Fundraising the Dead (10 page)

I tried to avoid her look. All right, I’d been guilty of sneaking a book out of the stacks now and then if I couldn’t find the form, or I didn’t have a pencil, or I was in a hurry and I was going to bring it right back . . . “Well, I always put things back,” I said defensively.

She sniffed. “Actually, we prefer if people
don’t
reshelve things on their own—all too often they end up in the wrong place.” Oops, she’d nailed me again.

I threw up my hands. “Mea culpa, mea culpa. I’ll never do it again, I promise. But in this instance, if something was removed legitimately from the shelf by an authorized person, there should be a multipart tracking slip—have I got that right?”

Felicity nodded. “Exactly. And when the book is returned to its rightful place, the two slips are stapled together and filed.”

At last, a ray of light. “Could we check the slips to see if this particular item was requested anytime recently?”

“Of course. Do you have the call number?”

“I’ll get it for you—if it exists. This collection isn’t really cataloged yet, you know—that’s what Rich has been working on. Oh, another question. If, say, this was a box full of individual documents, or folders of documents—would you sign out the whole box or just the items from inside the box?”

Felicity said primly, “The box, of course—or, if you requested such a folder to be brought to the reading room, the shelver would bring the whole box, not just a single folder. Again, it’s far too easy to mislay a single folder, and often they are identified only in the broadest of terms. We’re working hard to correct that, but there are many, many boxes, and a limited number of staff members. I had asked Alfred to pursue that, as time permitted.”

My first attempt to track down the missing items had already revealed to me a major flaw in the process: keeping track of something depended on the good intentions of the person who took it—who would have to be scrupulous about leaving a paper trail. For anyone with less-honorable intentions, he or she could just walk away with the item, at least out of the stacks, if not out of the building. Assuming, of course, that the person was able to gain access to the stacks in the first place. And although such access was limited to staff, a select few researchers (whose credentials had been checked up one side and down the other), board members, and special friends (Marty fell into two or three of those categories and had free rein of the place), unfortunately it was not a short list.

“One last thing—didn’t I see you talking with Alfred at the gala?”

“I spoke with him, yes. Actually I was surprised to see him there—I know how much he hates such events. I believe he was looking for you.”

“Me? Did he say why?”

“No. I told him I hadn’t seen you but I was sure you were around somewhere. So he never talked to you?”

“No. I was kind of distracted.” Was that when he had left the list for me?

“If you have no more questions at the moment, I do need to get back to the desk,” Felicity said.

“Go ahead,” I responded. “I’ll get you the call number on the box if I can, and I’ll help you look through the slips if you want—I know how busy you are.” While it sounded like sucking up, it was true: Felicity was one of the hardest-working people in the place, as well as a stickler for details. I really needed her as an ally in this search. “Thanks, Felicity. I appreciate it. And, I hate to say it, but the sooner the better, please. Marty’s breathing down my neck.”

“I understand, Nell. It’s a fairly quiet day, so I’ll see if I can find an answer for you.”

Fairly quiet was an understatement: nobody had moved from their position in the room since we’d left. Maybe they were
all
asleep.

My next step was to check in with Latoya Anderson,
our vice president of collections, and the person charged with oversight for all collections. Latoya was a relative newcomer to the Society: she’d been on the staff just over two years, one of Charles’s first major hires, and she was, in grant-writing terms, a “person of color.” I always found it offensive to label any staff member based on race (or gender, sexual preference, handicap, whatever), but the reality was that a lot of the organizations that awarded grants gave extra points to your application if you could demonstrate diversity, especially if it was not just for show. Luckily for everyone, Latoya was extremely well qualified, with an undergraduate degree in history from Princeton and a degree in library science from Simmons in Boston, and we were very lucky to have her. We had snagged her not because of our shining status in the historical world (although we did all right in that department), or the magnificent salary which we could offer (we couldn’t), but because the Society had an outstanding and largely unexplored collection of documents pertaining to slavery and the abolition movement in Philadelphia, and Latoya had been smart enough to negotiate for time to continue her own research, using those collections, while giving the Society four days a week.

I liked Latoya, or maybe
respected
was closer to the truth. She was smart and politically aware—which was more than could be said for many of the staff members. At the same time, I had a small but nagging doubt about her: she wasn’t a risk taker, and was almost fanatical about maintaining the status quo. She did her job well and conscientiously, but she stayed strictly within the confines of a narrow job description—which I thought could have been broadened to greatly enhance the Society’s standing within the academic world. Sometimes I wondered if she was giving one hundred percent to the Society. Or one hundred percent of the eighty percent she was committed to, anyway. Maybe I was biased because we didn’t have a particularly warm relationship, but as far as I could tell she had remained aloof from most people at the Society.

I was pleased and surprised to actually find her in on a Saturday. I wasn’t sure how many people had left as soon as they could yesterday, but if they had, they were here in force today. I rapped on her door. “Latoya?”

She held up one elaborately manicured hand and said, “One minute,” her eyes never leaving the screen of her laptop. She added a few sentences, then sat back and sighed. She looked up at me. “Didn’t want to lose the thought. What do you need?”

I made my way into her office. Unlike mine, hers was almost obsessively neat. All her books were lined up on her bookshelves. There were no stacks of papers sitting on any surfaces. There wasn’t even any dust. Me, I’ve always subscribed to the theory that an empty desk is the sign of an empty mind. Let me tell you, my mind is very full. In any case, Latoya’s visitor’s chair was free of encumbrances, so I sat down facing her.

“I’m surprised to see you here. You didn’t have to come in today.”

Latoya sighed. “Alfred’s unfortunate death means I have to attempt to reconstruct his methods. I’m afraid I’m not as well versed in his computer system as I should be.”

Nor was anyone else. I was glad that she was stepping up quickly. “I need to ask you something. I’ve encountered a, uh, situation, and you might be able to help me with it. And I could use a quick review on our cataloging procedures, at least as they apply to this.”

I had her interest. “What’s the problem?” she asked.

“You know Marty Terwilliger?”

“Sure. I can’t say I know her well, but I know she’s a board member and she does a lot of research here, and of course there’s the Terwilliger Collection. Why do you ask?”

“She came to me and said that some things she knew we had in that collection of hers weren’t where they should be, and she can’t find them. She says it’s an important group of items, and I believe her. Anyway, she’s mad, and I said I’d look into it. She gave me a week to work it out.”

“Hmm. Why did she come to you rather than me? Is she a troublemaker?”

“No, not at all. In general, she’s one of our strongest supporters, and she has a right to be mad, I think. So I’m hoping that we find what she’s looking for ASAP, and that it turns out to be some perfectly normal human error, or it was in transit somewhere in the building, or something like that.” But why did I have this ominous feeling deep inside even as I gave Latoya all the possible excuses? Unfortunately, I have pretty good instincts. And they weren’t telling me that the papers had been innocently mislaid. “When she brought this up, I realized I didn’t really know a lot about the current status of our inventory, or catalog, or whatever you all call it. I write about it a lot, but mostly I just drop in the boilerplate on collections—the stuff that you and your staff hand me—so I don’t really think about it. I have no idea if it’s accurate or even what it means. It’s pretty fuzzy.”

The more I learned, the more I wondered if that language was deliberately vague in order to cover up some long-standing shortcomings of the system. Of course, I knew we weren’t alone among our peer institutions in the dismal state of our record keeping. We were still struggling to make our way out of the nineteenth century (spidery brown ink on file cards), and here it was the twenty-first century. We’d been blindsided by the Internet, and had been scrambling for the past couple of years to try and keep an oar in the water while figuring out what it all meant and how we could possibly deal with it, with a budget that was already running a chronic annual deficit, and with a small—very small—endowment.

Latoya looked pained. “You want the short course on the state of our cataloging?” I nodded. She sighed. “Okay. You know the catalog room downstairs?”

“Yes,” I said. Of course I did—I walked through it daily.

“That was state-of-the-art fifty, a hundred years ago. There are seven—yes, seven—individual catalogs, all on file cards. Books, manuscripts, music, photographs, maps, objects, ephemera.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “And there are some subcategories for those. These are not integrated, but kept together as individual catalogs, all lined up side by side.”

I interrupted. “You mean, if I’m looking for a particular person or a place—a cemetery, say—I have to look through multiple catalogs?”

Latoya nodded. “Yes. Now, as you know, we applied for and received a grant a couple of years ago to put our most heavily used collections into an electronic format, so they could be accessed remotely, viewed from the website.”

I nodded encouragingly. That had been one of my proudest moments, and the grant had enabled us to take at least a baby step into the modern world. Alfred’s new cataloging software had been part of that package. Though I was a bit ticked at her use of the word
we
, since she hadn’t been around when the grant application had gone in—that had been
my
work.

I sighed inwardly. If we had lots of money available, we could do wonderful things, online and on-site. We could share our city’s and our nation’s glorious history with schoolchildren and the general public, near and far, and have them begging for more. All it would take was infinite resources, financial and human. But that wasn’t going to happen, unless Bill Gates decided that we were his favorite institution in the whole wide world. I wish.

Latoya went on. “Then you know that grant covered only three of the seven collections, which in themselves amounted to only about forty percent of the total of the existing file cards. Those collections were chosen because they were the easiest to scan—they had the fewest handwritten entries, they conformed best to standard cataloging protocols, and so on.”

I nodded again, with less enthusiasm. This was not encouraging.

“And that effort has been going on for over a year now, and while the bulk of the material has been scanned, translating that scanned material into new, consistent digital records and into an online format has been exceedingly slow.”

I was getting depressed. Time to divert the flow of gloom. “So what you’re saying is, we have modern cataloging for only a small percentage of our collections, and even that is incomplete?”

“Exactly.”

I pondered for a moment. “All right, let me cut to the chase. Let’s talk about the Terwilliger Collection, which I know is physically still maintained as a single collection. What state is it in?”

“We received that collection starting in, oh, 1967, I think. It came in several installments—the bulk of it when John Terwilliger moved out of his big family home and into a retirement community, and the rest upon his death. There was a catalog of sorts, but it was largely anecdotal, descriptive—nothing like a formal library catalog. I think some ancient cousin put it together a long time ago. It was better than nothing, but it was hardly specific. And if you’ve seen it, you know that the collection is massive, and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. That’s why Rich is here. You wrote the proposals to help fund him, so you probably know it as well as anyone here. Except me, of course. So Marty is worried?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

Latoya sat back and stared pensively at the ceiling for a long moment. Then she straightened.

“All right. Let me pull the files and get back to you. Later today?”

“Fine,” I said as I rose to leave. And then I realized that neither of us had mentioned Alfred. Latoya had worked with him for nearly three years, but she seemed unmoved by his death. I stopped in the doorway. “It’s a shame about Alfred, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s unfortunate. It won’t be easy to replace him.” Latoya turned back to her computer monitor: I was dismissed, and so, apparently, was Alfred. Or so I thought, until she said, “Will there be a service?”

“Yes, tomorrow. I’ll send you the details.” As I went out the door, I sent up a silent prayer:
Please, please let this all be a mix-up
. I didn’t like what I was hearing. It would be interesting to see if Latoya’s findings jibed with Alfred’s, or if she even mentioned his reports.

I had started two hares, so to speak, and now I wasn’t sure where to turn next. I went to my office and shut the door, which I never do. But I wanted a quiet minute to think, to try to put my thoughts in order. Unfortunately, what I
didn’t
know about how the Society managed its collections far exceeded what I did know. It was embarrassing—how many years had I been working here? Why hadn’t I ever asked anyone these things before?