The big news in area archiving that’s being shown off Thursday is about, in the driest, most basic terms, “consolidated access to bibliographic information,” as Newberry Library President David Spadafora put it.
But Chicago Collections, a new entity bringing old entities together, is about much more than that. Call it one-stop shopping for researchers, from high school students to wizened academics. Call it a case study in inter-institutional cooperation. Call it a free website where those curious about the story of Chicago can poke around and happily fritter away time.
Call it an antidote to the human tendency of being better at saving stuff, as a rule, than at being able to find it again later.
Or just look at the exhibition drawing from the collections that’s been up at the Harold Washington Library Center. In “Raw Material: Uncovering Chicago’s Historical Collections,” on the library’s ninth floor, you’ll see a 1937 map of Brookfield Zoo, a John Fischetti drawing of the then-new Picasso sculpture in Daley Plaza, Second City Theatre games workshop notes, and a 1927 in-studio photograph of the two Native American equestrian sculptures that now stand at Congress Parkway and Michigan Avenue.
Among dozens of items on display — quirky, technical, surprising, profound — those four come from, respectively, the Chicago Zoological Society, Columbia College Chicago, Northwestern University and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Those institutions, plus 17 more universities, museums and libraries in the area, are the current members of the Chicago Collections consortium. To fund its work, the organization collects modest dues from its members (about $6,000 annually at the top level of membership, Spadafora said) and seeks grant money (the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has been a big early funder).
“Our ranks have been growing,” Spadafora said. “There are at least three other significant Chicago organizations with which we are talking right now.”
The Web portal, at chicagocollections.org, went live two weeks ago and will be shown off in a public event at the main library at 3 p.m. Thursday. It is the group’s first significant, enduring project and the one that Spadafora and Mary Case, university librarian at University of Illinois at Chicago, settled on as they hatched the idea of the consortium beginning nine years ago, when both were relative newcomers to the city.
“This very first project is technical in nature and is making it possible for potential users of this score of institutions’ collections to get consolidated access to bibliographic information about those collections,” said Spadafora, a historian by training but, as head of Newberry, a librarian in title. “At this point that consolidated access point which we’re calling a portal is focused on collections of unique material that pertain to Chicago itself or the Chicago area.”
So it includes the papers of Fischetti, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, from Columbia College. It includes more than 100,000 photographs from various collections. It includes the Patterson Family Papers at Lake Forest College, represented in the “Raw Material” show with a letter to the Chicago Tribune publisher relating to the founding of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. It includes the H. Alan Lipscomb Collection at Northern Illinois University, represented by a pristine copy of the program of the 1968 Democratic National Convention; what a sunny, civic-minded good time the pamphlet seems to promise.
Putting all of this under one digital roof is a huge improvement in efficiency, said Jaclyn Grahl, executive director of Chicago Collections. “We’re directing, and we’re connecting,” she said. “If someone was wanting to study Jane Addams, they wouldn’t necessarily know that over five institutions hold material related to Jane Addams. They would start the paper chase, go to each place.
“What it’s doing is taking months and years off of research time. We have had scholars that have said to us, ‘Where have you been?’ The clickability we have to put things in people’s hands and direct them is unique.”
And the material those clicks can point them to is extraordinary. A few more examples from “Raw Material,” which, in its one-room display, symbolizes the function of the Web portal:
* A photograph of Harold Washington, future mayor of Chicago, lounging on a cot as a student at Roosevelt University in 1947.
* Thirty Cubs and White Sox baseball cards, from 1909-1911, found in the papers of novelist James T. Farrell, the “Studs Lonigan” trilogy author.
* A satirical novel, “Samantha at the World’s Fair,” credited to “Josiah Allen’s Wife.”
* A rental brochure for Marina City, future star of a Wilco album cover.
* Graced, improbably, by beautiful art-deco cover art, a souvenir booklet marking the 1925 opening of the 23rd Street Viaduct.
* Two pages from one of the seminal city documents, Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago.
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
‘Explore Chicago Collections’
When: 3 p.m. Thursday
Where: Chicago Public Library’s Harold Washington Library Center, Pritzker Auditorium, 400 S. State St.
Tickets: Free; more information at chicagocollections.org
