The Quantum Archivist

With that statement from George Mitchell as a governing principle, I set out  in 1994 to process 1,000 linear feet of papers from the former Senate Majority Leader. They came in a truck like the ones they use to move households. I had never processed anything on the scale of this collection or of this complexity. It challenged me to think differently about processing and access.

George Mitchell web site, 1999

The first thing we did was to think about a productivity approach to processing, although in a very  paper-based way. We used a primitive, but effective, database system to manage the series and folders and, using the “report writer” function planned to create an electronic finding aid on the College’s gopher. (Anyone remember gopher?)

Well the web exploded onto the scene not too long after we started, and to our good fortune but not surprise, we found that with just a little adjustment to our report templates we could export HTML pages from our database. In the true fashion of reinventing the past in a new technology, we created a finding aid for the collection in a few short weeks that looked suspiciously like a paper finding aid in its construction and organization. We didn’t really know what to do with this new thing, but we knew we had to be there. So we

were on the web and we had pictures, and video! Even then we were exploring the potential of the web for organizing and reorganizing information. We  had a photograph “database” that was really just a categorized alphabetical list of digitized photos. We believed in searching and indexing, but didn’t have the tools in place to be able to do it, so we faked it. Similarly, the “menu” system on the left side of the finding aid is not dynamically generated, but is a set of images hard-coded into every page. We could imagine what we wanted to do, but didn’t have the tools or the expertise to do it.

Somewhat to  my astonishment, more than 10 years later, this finding tool is still available on the web as  part of a larger project to document the former Senator’s career. Take a minute to visit the George J. Mitchell Papers at

Bowdoin College for a look at the past envisioned as the future. Good enough for its time, and a beginning of understanding the power of this new thing called the World Wide Web. It is also a story of attempting, but not completely succeeding, to think out of the box. Even though many of the elements of what would become quantum archives were there for us, we just didn’t have enough experience to see it then.

p.s. Another round of thanks to Eliot Wilczek and Calley Gurley who embraced and supported the experiment. Both of them went on to careers in archives in other institutions. You were wonderful people to work with.