Archiving Stan The Man!

John Waggener

By Katherine Keller
September 2, 2013

A few weeks ago, as an aside, Tart Katie Frank mentioned that, as part of doing research for her dissertation, she was in Laramie, Wyoming, at the American Heritage Center (AHC) looking at Stan Lee's papers.

While we were all fantastically happy for her, and happy to discover that such a collection exists, as a person who works in a large academic library (University Libraries, UNLV), I was intensely curious about the who, what, where, why, and how of this collection.

Comics are finally starting to be taken seriously as a medium, and collecting, curating, archiving, and preserving materials related to comics (and other similarly devalued kinds of pop-culture) is still fairly rare, and I cringe when I think what has been lost.

But, since I have worked in libraries almost as long as I have been an avid comics fan, I've also seen sweeping changes in the ways that such collections are cataloged, curated, accessed, and promoted. Technology has revolutionized how libraries can organize and describe materials, and it has also revolutionized how information about the materials and the materials themselves can be accessed. (My current job, which involves working with UNLV's institutional repository, exists because of these changes in technology.)

Thus, for both geeky and professional reasons, I was very eager to interview the person (or persons) who had worked most closely on the Stan Lee Collection. I immediately reached out to the AHC. (On the hunch that I'd get a "yes," I also picked the brain of a colleague, UNLV special collections archivist, Tom Sommer, for some discipline specific help in phrasing a few of these questions.)

Thank you very much to John Waggener for making time to answer these questions. Not only do his answers showcase what special collections do, and why they are important, but they also embody the service ethic of the staff at the AHC.

Sequential Tart: To get the ball rolling, let's start with a little bit about you. As a child, nobody says, "I want to go work at the library that houses Stan Lee's papers when I grow up!" How did you get into a career in library work, and what path lead you to the American Heritage Center?

John Waggener: Looking back, I always have had a strong connection to museums and libraries, so it does not surprise me that this is the field I landed in. My great-grandfather started a private museum, so the museum-setting has been close to me since my childhood. Secondly, I do come from a family of librarians. Several of my aunts were librarians and my older sister is a librarian. I guess you could say I have a familial connection to history and information, and that likely helped create a path to the archive. All that said, no, I never imagined being an archivist. My degrees are in geography. During my MA program, I began to lean toward historical geography (early Western exploration, transportation development, etc.), and I studied old maps. Of course dealing with geographic history and old maps also led me toward the archive. For my own research I began doing research in archival settings, which was a more formal introduction to the archival setting. It just so happened that my love for history and my basic understanding of archives (from a patron view) led me to apply for a job. I had no formal degree in the discipline. I guess you could say I came into the profession through the back door.

ST: What do you like best about the American Heritage Center? What do you think it excels at?

JW: There are three major components of the American Heritage Center that make working here very enjoyable and rewarding. The first is the immense volume of holdings. We have so many collections that it is on the order of impossible to know all of them and certainly impossible to know everything about every collection. As such, there is something new every day. This includes learning about a collection (I recently learned we have a collection with original material from one of my favorite movies, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), or sometimes learning about material within a collection. Not a week goes by that I don't come across a hidden gem – an important letter or photograph. The second is how active the archive is. We work with thousands of patrons every year from literally around the world. We work with patron both on-site and off-site. Laramie is not the easiest place to get to (especially in the winter), so we take great pride in assisting those out-of-area patrons who cannot conduct research on-site. We provide basic research services at no charge, and we provide a copy service. The third is that we are a very welcoming archive that prides itself on making materials available. A major reason I chose to work here is because of the inviting nature. It is not a dusty and dark place, and the patron does not need credentials. We serve the 4th grader just like we serve the world-renowned scholar.

I believe these answers also answer the second part of your question. The AHC excels at bringing in important collections and making those collections available to researchers in a welcoming environment.

ST: The AHC has a very interesting scope of collections. I completely expect a university's special collections library to focus on state and regional history (which the AHC does), but the AHC is also interested in 20th century entertainment, which is a bit surprising because Wyoming is not famous for its television, film, radio, or music industries, nor is it famous for being a vacation spot to the stars (like Las Vegas is). What was the impetus behind this area of collection?

JW: Indeed, the AHC serves as the archive of the University of Wyoming. It also collects heavily in state history. Our largest collecting history is Wyoming history. But, as you noted, the AHC also has national collecting areas. That is to say, we collect certain topics that transcend geographic boundaries. The AHC collects nationally in numerous areas. Not only is popular culture one of those collecting areas, but the AHC also collects materials related to transportation (mostly aviation and railroad history), economic geology and mining, conservation of natural resources, journalism, mountaineering, architecture and community planning (including the inventor of the Shopping Mall, Victor Gruen), and we even have some really little collecting areas that contain some gems of collections like sets of collections dealing with UFOs and with anti-trust law, just to name a few.

Specific to popular culture, the AHC determined that in the 1950s few if any archives were collecting popular culture materials. As such, there was an opportunity to solicit collections from those in the industry – producers, directors, screen writers, music composers and arrangers, actors, etc. Within the popular culture collecting area, the AHC focuses in select aspects, one of which is the comic industry. We have numerous collections related to the topic and we have agreements with others that their papers will come to the archive when they retire. As for Mr. Lee, we contacted him and basically made a case as to why we would be a good home for his personal papers. Obviously he liked what the AHC has to offer.

Beyond the fact the AHC is a good home for collections, we also recognize that a university (in this case UW) does not limit its teaching and research to only local things. In other words, a student attending UW won't take just Wyoming History. Maybe they will take a movie history class, or maybe they will take a geology class, journalism class, or a class on UFO history. In this case, right here on their very campus they have access to archival materials that relate to a class they are in. They have the opportunity to write a research paper that includes information they did not get from a library book or an Internet site.

ST: The 20th century collection includes the papers of notables such as Jack Benny, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, Barbara Stanwyck, and Dick Van Dyke. Though there are some novelists (such as Forest J. Ackerman and Robert Bloch) the emphasis is on TV and movies. How does the AHC see Stan Lee's papers as fitting in? What kind of outreach does the AHC do to garner new collections?

JW: As I mentioned earlier, the AHC actively solicits collections from individuals and organizations. Sometimes, however, potential donors come to us. Somebody might be retiring and they have files they know are worth saving, so they start asking around, and somebody might say, "Oh, you should contact the University of Wyoming; they collect this kind of material." In the case of Stan Lee, so the story goes, after he received a letter from us, he asked around, and he heard Jack Benny had donated his papers to UW. Stan said, "If that archive was good enough for Jack Benny then it's good enough for me." Again, one of the sub-fields of pop culture is the comics industry. The main ways we receive collections are by direct solicitation and by word of mouth. Of course, once an archive gets some "big name" collections in like a Stan Lee, that makes selling the archive to others in the comic industry easier. At some point, the archive starts to speak for itself.

ST: How did you end up being the archivist for this collection? (Are you the comics geek at work?)

JW: I assume you a referring to me as the archivist for the collection because I processed the collection. That is all that means – I was the person assigned to organize the collection. In fact, it could have been any number of archivists who arranged and described the collection. The archivists at the AHC are not collection curators. All archivists work with all the collections, so no one archivist is "in charge" of a collection, and no one archivist is in charge of certain kinds of collections. Ironically, and truth be told, I am not a comics guy at all. I'm not a comics geek, and I am not a pop culture buff at all. I never have read a comic book in my life, and I don't watch the super hero movies. I loved Tonka trucks growing up, so if we had the Tonka Corporation archive here, I would love to process that. {grin}

Not having an intimate understanding of the comics industry added a level of complexity to the project. I had to learn a new language, as it were. That is a neat thing about the AHC. The diversity of collections allows us to stretch beyond our own personal hobbies and professional interests. No one archivist will have a strong background in popular culture and petroleum resources. No one archivist will have a strong background in 20th century photojournalism collections and Western water resources collections. I am somewhat lucky in that my personal interests actually correlate well with many of the collecting areas at the AHC, so when I became an archivist, I already had a very strong background in many of our collecting areas, popular culture being one of the exceptions.

ST: How long did it take you to organize the material? Did it come in one chunk, or did it come in over time?

Click to enlarge.

JW: The Stan Lee Collection has been coming to us in bits and pieces since the 1980s, and it continues to come in. Just a year or so ago, Mr. Lee sent us another big group of boxes. I believe that as the file drawers in his office begin to fill up, he and his staff box things up and ship it to us. Because material is still coming, the Stan Lee Collection, though it was processed in its entirety a few years ago, is once again considered a partially-processed collection. The piece of the collection that I processed included all of the material we had received from him before 2007. I believe there were about 95 boxes of material when I finished. I believe it took about four or five months to go through the collection and organize it. I don't know when we will process the next round of Stan Lee boxes, but I would imagine it will be several more years before we get to it. This unprocessed part of the collection is available to researchers if they want to look at it, but it is not known specifically what is in each of the boxes, so that makes it a daunting task.

ST: There are many different ways a librarian or archivist can choose to organize a collection like this. Which method was chosen for this collection, and why?

JW: When an archivist arranges a collection, one thing they attempt to do is maintain what is called original order. That is to say, the donor may have had a certain filing system and the collection was sent to us in that manner. Sometimes, the collection may be a bit messy but after examining file folders, the archivist might see some pattern. The archivist then can start to put the pieces of the puzzle back together. Other times, collections come to us in big piles of clutters. I imagine the family backing up a pick-up truck in grandpa's driveway and tossing stuff in the backend, and they drive to the archive and dump it at the loading dock and say, "Here you go! Here is grandpa's stuff that you requested!" Then, the archivist has to study the collection and begin to understand the best way it might come together. Usually, archivists will organize things by subject matter and by the type of material it is (videotapes, scrapbooks, letters, etc.)

ST: The listing for the collection says that the end date is 2001. Is Stan no longer sending materials? (Is there a reason why this is the end date?)

JW: When archivists process collections they try to determine what the oldest item is in the collection and what the most recent item is. This is known as the date range of a collection. In going through the collection, I determined that the oldest item was a photograph of Mr. Lee taken in 1942 when he was in the army during World War II. I determined the most recent material was from 2001. So that is what those dates mean. It is often the case that active collections (collections from people who are still active and are still generating materials) such as Stan Lee's collection, have older material. Newer material might still be needed in an office for example, so people still want to maintain more recent project files and letters. Usually, when somebody believes that certain files are no longer needed, then they will box up that material and send it to us. As I mentioned, Mr. Lee continues to send material to us. Usually it is material that is about ten years old, so the material we are getting from him now is from the early 2000s.

ST: What kind of condition were these materials in? What steps have been taken to preserve them? (For instance, I know that common typing / copy paper from the 1970s through mid 1990s was quite acidic.) Did you make any "great saves"?

JW: The collection came to us in very good condition. The real issues relate to some of his audio-visual formats. Some of his early video is of a very rare format. It cannot be accessed. There is a chance the content on those tapes may never be accessible. This is sad, but it is the nature of the business we are in. In a sense, when the rest of the world is moving forward in technology, the archive has to go backward in time. I even have gone to garage sales looking for obsolete audio and video equipment.

ST: What are the plans to digitize these materials or otherwise keep them accessible to posterity? (I'm mostly thinking of the video tapes in the collection.)

JW: It really is not feasible to digitize a collection. Mr. Lee's collection alone probably has hundreds of thousands of items in it. Now think about how many collections we have that are at least that big if not bigger. We could hire a warehouse-full of workers and set them up at scanning stations and set them loose on scanning materials as quickly as possible. Even in that scenario, it still would not be feasible. And then we have to throw into the mix the fact we receive collection material every day. We could not even keep up with it. Secondly, though it is a common belief that digitization solves the problem of keeping things forever, in fact, if you think about your own experiences with computer technology it is far from safe. Computers crash. Storing devices like thumb-drives and CDs fail. And, computer technology changes at such a rapid pace, you continually have to forward migrate things to the latest technology. Manage digitized material is very complex and very expensive, and it is far from fool-proof. We tend to think of digitization more as an access tool than a preservation tool. We can digitize a video and load it to our website and then people from all around the world could view it.

ST: As you worked on this collection, there were several advances in library and archival technology and techniques. How did these changes help, or in some cases, even hinder, your efforts?

JW: When I was processing the Stan Lee Collection, one of the things that was fairly new to the AHC (and perhaps to the industry) was that of creating on-line inventories or EADs as they are known. This involved learning a new program designed to create on-line inventories. Prior to this, we were generating simple Word documents.

ST: Are there any "holds" on materials in the collection? By that I mean, I understand why the comics scripts cannot be scanned and posted online (copyright), but are there agreements that prevent the posting or cataloging of materials until a later date? (For example, my library's special collections has boxes of materials from former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman. We have packed and stored them carefully, but, per our agreement with him, the boxes must remain sealed and uncatalogued for the next few decades because of the sensitive nature of the contents.)

JW: The Stan Lee Collection is open to all researchers. There are no restrictions on accessing the collection and making copies of material. Indeed, for those items that may be copyrighted the patron will want to observe copyright laws, but for educational use, many items can still be copied. We do have some collections with restrictions, but most of our collections don't have any restrictions. Our goal is to make material available to researchers.

ST: What's the most unique item in the collection? Is there something that you found particularly surprising or amusing? Do you have a favorite?

JW: Regarding items in the Stan Lee Collection, I really like the fan mail. As a matter of fact, several years ago, a UW student was here doing research for a paper he was writing for a class and he learned we have the Stan Lee Collection here. He told me that his father is a huge Stan Lee fan, so he was excited to tell his dad. Many months later, I happened to be in our reading room when this college student and his parents came in to see the collection. His father remembered writing a letter to Mr. Lee in the 1960s, so they requested the box of fan mail from that time. They started going through the folders of fan mail, and after about 30 minutes, I heard the father yell out, "Here it is! Here it is!" That was a great day, and it is those sorts of experiences that make working in a reading room very rewarding.

ST: Has Stan Lee ever visited?

JW: Stan Lee has come to Laramie. I think he was here in the mid- 1990s. Spider-Man came with him. He also sends us letters and on occasion will even pick up the telephone and call. He is very personable. Speaking to him is no different than speaking to your next-door neighbor.

ST: Where do you see and/or where would you like to see this collection in the next 50, 100, or even 500 years?

JW: What will the collection be like 100 years from now? It will be much larger, no doubt. I would imagine when Mr. Lee finally retires and boxes up the whole office and has it sent to us, it will be a very large collection – maybe 300 or 400 boxes of material. I also see it being a popular collection. His super heroes will always be popular, so people will likely want to research this collection for a long time to come.

ST: And finally, what cool, neat-o collection(s) are you currently working on?

JW: When I processed the Stan Lee Collection I worked in the reading room as a reference archivist and I processed collections. Now, I work strictly in the reference department, so I don't organize collections as much as I used to. But, in reference, we have the opportunity to work with all of these new collections coming in. A collection of photographs was just sent to us from a Wyoming photographer who happened to be present for many important events that occurred in Wyoming's past, so we have some images of some very important events. So, there are always great things coming in.

Stan Lee Papers — Official guide to the AHC's collection of Stan Lee materials
Excelsior and Yee-haw!: The Stan Lee Papers at the American Heritage Center — Katie Frank's article about her experiences at the AHC.