It occurred to me the other day that my blog is also being seen on Archives Blogs, a blog aggregator that publishes entries from blogs "for and by archivists. " As a result, it made me feel a little bad (and even a bit embarrassed) about some of the fluff that I have been posting on Order from Chaos. I felt that my content should be a little more erudite, or at least occasionally about archives. To that end, I am posting tonight, and will do so periodically, a little vignette about an archives that I choose and wish to highlight.
The first selection is the Rockefeller Archive Center. In addition to being a stellar repository, it is where I got my start in archives. The Archive Center (familiarly known by staff as the RAC) was established in 1974 to pull together in one location the papers of the Rockefeller family and their various philanthropic and educational institutions, the Rockefeller University, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Ten years after its founding, the Archive Center began to collect non-Rockefeller philanthropic records, including the archives of the Commonwealth Fund, the Culpeper Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the John and Mary Markle Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.
The Archive Center traces its roots back to the 1930s when, upon the death of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. in 1937, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. realized that something should be done with his father's papers. He talked with the Library of Congress, and while interested, cautioned Junior (staff call him Junior, because it is easier to identify him - otherwise, you have to be more specific as to which Mr. Rockefeller you are talking about) that his fathers papers might get "lost" at the library as just another American industrialist. They encouraged him to go out and get a family archivist, which he did, setting up an archives in the newly built Rockefeller Center in New York City. The archives became the central repository for the work being conducted by Junior and the "Brothers," Junior's children: Abby (yes a woman led the Brothers generation), John III, Nelson, Winthrop, Laurance, and David. All of the brothers had their own devotions and the papers found their way back to Rockefeller Center.
In the early 1970s, upon the death of Junior's second wife, Martha Baird Rockefeller, in 1971, the archives at Rockefeller Center, along with the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rockefeller University were looking for a space to expand and the home that Martha had near the family compound in Sleepy Hollow, New York was made available to these organizations to create an central archives.
The archives vaults were created under the house and the Archive Center opened for business in 1974. Today, they are visited by hundreds of researchers a year along with individuals who benefit from the Archive Center's extensive Grant-in-Aid program.
While I worked there, I worked primarily on the papers of Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York and Vice President of the United States. The papers were very interesting and obviously where I learned what I needed to know about processing archives. A great place to work and I can even truthfully say, a fantastic place to do research, having been on the other side of the reference desk there as well. They have great stuff and the topics that are researched there every year produce some outstanding scholarly works.
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