From the Leopold Archives

On the Paper Trail with Aldo Leopold

by Bill Meier

The making of the man who wrote A Sand County Almanac, and whose life and thought continue to be relevant to a wide audience, is well-documented in the collection of Leopold Papers held at the UW-Madison Archives. Here, in paper form, is Aldo Leopold unedited: all the little scraps that made up his life, from handwritten journals and letters to photographs and newspaper clippings. Now, drawing upon generous funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the Aldo Leopold Foundation is nearing the completion of a project to digitize every last scrap of the Leopold Papers. A collaboration between the foundation, UW Archives and Digital Collections, and NHPRC, this project promises to make Leopold accessible at the touch of a button to scholars and schoolchildren worldwide.

Since May 2007, when I was hired by the foundation to work on the project, I have traveled on Leopold’s paper trail to ensure that each piece of correspondence, draft of an essay, and photograph was accounted for and properly filed before being sent to scanners at Digital Collections. I had previously worked at the Archives and quickly became aware through my duties in assisting patrons of the high demand for access to the Leopold Papers; now I am proud to participate in an effort that will greatly expand public awareness of, and access to, the life and work of Aldo Leopold. What impresses me most about the project is the uniform commitment to seeing it succeed. Each of the constituencies involved—archivists, preservation specialists, scholars, the Aldo Leopold Foundation, Digital Collections, and patrons—brings a different point of view on how best to proceed, but all remain dedicated to the project because it promises to multiply the possibilities for Leopold’s legacy to affect education, public policy, and awareness.

In addition to the educational benefits of digitization, the project represents a new dimension in preserving the physical collection. The effort to preserve the papers commenced with Leopold, whose elaborate filing system provided a place for every item. Following his death, family members, colleagues, and scholars added new material to the collection and prepared detailed finding aids to organize the materials. Now, in preparation for scanning, every item receives a thorough physical makeover: rusty staples and paperclips are removed and replaced by plastic fasteners; albums grown weary from age and use are refurbished and replaced; and Pine Cone newspapers will be encased in plastic to prevent further deterioration.

My mundane yet necessary task of preserving the collection is complemented by the need to reevaluate the meaning of the physical order of every document. The heightened visibility of the Leopold Papers as a series of webpages means that we must consider their intellectual presentation to the online user. For example, does it make sense for the user to browse through correspondence that is filed alphabetically or chronologically? How can we indicate to the virtual user that a letter or other artifact was an enclosure in another letter? These and many other issues highlight the challenges that a digital collection poses to archivists and user alike; therefore we continue to devote a great many conversations to such particulars as how best to capture in digital format a flower that Leopold sent to Estella in a letter.

Nowhere was the sequence of items more critical than in the multiple drafts that ultimately became Leopold’s most famous writings. Leopold wrote out, longhand, a first draft, and then he frequently attached to that draft small slips of paper that contained comments, criticisms, revisions, or references to maps and figures. Because of the poor state of much of the tape, staples, pins, paperclips, and other fasteners he used, each of these slips had to be removed (often they concealed the original writing beneath them). What followed was like putting together the pieces of a puzzle: we had to communicate with scanners how best to capture each stage of Leopold’s thought process in order to present to an online audience the evolution of his ideas from one version of an essay to the next.

The expert staff at UW Digital Collections take over at this point: I deliver box after box of material to them and they begin to create “metadata”—specific information about every item in the collection that will enable it to be clickable online. Digital Collections uses a flatbed scanner to capture most documents, but special cameras are also used for oversize material like Leopold’s bird song charts or even such three-dimensional memorabilia as his field glasses, bows, and arrows. Working with Digital Collection, I edit and then insert web links into an updated, online finding aid that will ultimately provide an interface between the patron and the digital collection. Careful description and scanning of every page reincarnates the Leopold Papers as digital documents.

Such details are no more irrelevant because they are mundane and technical; there is a close relationship between preserving the physical collection and presenting the intellectual message therein. Digitization of the Leopold Papers will grant them a new lease on life and enable Leopold’s ideas to be communicated to an ever-widening audience.

Bill Meier is a graduate student at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been coordinating the digitization of the Leopold Papers since 2007. When not working in the Archives, he is writing his dissertation in British history. He lives in Madison with his wife Courtney, and son Charlie.