In winding down an academic career in anticipation of having more uninterrupted time for my writing and advocacy work on homelessness, I’m faced with what to do with the boxes and piles of research materials, field notes, correspondence, and my ‘digital assets,’ including this personal website and my digital storytelling videos. And then there are the hundreds of personal journals I have kept since I was eleven. What to do with all this stuff?
I have worked at a public university for the past thirty years, during which I have researched and written four nonfiction books on various aspects of homelessness. My relationships with university librarians in support of this work have been collegial, mutually respectful, and rewarding. So when university archive librarians asked me to consider donating my research materials, I didn’t hesitate to say yes. Here is where I can donate ‘all this stuff!’ But wait. It’s not as simple as boxing it all up and sending it to them as if it was used clothing.
The university archive librarians are walking me through the process of sorting, organizing, and inventorying all of the materials I plan to donate. Since I do not have any university research colleagues who have gone through this process, I turned to my author colleagues through my membership in the Authors Guild. On the guild’s community forum, I posted a question as to advice and resources on donating author materials to a university archive. I’ll summarize some of the best replies but without specific attribution.
- Think through what materials you want to maintain access to for current and future work. Decide on copyright transfer and how open or closed (restricted) you want the collection to be. Public universities like the one I work for want archived materials to be as widely accessible as possible. They do allow restrictions (like length of time until they are open) on sensitive materials such as personal journals.
- Some authors donating their materials to university archives are so embarrassed by earlier work (like for their MFA degrees) that they destroy those writings. Other authors consider the inclusion of earlier, perhaps messier and less mature writings as an honest part of their writing life and include them in their archive donations.
- Allow more time than you think it may take and try to work closely with a university archive librarian throughout the process.
- An advantage of donating one’s research and writing materials while still relatively healthy is the peace of mind (not to mention a less cluttered living space). And, knowing that we won’t be burdening our family members with deciding what to do with all the boxes of detritus after we die.
- The point of an archive is that you have material that is of interest and help to future researchers. It is based on the quality of your materials and not on how famous you are or may become.