Have been coming to again and again this month. This is the fourth installment of the series. We have focused mostly on architecture. You might recall we had House Speaker on the folklife, but this one is different to me. It speaks very clearly and closely to my heart as a historian. I know visitors that come to d. C. , they want to go to library of congress, they are in on and they should be. Researchers cannot wait to read in the main reading room. It lands a certain something lends a certain something to the seriousness of what they are doing. Scholars that really know the score walk right past the Jefferson Building and go into you may not like the way it looks, but the madison ling is where it is at. That is where the manuscripts is where it is at. That is where the manuscripts are. I am getting this from the website. 60 million items over 11,000 separate collections, truly the greatest manuscript treasure of American History and culture. To talk to us about that collection is Jeff Flannery, an old friend of the society in particular friend of scholars who work in American History, like my former colleagues and i. For 40 years, put together a document history project, and it brought us to jeff nearly every week. He and his staff helped us produce those volumes. Jeff is the head of the reference and services section. He has been in the management for 31 years, and that is all i will say. Jeff. [applause] Jeff Flannery well, thanks for coming today, and i feel especially honored to be here at the invitation of the United States capitol historicals ready. Chuck and lauren have been very helpful in preparing the talk. It is a great honor to be here to speak to the group. Is purpose of my talk today for the Manuscript Division, but it is more than that. I want the audience to know who we are, who the Manuscript Division is, how we work. And our place at the library, the role of scholarships. I am hoping that you will be enlightened to some degree by my remarks, and then afterwards if you have questions, i would be glad to answer them. Technology that many of the people whose papers are at the library of congress would have had no inkling of. Power points. That is many of these folks predeceased us. There are some questions about this. I will start with the basics. What is the manuscript . How do manuscripts get used . How does the manuscript reading room different from the main room and other reading rooms, and how do we achieve our mission . That is questions about the collection, then we will talk about access. What kind of subjects are covered by the collection . How does one find manuscript material that is relevant to research . Are any of the materials online . I will spare you the specimens. There the suspense. There is a lot online. And if you visit us, what do you need to know you start coming in . Is it cold . My colleagues have an issue with that. I can answer in the affirmative it is cold. You might want to bring a sweater or jacket if you are doing extended research. What is the manuscript, and how to researchers use it . I dont want to trip over my definition, so i will read a little bit of this. It is an unpublished handwritten or typed document that has historic or literary value. That is the basic definition. Re is much more difficult detail, but that is the basic one. How the manuscript reading room differs from the reading rooms . We are format driven, format based. We only provide primary source materials. And what is the mission of the definition . We were established as a separate unit in 1897. The library is, was established in 1800. We are the oldest federal cultural institution. Sorry for the smithsonian area they cannot claim that. The smithsonian. They cannot claim that. And we moved to the magnificent Jefferson Building as a separate unit. The mission of the division is to acquire, organize, describe, and make accessible original materials that primarily document American History and culture. Manuscript . Are unpublished primary source documents that ,nclude many types, diaries correspondence, notebooks, accounts, journals. Scrapbooks, press clippings, photographs, everything. Handwritten and type written. Microfilm,terpress, computer diskettes. There is the typical example. We have a letter written by Thomas Jefferson on the left to his daughter patsy, giving some fatherly advice. Commission for Robert Todd Lincoln in the union army as an officer, signed by his father. Next to that is a typescript thet of a book called emergence of totalitarianism by a political philosopher. Next to that is a map of jefferson, washington dc. He drew in an accompanying letter. That is not a manuscript. That is Sigmund Freuds pocket watch. It came with his papers. We have taken it, but it is not a manuscript. We put them in boxes, put them on shelves. There are stacks. They are always limited to members of the public, but that is where we keep the material. It is house off of the reading room housed off of the reading room. As chuck had mentioned earlier, we have 65 million items and 11,000 plus collections. I know an item can be a single scrap of paper. It can be this scrapbook here by newton chittenden, who was an amateur anthropologist that documented native americans in the Pacific Northwest in the early 19th and 20th centuries. The definition can vary. It can be 400 pages in a diary. It could also be a rough draft of the declaration of independence by Thomas Jefferson. This is among the top treasures. This is jeffersons draft with byotations by, or revisions john adams and benjamin franklin. Kept in, it is not even the division itself. We have it in a fault under vault under strict climate and temperature concerns. Why, what is the purpose . Why do we need it . They have crossed everything out. It cannot be that important. Why is it special . According to my colleague, i will not take the wraps, but there are 86 changes on that. Not count them. Scholars come back to these changes and revise what were the intent of the founders in the declaration . These are debates still going on today. Scholars need access to these original source materials to interpret these documents. And as i said, not every , be ast might have valuable as a rough draft, but they are all important. They are unique. That is another characteristic of the them of the collections. This is a letter written by Theodore Roosevelt to one of his sons, dated 1890. He was not yet president , but he was serving on the Civil Service commission. He is writing to his son. He says his sons name was theodore too, but he was called blessed ted. I sent you a picture letter because you are not old enough to read writing. You will be glad to see your, when he comes back. Do you want to play in the barn with him and go swimming when he returns . Your loving father. He gives him a little story. A cow go out to see the world, they meet up there and are frightened. He chases them as fast as they can run. When they get home in safety they make up their minds they will never run away again. [laughter] one can only imagine the older Theodore Roosevelt was saying, i got got a letter from his wife saying we got this kid running around, give him some control. Are special, not only because they are unique, irreplaceable documents written by famous people in American History. Many collections are not related to historical figures at all but document important moments in history from a variety of perspectives, including science, literature, art, architecture, politics. The documents that the arm the authors speak for themselves. Compare the private and public lives of an individual even to discover something new. Individuals who come to the manuscript reading room do so for all sorts of reasons. Dissertation, writing articles, discover material for exhibits, track down evidence or track down legal argument or hypothesis, find an ancestor, or look to artistic inspiration for novels or music. Everyone over High School Age with a Serious Research idea can use the collection. This is our organization and division. There are three sections. We have a staff of historical specialists and administrative staff who have curatorial responsibilities, divided by subject era or historical periods. These are responsible for acquiring collections. With donor relations. Looking at outreach and exhibits. Many of the collections that come to the Manuscript Division, buy gifts or copyright deposit. We purchase material sometimes, but we have a limited budget. When the collections are required, preparation goes to work. They will arrange and describe collections. Aids,ill create fighting don box lists, and they stack them. And the reference staff, where i work, we actually serve the collections. We will physically bring the material out to the reading room. We answer questions about the collections. Phone, letter, or email. These are some of our staff. Who work on the materials for acquisitions. This is dr. Michelle who is one of our acquisition specialists with the lincoln papers. Of coarse this is what our archivists get to deal with, and technicians, sometimes materials will show up in boxes. Maybe underneath on the bottom of the picture. A lot of times they come in a suitcase and have mold, so we have to get the Library Preservation folks to treat that. Excitement, that opening something for the first time and going through it and sorting it. You are probably the first to put eyes on these things since the person that wrote the letter. It is a very exciting time when the collections come into the division. I have been known to put my nose back there and start looking around. Archivists dont like that. This is one of our processing areas. You need a lot of space, so we have these tables. They start the process of sorting materials, putting it in order, getting some intellectual control over collections of documents. After they are finished organizing materials, they will put them on the shelf. You might think those are books in the foreground. They are not. Where webound items have tipped in the actual documents onto the backing page. This was a common preservation method up until world war ii thee excuse me, many of things were organized chronologically. After that professional practice changed, and you went into a series of boxes were you put the materials in acidfree fullers and stored them in acidfree boxes folders and stored them in acidfree boxes. When you visit us, this is where you go, the manuscript reading room. This is where the researchers interact with the materials as well as get guidance from the staff. Our reading room can be busy. Weously after hours can have as many as 10,000 researchers visit us over a year. It fluctuates between 8500 and 1000. People fill up the seats, someone looking at a folder of Robert Oppenheimer tapers, atomic scientist, and next to him is someone looking at the charles dean papers, architecture drawings by the famous designers. And behind them someone trying to trace any ancestor in the records of the maa cp that we naacp that we have. It changes from one table to another. This is the way the reading room used to work look. This is in the Jefferson Building. You cannot accommodate 40 or 50 people in that space, but it gives you a sense of Historical Research perhaps back in the 1930s or 1940s. You can see the bound volumes, many collections were that way. That table kind of lent itself to looking at that. That is a vision of the past. Some of the oldest material that we have of manuscript came to the library with a purchase of Thomas Jeffersons library in 1815. You probably know when the british burned the capital, they burned the books that came with the original library they have started collecting in 1800. Jefferson offered his library for sale to rebuild the collection. Part of that or manuscripts. Manuscripts that were manuscripts. They have been in the library since 1815. These were from the virginia company. Of theon was cognizant historical documents. He took great care preserving items, collecting them. These go back to the founding of the Jamestown Colony in 1607. You can see some books, different records documenting the establishment of that colony. Another significant i just love this picture. This is how i look in the morning sometimes. This is peter force, he was a former mayor of the. He was a of washington dc. Gathering documents for the american revolution. He was gathering the american archives. He never finished but that six or seven volumes printed got six or seven volumes printed. The transcribed letters related to the revolution. He transcribed letters related to the revolution. During that process he collected tens of thousands of documents and transcribed other documents that went into his collection. The library not the library, congress purchased for the for the sum of 100,000. That was big money back then, and formed the basis of the collection. In the 19th century, the state department had custody of many important manuscript collections, principally the letters of washington, jefferson, james madison, james accumulated,hese the accumulated these papers over time. By the early 20th century they were deemed such historical interest that they needed a more fitting repository to make these accessible to the research community. 1903, president Theodore Roosevelt by executive order transferred custody to the library of congress. And again since we bound those 1930s, andhe early you can see some of the washington papers, they are arranged chronologically. It is also a demonstration that the divisions collecting interest has evolved since its concentration of clinical and diplomatic history. Since world war ii, the division has selected cultural history, science and the archives of nongovernmental organizations. The focus is still primarily on American History. Among the crown jewels are the papers of 23 american president s, the library is collecting librarys collecting predates the Library System inaugurated with Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt and extended to the present. The library of Congress Still has, as a single institution, has more residential papers that any other institution. We dont have papers of every andident before hoover roosevelt. John quincy adams and john adams papers are at the nasa chooses Historical Society massachusetts Historical Society, and another state has rutherford b. Hayes and others. We have the most significant collection of papers in one place. More treasures can be found in these papers. This is a copy of the dunlap broadside inside the washington papers. It is technically a fragment because you see the bottom the dunlap broadside was the first printing of the american copies orn, about 100 so were done and sent to different colonies are they sent one to king george the third. I guess they wanted him to read it. This will have their copy in england. They still have their copy in england. There are 200 today. One went on the market a few years back and sold for over 1 million, so it can get you an idea. This is washingtons personal copy. John hancock, the president of the continental congress, since washington this copy sent washington this copy and asked him to read it to the troops. They were in new york, and he did. Washington had it read for the troops, and they got so excited and wound up about it, they went down to the bottom of new york city and pulled down the statue of king george the third. And later brought it down turned it into bullets for the American Army, which i thought was interesting, now the American Army was shooting pieces of george the third at the british. Closeup of it. What kind of subjects are . Vered by the collections how do researchers find manuscript material that is relevant . What resources are available . I think i answered that. We are adding things on line to our website. Almost any subject you can think of, jefferson very famously, when he offers his library to congress, said there would be no subject a member of congress could not refer to in his library. The division has followed that up. Politics, military history, civil rights, art, anything you can imagine in the u. S. Experience is documented in our collections. Catalogs andies of finding aids that extend back to ,he early days of the division in the early 20th century when they published handbooks that provided guidance to what was in the collections to now more modernday fighting aids finding aids. We usually do not describe collections on the item level. There are some exceptions like the president s papers president s papers, but we have them on the folder and subject level. Every day well not but we are adding content every month to the online presence. In some respect putting ourselves out of business. The president ial papers, up from washington to lincoln, have been digitized. They are all online. We get very little calls for researchers coming in the rooms to look at those collections. One of the largest collections of papers that we have, personal papers, or the papers of Daniel Patrick moynihan. The collection is 1. 3 million items. It is kept in 3100 containers. This is the largest collection of personal papers the division has. And of course we solicited moynihans papers back in the 1970s when he had served in the kennedy, johnson and nixon administrations at various posts. He was the ambassador to india. Little did we realize it would be he would be a three term senator from new york and add voluminously to that collection. It is a frequently consulted collection, and is one of our mo