by Jed Birmingham
You have your grant. Now you are stoked to order the materials you want to see. The Sanders Archive is stored at an offsite facility separate from the Firestone so to see items from the collection, you have to place an order ahead of time to get them pulled and delivered to the Special Collection Reading Room, The Library asks for three days notice in order to assure that the items get pulled prior to your arrival. Keaton and I placed orders well over a week in advance. This may be overkill but when you are ordering dozens of boxes at a time it gives the staff plenty of time to take care of you.
Before requesting items, you must create an account. Go to the Collection Overview Page for the Ed Sanders Papers on the Princeton Library website. Click on “Your Account” in the top right-hand corner. From there, you will be prompted to either login or register with the usual types of required information. You don’t need to be affiliated with a university to create an account. I have absolutely no academic credentials of any kind.
Once you create this account, getting a Special Collection Photo ID card is rather easy when you get to the Library. I would also have your grant acceptance letter available and a contact in the Special Collection in case there are any issues. On your first day, enter the main library and go to the kiosk to the left. They’ll ask for some ID, take your picture, and print a card. You can only get a card Monday through Friday beginning at 9am. This card will allow you to access the entire library, not just the Special Collection.
I arrived at the Firestone on a Saturday to case the joint out and could only get a one-day pass. Word to the wise, keep your Special Collection card. It is good for around six months, and you can just reactivate it after that point. Keaton keeps losing his card and having to get a new ID and photo taken. I refuse to do this because I do not want any more photo IDs in my life. I have gotten to the point where anytime I get a photo ID I wonder how can this fucking piece of plastic possibly work since I swear none of the photos taken in recent memory look like me. I mean there is no way in hell that I look like that. I do not see that fat, florid face in the mirror each morning. I sincerely hope nobody else sees it either. Thank God, you do not have to actually show the ID to anybody in the library. You can scan your way in and out everywhere. If anyone examined my ID, they would not let me in since, as I insist, it looks nothing like me. Who is this Steve Bannon-looking idiot anyway? Entry denied.
Back to ordering. The items you want to see are requested by box number. There are over 400 boxes in the Sanders Collection now. From what I am told, hundreds more are on the way. Once you receive your grant you should already have a particularly good idea of what boxes you want to see. In fact, referencing the boxes you want to review and what you hope to find in them is one of the keys to a successful grant application. Once you’ve selected what you are interested in from the online finding aid, click on “Request This Box” at the bottom of the page; this adds the box to your cart. There may be multiple items you want to see that are in a single box. If this is the case, you only need to add the box to your cart once. When you have added all the boxes with items you want to look at to your cart, you click “Request” at the bottom of the cart window.
If you’re going to request a large number of boxes, it’s best to write to the library ahead of time and let them know when you are coming, how long you plan to stay, and the order you’d like to work through the boxes. They can’t bring all the boxes to the reading room at once for a large order. For this reason, when you finish looking through a box, they will ask if the box can go back to the offsite storage. They can continue to hold a box if you think you might return to it, but there is only so much space. This means that if you have a lot of boxes, you’ll need to finish some so that there’s space to bring in more. You can request boxes, but you must factor in the up to three-day period it takes to get boxes from the other location. For reference, I ordered roughly twenty boxes at once. You can only review two boxes at your desk at one time. The rest are onsite in Special Collections at the Firestone but not available for instant access. The librarians advised me not to send any of the boxes back after I looked at them. So, for 20 boxes, at least, space does not seem to be an issue. By the way, that advice was some of the best I received as I was constantly re-reviewing boxes of material based off what I found in other boxes and based off how my research interests developed over the two weeks.
The Special Collection Room is on Floor D in the bowels of the Firestone. Pack light. They do not allow any bags, writing instruments, paper, food, or drinks in the room. Basically, you can bring your computer, a power source, and your phone. You might be able to bring a camera and tripod, but when I was there everybody was using their iPhones, which accounts for the fact that my pics are so shitty. They have lockers to keep your things in but they are small. If you are a food and drink person, maybe keep some shit in there. I smoke cigars (heavily), so the lockers were my humidor. Someone downstairs will check you in using your new card, run you through the basic rules and procedures, have you wash your hands, and let you into the reading room. You must wash your hands every time you exit and re-enter the reading room.
I like routine and so does Special Collections. There are long rectangular tables in the reading room with three seats at each table. The librarians will seat you at the ends of the table first. For the entire two weeks, I sat at the exact same spot as did everyone else there. When I was there, anywhere from four to ten people were also researching at the same time. There is Wi-Fi available in Special Collections but like everything associated with the library you must sign up and register for it. I was sick of registering for shit, so I used the hot spot off my phone. This was passable but not ideal. I suspect the library Wi-Fi is much faster and more dependable.
It is a pretty straightforward process. Something Keaton was recommended before his first visit was to contact the librarians about questions or concerns before showing up. Spend some time thinking about any potential needs or issues. Spend even more time thinking about what you want to look at. You should know the Finding Aid like the back of your hand before you get there. You may not know what exactly is in the boxes but you should be familiar with the descriptions that are available for those boxes. The less time you spend getting set up and having the librarians to get you set up, the more time you have to research. Time goes really fast in there. The next thing you know last call at 4pm has rolled around and it is time to pack up and leave. In our experience, the librarians have always been very friendly, supportive, and happy to help. The key to this is being familiar with the policies and procedures before you get there. Do not come into Princeton and research on the fly. It is wasteful of your time and the librarians. If you believe anything I am telling you, believe me time flies. My two weeks were over before I knew it.