This post is the first of two by guest author and Archives intern, Ash Smith ’23 on the Bloom Ephemera.
About the Collection
The Bloom Ephemera Collection consists of roughly 20,000 pamphlets, fliers, newsletters, magazines, and other ephemeral publications from American left wing and radical organizations – published between 1960 and 1980 – that were compiled by the Liberation News Service.
In 1967, Marshall Bloom (AC 1966) and Raymond Mungo of Boston University co-founded the Liberation News Service to deliver news to “underground” presses, college/high-school presses, radio stations and independent newspapers as an alternative to established mainstream news services. These papers, presses, and publishers would send the LNS one copy of every issue their stories were published in. Around 3,500 newspapers were moved from the Ephemera collection and became the Marshall Bloom Alternative Press Collection.
Taking Inventory
As the processing archivist assigned to this collection, my job is to create an inventory of what exists in these mystery boxes. The pieces of information I’m capturing are: title, date, and place of publication, authors and organization names, issue numbers, and size. We’re also interested in who, if anyone, is listed as the recipient of the document, noting any deleterious conditions like tears or mold and sharing any interesting notes!
It’s a pleasant surprise when I can find all of this information just by flipping through the document, but sometimes omissions or errors require additional research. Searching can be as simple as visiting a wikipedia page – when looking up the publication city of a reprinted essay from a popular journal for example. But research can also be challenging if I’m trying to find details about lesser-known collectives, authors, and newsletters. In these cases, with the limited information I do have about a publication, I’ll check leftist digital archives – like libcom.org for digitized scans or The Anarchist Library for text of manifestos, essays, and other statements with attached creator information.
Our Special Collections cataloger Rebecca Henning also introduced me to the union catalog Worldcat — which allows me to see if any archive or library has a catalog record of the document I can base my entry on. Though the ephemera materials might seem niche or obscure out of context, many are printed publications that end up in many hands and many places. If I can’t find the document on WorldCat, it doesn’t mean that the copy we hold is unique – only that the libraries featured in WorldCat don’t have it, and the document may not have a clear digital paper trail.
I still do the work of searching for the sake of future access. If an archival document isn’t tagged/named with key information, people may not be able to find it. And the Ephemera is important; there’s a wealth of information in these boxes about global leftist movements, strategies, talking points, and grievances that I’ve been moved and mobilized by.
Early Arranging
Archivists have guiding principles for processing collections that provide a technical foundation for the work. And what’s become clear as I’ve worked across collections is that my processing approach shifts depending on the size, scale, condition, and format of the material and also on my interest in the lives that make up the collection. Alongside the intellectual and technical steps, I’m learning how to trust my curiosity as a mode of engagement that is not unprofessional but informs aspects of process and decision making.
I was working on the Bloom Alternative Press Collection when Preservation Manager Mariah Leavitt first introduced the Bloom Ephemera to me as the Alt Press’ more unwieldy parent collection – large, unprocessed, and full of unknowns. I flipped through the first box and found small publications and single sheets on organizing for neighborhood safety, prison abolition, and other topics of personal & political importance.
I also discovered early on that I could not easily recover a paper in the collection’s current state, as around 250 individual publications were stacked in no
discernible order (left). My enthusiasm toward this collection project was born not just from the material but the eagerness to share and talk about these buried publications with others. So I started to imagine how I might organize the files to help with their retrieval.
I decided to group the documents by very general themes and put them in old folders as a temporary solution (right). The boundaries between each category – cooperatives, university presses, labor strikes, youth organizing – are porous, but even this basic, messy remediation has helped me find things I only have a vague memory of.
And though basic, grouping these documents was still a pretty time consuming process. There were moments I’d spend hours working to be left with a box that barely seemed to thin out. I had to pause and ask myself if I was spending too much energy creating a temporary order that future archivists might dismantle. But in reflection, I realize how necessary the decisions I made were for my access needs and hopefully those of future patrons who might make art, think, talk, and journal on these publications while the Ephemera undergoes the longer term work of being processed and made accessible via finding aid.
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