A 124-year-old cookie stuck inside a soldier’s scrapbook is among the treasures – and oddities – lining the shelves of the Library Services Center at Johns Hopkins. The piece of hardtack, a cheap and durable army supply issued during the Spanish American War, was significant enough that artilleryman Private Henry Hyndman could keep it in his personal collection, along with medals, clippings of diaries, letters and other memorabilia spanning his young adulthood. . Today, his album survives among piles of Johns Hopkins Special Collectionsnearby relics like the Hopkins Family Bible, a collection of letters and original works by Gertrude Stein, and research remains from NASA’s first mission to Mars.
In total, the Library Service Center– a cavernous, temperature-controlled warehouse in a corner of the Applied Physics Laboratory campus in Laurel, Maryland – houses more than 20,000 boxes of artifacts belonging to Johns Hopkins University’s Sheridan Libraries, university scraps and l Baltimore’s history mingling with thousands of diverse donations and curated collections. Items held in this facility number over 2 million, primarily books and manuscripts, but also include photographs, artwork, films, academic records, sheet music, journals, sports memorabilia, postcards , diaries, etc.
“I have worked here for 25 years and the bay still impresses me. She’s not only physically imposing, she exudes this weird monolithic energy.
David Keifer
Library Services Manager
“I’ve worked here for 25 years and the bay still amazes me,” says Dave Keifer, the library services manager who oversees the facility with his small staff. “It’s not just physically imposing, it gives off this weird monolithic energy.”
The oldest artifact may be a Latin monograph from the 1500s, Keifer speculates. There are busts of famous Johns Hopkins figures, as well as a bust of a deer. More than 1,500 boxes contain the papers of longtime Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski, dating back to his early activism on the Baltimore City Council. Thousands of VHS tapes and DVDs come from Video Americain, the local arthouse rental chain that survived until 2014, and a recent acquisition has added thousands of vintage academic films.
“Libraries are often asked why they keep what they keep. Simply put, libraries keep history, whether it is the history of scholarship in a discipline or the history of an institution,” says Elizabeth Mengel, Associate Dean of Collections and Academic Services, who works closely with the Laurel team. “We believe that preserving this history is important for education and for maintaining an informed and knowledgeable society.”
In the Hopkins facility there is the scrapbook and gold-tipped cane of Daniel Coit Gilman, the first president of Johns Hopkins University. There is a Fake Benedict Arnold. Within the Levy Sheet Music Collectionearly 20th century songs can be found from Pace & Handy Music Company, one of the nation’s premier black sheet music publishers.
In collaboration with MICA, the warehouse also stocks vintage advertisements from the Globe Printing Corp., a Baltimore institution for 81 years that promoted vaudeville, movies, carnivals and later rock bands. “We have their old-fashioned Rolodex with famous people’s names on it, so you go through it and see ‘Brown, comma, James’ and his phone number,” Mengel explains.
Spread across thousands of boxes, the shelves also contain all administrative and departmental records relating to the history of Johns Hopkins University, as well as those of some affiliated organizations, such as the Space Telescope Science Institute, whose records include planning of the Hubble Telescope in the 1960s. “Keeping things like a faculty member’s ephemera, like a course syllabus from years ago, or papers from a group of students, allows scholars to see the context at the time, which helps them better understand the decisions and actions that took place,” Mengel says. . “As librarians and archivists, we are always surprised at the twists and turns people take in a great search. What started as an innocent piece of paper in an archive box may well spur the next big ideas. .”
Hopkins archivists at the Homewood campus are responsible for processing and organizing archival materials. At Laurel, Keifer’s tight-knit team – library assistants John Bullock, Glenn Gonzales and Rosemary Spellman – maintain the hoard and are available to retrieve and send materials to any scholars who request them – from a student of undergraduate who completes a project to an author writing a book or a curator organizing an exhibition. Once you click “submit” on the library’s website, the team helps you by either scanning the documents and then emailing them within 24 hours, or delivering boxes to the two days to researchers from different Hopkins libraries, via daily van trips.
Maintained at 30% humidity at all times for preservation purposes, the massive storage space contains 12 rows of shelves, each rising 30 feet high, almost touching the ceiling. Reaching the boxes on the highest shelves requires hydraulic lift and tolerance for heights – a task usually reserved for Bullock, whose nickname is “The Boxman”.
“There’s a great system in place where we can request items be sent to Laurel, and it’s done quickly because of the phenomenal organization there,” says Heidi HerrLibrarian for English, Philosophy and Student Engagement in Special Collections.
Older documents are usually the domain of the Special Collections Department and may be shipped in containers to that department’s staff, for use in a special reading room.
On average, the Laurel team handles approximately 140 requests per day. Some time ago, a biologist conducting field research on evolution in the Amazon had only brief Internet access every two weeks. At that time, he was still asking for hundreds of additional reading materials. “It went on for several months,” Keifer says. The team also remembers the Belgian researcher who thanked them for their help by regularly sending chocolates.
In addition to the original storage bay, built and opened in the early 2000s, another equally large one was recently built next door to store the contents of the Homewood campus. Milton S. Eisenhower Library during a major renovation next year. Already, 400,000 items have been shipped to Laurel.
The archive collection also continues to grow as Hopkins librarians and curators expand it over time.
Herr, for example, recently amassed a cache of old board gamesas well as a romantic cartoon collection from the 1940s to the 1970s.
She admits, however, that she has never seen the Laurel warehouse in person. This is true for many. As vast and fascinating as its collections are, the place is quietly tucked away, a treasure chest you’d never know existed if you weren’t looking for it.