 
and time spent on the archives of his in-
stitution. 

56 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES