Volume 35, Issue 3

Developing Donor Relations Collection development archivists know that building a partnership with a potential donor may take years, occasionally decades. From the perspective of a donor, contributing unique materials to an archival repository – a local historical society, academic archives, or a research library – can be an emotionally complicated process. A donor must have acquired a degree of separation from the material, but also have a deep sense of trust in the repository soliciting the records. Often, the initial contribution to a repository consists of records void of sentimental or financial value. As the relationship between a donor and a repository strengthens, donors (hopefully) begin contributing more noteworthy and revealing materials, including personal correspondence, diaries, and photographs. This scenario is routine not only with the acquisition of personal papers, but the records of businesses, membership organizations, and all other kinds of archival records.

In the fall of 2000, during a review of the University of Oregon Libraries' Document Center departmental resources, it was noted that the indexes for the student newspaper, the Oregon Daily Emerald , 1900–1979, and the regional newspaper, the Portland Oregonian , 1850–1987, could only be consulted on site, and so would be worthy candidates for conversion to a websearchable database format.

Microforms in today's academic libraries appear to be understaffed and left behind in the electronic age. At best, microform collections experience benign neglect. At worst, administrators view microforms as an obsolete format that has little merit in today's digital world. Despite the fact that microform collections in many academic libraries represent a large financial investment, staffing is almost entirely by paraprofessionals and students. In some of the largest libraries, service for microform collections consists of machine help only.

In August 2002 the Library of Virginia and the Huntington Library of San Marino, California, signed a much-anticipated agreement. Since combining resources, the two research libraries have been hard at work microfilming the Huntington's immense collection of Virginia manuscripts collected a century ago by noted historian, antiquarian, and collector Robert Alonzo Brock (1839–1914). Purchased by Henry Edwards Huntington in 1922, the Brock Collection ranges from the colonial period through the end of the 19th century, with the bulk of the materials dating to the middle years of the 1800s. The collection includes letters, diaries, military and business records, governmental records, church and other organizational records, genealogical research, and Civil War–related materials of every sort, as well as much of Brock's own correspondence as he assembled this amazing assortment of resources.

Introduction The Readex Company (a division of NewsBank) has in the past few years become one of the library community's primary vendors for searchable, full-text databases of Americana. Of course it helps to be a partner with one of the best collections of this type in the country – The American Antiquarian Society (AAS). Still, having a rich source of primary documents is only half the process and Readex, by bringing together a talented group of editors, indexers, web designers and document conversion specialists has proven itself an equal partner in their arrangement with the AAS.