AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER ACADEMIC PLAN
Introduction
The American Heritage Center is one of the largest manuscript repositories in the United States, with more than seven thousand collections. The Center holds substantial collections in the areas of popular culture, transportation, conservation, water resources, mining (including the Anaconda Geological Document Collection), journalism, architecture, and contemporary history. We enjoy a favorable national reputation for the quality and breadth of our collections, staff involvement in archival and historical organizations, and our many outreach activities, such as the George A. Rentschler Distinguished Lecturer series, the Bernard L. Majewski Fellowship, the annual symposia, and the Center’s newsletter, annual reports, and guides to collections. We provide a wide range of services to scholars from throughout the United States and abroad, government agencies, and businesses. The primary goal of the Center remains the collection and preservation of the history of Wyoming and the West, and we have a history of service to the University of Wyoming and the people of the state. At the heart of the Center is the work of Grace Raymond Hebard, longtime UW faculty member, administrator, librarian, and Wyoming historian. Dr. Hebard collected the papers and reminiscences of many of Wyoming’s pioneers and conducted research on many Wyoming topics. Her collection became the foundation for the Center, which was officially established in 1945. The Center is also the home for the University of Wyoming Archives.
For decades the Center’s focus was the acquisition of material, which has resulted in nearly one hundred thousand cubic feet of documents and artifacts. Responding to concerns expressed by the archival and historical communities and following clear directives from the UW administration, since the late 1980s the Center has concentrated more of its limited resources on processing, cataloging, and making accessible its collections. Meanwhile, we continue to selectively seek those materials which fall within the guidelines of our collecting policy. In the fall of 1993, the Center moved into the Eleanor Chatterton Kennedy—Joe and Arlene Watt AHC in the Centennial Complex. The new building and the shift in focus from acquisition to accessibility has vastly increased usage by the general public, scholars, and the University of Wyoming community. The facility also allows for better care of the extremely valuable materials held by the Center. While no university funding was allocated to support the Center’s expanded public programming, our management of the rare books, or our new initiatives in collection processing and cataloging, the Center has advanced because of a highly successful fund-raising record both in the private sector and in competing for federal and state grant support. Since 1991 the Center has raised nearly 3.7 million dollars from individuals and corporations, and more than four hundred thousand dollars through grants.
To complete this document the Center received input from all of its staff. The acting director met with the department heads to discuss the Center’s various missions. The department heads then worked with staff in their areas to determine goals and objectives. The heads and interested staff members again met with the acting director to outline the goals and objectives included in the Center’s plan. The American Heritage Center’s Board of Faculty Advisors and Director Michael Devine (on leave for the 1998-1999 academic year) also reviewed and commented on a draft.
The Center holds the papers of many nationally significant authors, journalists, entertainers, and others. Our historical collection houses the papers of Admiral Husband Kimmel, the commander of U.S. Naval Forces at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, other collections relating to the controversy surrounding the attack, along with the diaries and letters of many servicemen who served in the Pacific and European theaters. Hugh Downs, longtime host of ABC’s 20/20, leads the list of journalists, which also includes Richard Tregaskis, WWII journalist and author of Guadalcanal Diary, and the producers of the noted March of Time documentary series. In the area of architecture are the papers of Frederick Gutheim, Oskar Stonorov, and Alfred Kastner, as well as those of the Wyoming firm of Hitchcock and Hitchcock, designers of Old Main. In popular culture the Center has some or all of the papers of William Boyd (Hopalong Cassidy), Jack Benny, Barbara Stanwyck, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, and many radio, film, and television writers, producers, and directors. The music of Fred Karlin, Oscar-winning Hollywood composer, and a number of big band orchestra leaders, including Hal Kemp, is also here. The Center also curated an exhibit at the Newberry Library in Chicago and loaned artifacts to the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City for a major show about Hopalong Cassidy and to the Museum of the Horse in New Mexico for a saddle exhibit.
The Center’s extensive Wyoming collections include the papers of Francis E. Warren, Governor and Senator Milward Simpson, Senators Alan Simpson, Gale McGee, Joseph O’Mahoney, and Lester Hunt, Congressmen Dick Cheney, Frank Mondell, and Teno Roncalio, Governor Nellie Tayloe Ross (the country’s first woman governor), Owen Wister (his diaries from the 1880s and 1890s, upon which he based his famous western novel The Virginian), the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, the Wyoming Wool Growers Association, the Dude Ranchers’ Association, records of mining companies, ranches, homesteaders, Oregon Trail emigrants, the records from the office of the president of the University of Wyoming, UW faculty members, and other university offices.
The staff of the American Heritage Center has been active in professional archival and historical organizations. Michael Devine, the Center’s director, is presently serving as the Houghton Freeman Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s graduate center at Nanjing University in the People’s Republic of China. In 1995 he served as a Fulbright Scholar at Yonsei University in South Korea and in 1999 he will become the president of the National Council on Public History, which will bring a high national visibility to the Center. Other staff members and faculty have given papers at the annual meetings and served on committees and as officers for the Society of American Archivists, the American Library Association, the Society of Rocky Mountain Archivists, the Mining History Association, the Wyoming Center for the Book, the Albany County Historical Society, the Wyoming Association of Professional Historians, and the Wyoming State Historical Society. In recent years several staff members have authored articles in leading professional journals.
Through its outreach activities the Center has brought noted people to the University of Wyoming. The George A. Rentschler Distinguished Lecturers have included Patty Limerick (a McArthur Fellow and western history professor from the University of Colorado), Howard Lamar (western historian and former president of Yale University), Robert Utley (historian whose works include books about General George Custer and Billy the Kid), Stan Lee (founder of Marvel Comics), Fred Karlin, and Clay Blair (journalist and author of books about World War II and the early years of John F. Kennedy). The topics for the Center’s seven annual symposia, including the West’s and Wyoming’s sense of place, issues of multiculturalism, Blacks in the West, 100 Years of Western Literature, the changing western environment, and women in public life, have involved numerous UW faculty and attracted scholars from throughout the United States.
More than an archive, library, or museum, the Center maintains an active in-house and traveling exhibit program and annually curates a major exhibit in cooperation with the University of Wyoming Art Museum for display in the museum’s galleries. In years past, the Center produced an exhibit in cooperation with the Wyoming Stock Growers Association examining the history of this organization, and in 1996, the Center, in partnership with the Albany County Historical Society and the Wyoming State Historical Society, completed an exhibit about the October, 1955, crash in the Snowy Range of United Airlines Flight 409. The Center’s active traveling exhibit program includes such topics as "Images of Black Wyoming," "Wyoming Water," "Rural Images: Life within the Family," and "Souvenirs of War: Vietnam and the Combat Snapshot." Another outreach activity of the Center is its work with schoolchildren and teachers. Staff present workshops for students in grades four through twelve at the Center and travel to classrooms around the state. We instruct the students in what constitutes primary sources, what can be learned from them, and how to use such sources in their research. The Center also assists the Wyoming State Historical Society with its History Day program for students in grades six through twelve. The acting director serves on the History Day Advisory Council, faculty and staff judge at the district and state competitions, and the Center provides scholarships to History Day students who wish to use our collections. Staff members have completed instructional packets for teachers on Wyoming themes including Native Americans, western railroads, and the Oregon Trail. Recently, a teachers’ guide examining the history of the World War II Heart Mountain Relocation Center has been added to the Center’s web site.*
The Center, in partnership with the Wyoming State Historical Society, has produced the Wyoming Historical Calendar since 1996. The Center and the UW History Department and the office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences, along with the Wyoming State Historical Society, saved the state’s historical journal, Annals of Wyoming: The Wyoming History Journal, when the Department of Commerce threatened to withdraw all support for the publication. Annals of Wyoming is now headquartered at the Center and produced under a cooperative agreement with the WSHS, Department of History, and the A & S Dean’s office.
In 1990 the University of Wyoming administration charged the American Heritage Center with integrating itself into the academic life of the university. The Center’s staff has committed much time and effort to fulfilling this charge. Previously, we focused primarily on collecting and the use of our collections by a few scholars. In a dramatic turnaround during the past decade, the Center became an important resource for many colleges and departments at the university, as well as Wyoming institutions, schools, and citizens. We now have much better finding aids and catalog our collections online. The reference staff and the curator of rare books continuously work with UW faculty to provide bibliographic instruction for their students or create classroom projects using the Center’s varied resources. The classes which use our materials come from the departments of Art, English, and History, the American Studies Program, the College of Education, and many University Studies classes in the College of Education, Arts and Sciences, Health Sciences, Agriculture, and the American Studies Program. The Center’s faculty make presentations to UW Libraries staff, Wyoming’s High School Institute, Wyoming Press Association, Wyoming Association of Art Educators, and classes from Wyoming’s elementary, middle, and high schools, and community colleges. The Center also has provided records management instruction to UW personnel. American Studies and History graduate students are employed to process collections, and internship opportunities for other UW students which provide valuable experience are available at the Center.
The University Libraries and the Center maintain a close working relationship. The Libraries manage collection development for the Hebard Collection of Wyoming printed material, which is stored and accessed under carefully supervised conditions here. The two institutions have recently signed an agreement which will allow access at the Center to the many Wyoming maps held by the Libraries and which are now part of the Hebard Collection. Also, in 1993, we took over responsibility for the university’s rare books. The Center has cataloged thousands of these books since that time. There is an ongoing project transferring the pre-1850s books from the University Libraries to the Center’s rare book library. We are currently working with the UW Library Council to produce an exhibit about diversity in Wyoming.
A recent example of the Center’s staff work with other departments to create an exhibit is the Family and Consumer Sciences Department jointly produced exhibit, "Flappers and Flower Children," examining women’s fashions from the 1920s and 1960s. In the spring of 1999, we will host several exhibits sponsored by the UW Art Department and we are always available to help with other exhibits like the photographic exhibit created in the fall of 1997 about the past presidents and members of the boards of trustees of the University of Wyoming.
In 1997 the Center signed a cooperative agreement with the Vice President of Academic Affairs, the Vice President for Research, the Department of Geology, and Wyoming’s State Historic Preservation Office to purchase a large format scanner. The scanner, housed and maintained by the Center, allows the university community and government agencies and businesses to digitize large format items such as maps and plans. Presently we are digitizing the Wyoming maps being transferred from the University Libraries to the Center. When the cooperative agreement expires in December, 1999, it will be reevaluated.
To assist with the integration into the academic life of the university, the Center’s Board of Faculty Advisors, drawn from different departments on campus, helps us develop, plan, and publicize the Center’s programs and activities, select the travel grant recipients, serve on ad hoc committees, advise on policies and acquisitions issues, and have authority over the deaccessioning of collections.
Research
It is common for many universities and colleges to have a special collections area, but very few have an institution of the size, significance, and reputation of the Center, with the wide variety of original materials and rare books which can be used by UW students and faculty for their education endeavors. Because of its vast number of collections documenting the history of Wyoming, the Center today is the first and best place for a researcher to learn about Wyoming’s heritage, and its collections of international significance are the best resource for the study of American political and economic development, culture, and other topics in American history. Finally, the Center through the University Archives maintains the history of the University of Wyoming.
The Center is a research institution with significant collections used by University of Wyoming students and faculty, scholars from other institutions, the media, and the general public. Numerous publications, documentaries, and student papers have resulted from the use of our collections. Each year we provide travel grants to scholars and graduate students from around the country to visit Laramie and research the collections. The arrangement and description staff continue to produce finding aids for the collections which meet national standards, and the cataloging archivist catalogs all newly processed collections into the CARL and OCLC bibliographic databases, thereby allowing greater access to the collections. The reference staff continues to promote the collections on campus and encourage university departments which have not yet utilized the Center’s resources to do so. They also produce teachers’ guides drawn from the Center’s collections which will be placed on the web site for use by university faculty and elementary, middle, and high school teachers around Wyoming and the country. The curator of rare books is in the process of cataloging books in the thirty-thousand volume rare book library and continually promotes the library by making special presentations to university classes and outside organizations. The demand for the use of the Center’s resources has grown dramatically during the 1990s. In 1990 the staff assisted about three hundred people per year. In 1998 the Center’s staff assisted more than five thousand patrons, including guests from CBS and CSPAN. This number does not include the many who have viewed the Center’s exhibits, participated in workshops, or attended the George A. Rentschler Distinguished Lecturer and the Center’s annual symposia.
Teaching
Since the early 1990s the Center has expanded its programming into teaching. The Center’s faculty offer a three-course archival sequence through the university’s History Department and the curator of rare books teaches a class titled "The History of Books and Reading" cross-listed through the College of Education and the History Department. We will continue to teach the archival courses and "The History of Books and Reading" course. If the Masters in Public History proposed by the History Department is instituted, the Center and its staff will be actively involved in that program. The Center’s collections will serve as a resource for the Alliance on Interdisciplinary and Multicultural Studies (AIMS) if the Interdisciplinary Division’s proposal is approved. The Center will maintain its partnership with the American Studies program by supervising and training graduate assistants and interns and possibly by hiring an academic professional shared with American Studies. In the past, the Center has sponsored interns from other departments and expects to do so in the future. In addition, each semester the reference and rare book staff provide bibliographic instruction to dozens of university classes as well as assisting UW faculty in devising class projects which utilize the Center’s collections. We plan to expand our teaching efforts to Wyoming’s elementary, middle, and high school teachers and classes.
Service
The Center takes its charge of service to the people of Wyoming quite seriously, as witness the partnership to produce the Wyoming Historical Calendar and the state journal Annals of Wyoming. In addition to our traveling exhibits, we have created a speakers’ bureau through which the Center’s professionals speak to organizations and the general public around the state about Wyoming history and the Center’s collections. The University of Wyoming recently formed a partnership with Cheyenne Frontier Days. The Center has enhanced this partnership by successfully beginning in 1998 a ten-year project to commemorate the history of Cheyenne Frontier Days using the Center’s collection material.
It is important that the university have a sound and viable university archives program, which will save money, protect the organization during litigation, ensure compliance with relevant laws, and ensure that records are made available to make sound decisions at the University. The Center now serves as the University Archives for UW. In 1995 President Terry Roark appointed the director of the Center as University Records Officer. Thus the Center administers the university’s records program, preserves the history of the University of Wyoming, and provides a reference center for UW information. As the university did not provide any additional funds for the management of the archives, in 1997 the Center dedicated about a third of one staff member’s time to the university archives. Since that time we have developed record retention schedules for many offices and departments on campus, including Academic Affairs, American Studies, Staff Senate, Telecommunications, Theatre and Dance, and the University Legal Counsel. Presently twenty-two of the University’s 183 units (12%) have records retention schedules. The goal is to increase this number to 20% by the year 2002. This job, however, requires at the minimum one full-time position and student assistance. To make the program self-supporting in future the university administration might have to be charged for services provided. The Center has storage space only for permanent records. Offices with records retention schedules not able to continue to store their temporary records will need to arrange for offsite storage. By managing the university’s records and information, the Center saves the university time, money, and space, provides a legal foundation for the management of the records, and preserves the history of the University of Wyoming.
To assist in the preservation of Wyoming’s history, the Center, in cooperation with the American Heritage Center Associates, in 1996 instituted the Citizen of the Century program. Chaired by Win Hickey, with Governor Jim Geringer and Senator Alan Simpson serving as honorary co-chairs, the program enables Wyoming to mark the end of the twentieth century by recognizing the achievements of outstanding citizens. People from around the state nominated nearly two hundred individuals who have influenced Wyoming history and that of the nation. Finalists in each of the eleven categories have been selected by volunteer committees, and the Citizen of the Century will be honored at a banquet to be hosted by UW President Phil Dubois on October 30, 1999. To enhance research opportunities, the Center will also acquire new manuscript materials. Senators Craig Thomas and Mike Enzi and U.S. Representative Barbara Cubin have already been contacted and we anticipate they will donate their congressional papers when they leave office. We will continue to acquire other material which documents Wyoming’s history so we can preserve the state’s heritage.
The George A. Rentschler Distinguished Lecturer series and the Center’s annual symposia have become important parts of our teaching mission. In addition to a public talk, the Rentschler lecturers always speak to university classes, providing their insights and sharing their experiences with students. The 1999 symposium, which will be co-sponsored by the Department of History, the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences, the American Studies Program, and the College of Education, will look at family life during the 1950s (it is titled "The Fifties Turn Fifty: The ‘Nuclear Family" and Postwar American Culture"). In 2000 the conference will examine the issue of cultural landscape, and be hosted in cooperation with the UW Art Museum as part of their "Landscape 2000" project. In 2002 the symposium will be co-sponsored by the American Studies Program and will examine the legacy of Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian, published in 1902.
The Center will continue to expand its web pages. During 1999 we will begin to put collection finding aids on the web so that our patrons will have greater access to our collections. Patrons can also access CARL through the Center’s web page, and we will continue to catalog our collections on CARL and OCLC so people worldwide can search our collections.
Future Challenges
As it is across campus, adequate funding is a major concern for the American Heritage Center. During the past ten years the university has decreased its funding, and in FY 1999 the Center is actually receiving fewer dollars from university funds than in 1985. Presently only forty percent of our funding comes from university and state sources all of which is used for salaries. The remaining sixty percent comes from a combination of endowments (the largest are the university-held Coe and Kuehn endowments, but there are also UW foundation-held endowments), grants, self-generated funding, and private gifts. Because of the decrease in university support, since 1991 a greater emphasis has been placed on private fund-raising. The American Heritage Center Associates, a fund-raising and advocacy group of the Center, was established in 1992. Its first chair, the Honorable Win Hickey, former legislator and first lady of Wyoming, has assisted in assembling a group of influential state and community leaders interested in preserving the history of UW, the state, and nation. All share a commitment to making the unique materials housed at the AHC available to researchers. They have funded student internships, exhibits, outreach activities, lectures, and the Center’s annual symposia. During the coming years the Associates will assist the Center’s efforts to raise major gifts and will actively identify, involve, steward, and solicit new donors.
However, private sector support cannot be substituted for a dwindling commitment of university funds. A strong public-private partnership is essential. If programs of the American Heritage Center were downsized or eliminated, there would be adverse effects which would far outweigh any apparent cost savings. If the Center’s manuscript collections and the records in the university archives were not well managed or accessible to researchers and the public, a good portion of the history of the university, Wyoming, and the nation would be unavailable. Without proper professional care, much of the valuable material would soon be damaged, stolen, or misplaced. The trust placed in the American Heritage Center and the University of Wyoming by donors of valuable collections would be breached, and the university would be subjected to the public criticism it properly received for decades prior to 1990. Furthermore, incalculable damage would be done to the university’s relationships with dozens of major financial benefactors.
Strengthening the public-private partnership is necessary to address three needs of the American Heritage Center. The curator of rare books is currently funded by one generous donor. An endowment of $1.2 million must be raised to ensure funding for this essential academic position. An endowment must also be established for the acquisition of collections and for the arrangement and description of those materials. Oftentimes people will donate their papers, but not the money to arrange and describe them. The papers then become a short-term burden until money can be raised to complete the processing. There are still small, but important manuscript collections sold on the open market which should be purchased, preserved, and made available. There is also the issue of space. With its current rate of collection acquisition, the Center has enough space to last until 2005. There are a number of strategies by which to meet the challenge. In 1997 private funds were available to install compact shelving in the rare book vault and cold storage unit. New funding can be used to purchase and install more space-efficient shelving units in the audio-visual storage area. Also, new funds could be used to hire more professional staff to process more of the Center’s collections, for when processed, collections often are reduced in size, being more efficiently arranged, with extraneous material removed. However, even with these strategies, the Center will shortly need to look at expansion of the building so that it can remain a viable, active, archival institution. Private fund raising can assist, and it is anticipated these needs will be included in the upcoming university capital campaign.
While salaries are a problem university-wide, the issue is especially difficult for the American Heritage Center. In 1995 the Center’s professional staff moved into faculty status, and it was expected at that time the UW administration would provide the funding to place Center faculty on a par with UW Libraries. This never happened. Currently the Center hires professional archivists with masters degrees for eighteen thousand dollars, far below what the University Libraries pays for positions with similar qualifications. The salaries for department heads, as well as faculty positions, are well below market level for comparable institutions around the country and on campus. Funding from restoring the payout on the Coe and Kuehn endowments to a typical university standard of five percent (from the current reduced four and a half percent), would enhance the programs currently supported by endowment funds.
Conclusion
The American Heritage Center is among the University of Wyoming’s programs with a national reputation and constituency. The Center draws scholars and researchers from throughout the U.S. and abroad, and its donors and benefactors include leading Americans from many walks of life. We occupy an important niche as the premier institution for the study of Wyoming history, and are among the five or six most important archives in the nation for research on the American West.
The Center has now fully integrated itself into the academic life of the University of Wyoming and complements the teaching, research, and service of many departments throughout the campus—in particular History, American Studies, Art, the University Art Museum, and the College of Education. Furthermore, the Center cooperates with the University of Wyoming Libraries on the care of the Hebard Collection. The Center manages at the highest professional standards the university’s rare book collection, one of the jewels of the University of Wyoming.
With the assistance and guidance of our Board of Faculty Advisors, the Center will continue to serve as an integral component of the university’s academic core through developing and managing a research archive and producing a range of scholarly and popular programs. The assistance and support of a committed and energized Board of Directors of the AHC Associates will enable the Center to enhance its public profile in Wyoming and develop the public-private partnership that will advance the Center’s mission. Our goal is basically this: in the decade ahead the Center plans to strengthen its position as the premier institution for the study of Wyoming history and establish a national reputation as the finest university-based historical archive in the United States.