People Who Built Archives That Still Matter

Schomburg assembled books, manuscripts, and other records of Black life across the Americas and beyond. In 1926 the New York Public Library acquired his collection for its Harlem branch, where he later served as curator. The research center that bears his name grew around a collection he wanted people to be able to use.

At Howard University, Porter Wesley expanded what became the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. She collected papers from everyday people and challenged a cataloging system that could send much of Black history to a shelf labeled slavery. Her published bibliographies helped readers find a much wider body of work.

Beard organized the World Center for Women’s Archives in 1935 to gather published and unpublished records of women’s lives. The center closed, but material went to Smith College and Harvard’s Schlesinger Library. The records survived because the campaign found other institutions willing to keep them.

YIVO’s early offices occupied a room in Weinreich’s Vilna apartment. He helped shape an institution that collected records of Jewish daily life in Eastern Europe, then reestablished it in New York during World War II. The Paper Brigade’s work hiding material in Vilna helped ensure there would be a collection to reunite digitally decades later.

Ringelblum led Oneg Shabbat, which collected diaries, reports, and everyday documents in the Warsaw Ghetto. Members buried records in metal boxes and milk cans. The surviving material preserves accounts by people living through the persecution and mass murder they were documenting.

Williams bought whole libraries to help build a national collection for Wales. He donated his printed books when the National Library of Wales was founded in 1907 and secured the Peniarth manuscripts for it. Researchers can still follow the separate histories of the books and manuscripts through the library’s catalogs.

Lomax helped build the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song through field recording. On a 1939 trip he and Ruby Terrill Lomax recorded hundreds of performers across the South. The surviving discs and field notes make it possible to hear performers and read about the circumstances in which they were recorded.

Stanner helped establish the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, a predecessor of AIATSIS. The institute’s finding aid for his papers lists field notebooks, photographs, and records from the Yirrkala land claim. It also explains access restrictions on much of the Australian material, a reminder that preservation and permission to consult records are separate questions.

Nestle and fellow organizers created the Lesbian Herstory Archives in the 1970s to keep records that were disappearing from public memory. Her Manhattan apartment became a place where volunteers sorted papers and visitors could use them. The collection later moved to a permanent home in Brooklyn.

Blockson collected Black history across formats, from books and newspapers to sheet music, posters, and correspondence. In 1984 he donated his collection to Temple University. Its scope makes room for evidence that rarely survives in a single family’s papers, including material on the Haitian Revolution and the Underground Railroad.

Lansky organized volunteers to collect Yiddish books that families were giving away or throwing out. The work became the Yiddish Book Center in 1980. Digitization and a shared catalog later made it possible to find editions across several institutions, even if there was no local library collecting in Yiddish.

Haidara helped expand his family’s manuscript library and founded a cooperative of private library owners in Timbuktu. When collections were threatened in 2012, he helped organize their removal to Bamako. A later partnership photographed and cataloged manuscripts so the work of protecting the originals could also open them to researchers.