By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Nestled on Olden Street, Mudd Manuscript Library operates on the Princeton University campus as a mini-Library of Congress.
Inside an otherwise nondescript three-floor building are 220 million documents that a 10-member staff, a supervisor and student employees help keep in order. Historians, students and other users make up the just under 2,000 visitors a year to pass through its doors.
Here, staff handle everything from scanning documents that patrons have requested to organizing the boxes of material that get turned into neat folders of information that a scholar can access.
For a university as old as Princeton, the school has had an official archives since only the middle part of the 20th century, established in 1959. Then-Princeton President Robert F. Goheen received permission from the university trustees to establish the archives and hire an archivist, the job held today by Daniel J. Linke.
“There had been people prior to that that had various titles that gave them responsibility for collecting things related to Princeton’s history,” Mr. Linke said in an interview from the library. “And in (1959), that’s when they said we need to formally collect the records of the university that were being generated by the various offices, as well as the publications and things about the student groups and activities.”
The mission of Mudd is “to document the life of the institution,” in Mr. Linke’s words. That can run the gamut from photos, books, documents and other records, although Mudd is not a museum or hall of fame for the university.
The reading room, located off the main entrance, has rules that patrons must follow, including a ban on them bringing in their own writing material to take notes.
“We have basic rules in place to ensure that the documents are handled properly and well,” Mr. Linke said.
As technology improves, so does the ease with which people can access material. For instance, tens of thousand of senior theses are kept at Mudd in bound volume form. But theses since 2013 can be accessed electronically, said Lynn M. Durgin, a special collections assistant.
Yet in an era of emails and countless other records that a school like Princeton generates, how to decide what to include in the archives?
Mr. Linke said the university has a full-time records manager, whose main job is to tell “people when to throw out things, what’s legally permissible and no longer needed.”
He said a “happy side effect” of the record manager’s work is to identify things that she thinks should come to Mudd and bring them to Mr. Linke’s attention.
Other times, Mr. Linke will get calls regularly from alumni, their surviving spouses or children who want to give photos or documents for posterity.
Aside from the archives, there also are the 20th century policy papers kept at Mudd: former Naval Secretary and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal and former Secretary of State James Baker, both of whom attended Princeton, are among some of the notables in the collection.
Mudd is also the repository for the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union, the biggest and most used policy papers collection, Mr. Linke said.
“The ACLU collection is a beast. It’s over 5,000 boxes,” said Rachel Van Unen, a project archivist at Mudd who deals with policy papers. “The ACLU sends us just such a huge collection.”
In handling the papers of former high-level government officials, there are times when the documents contain secret information.
“We do have some other collections that have come in that, at one point, were classified and either were declassified before they came here or we worked to have them declassified,” Mr. Linke said.
For instance, the library holds the papers of former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Periodically a few times a year, Mudd will get some of his papers that the State Department had declassified — meaning the documents can be available to library users.
Overseeing the operation of everything is Mr. Linke, a 50-year-old native of Camden County in South Jersey. He earned his undergraduate degree in history and English in 1986 and a graduate degree in American history in 1989, both from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
As part his fellowship obligations in college, he worked at the Western Reserve as a manuscripts specialist for about two years ending in the year he got his master’s.
His career stops have included the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center, the New York State Archives and Records Administration and finally Princeton University. He was an assistant archivist at Mudd for eight years starting in 1994. He’s held the top position since July 2002.
“The work here is just compelling,” he said.
Yet there can be moments of controversy, like during the 2008 presidential race, when the Obama campaign asked the university that Michelle Obama’s senior thesis not be released.
The document was not going to be made available until after the presidential election, but the Obama campaign eventually provided a copy to the website, Politico. The university then lifted the restriction on access.
“Initially, I think the campaign requested to Princeton that it not be released. And the administration complied,” he said. “And then after things settled down, after about a week of this then we were able to release it again.”
