Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    College Advising
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
The Chronicle Review

Archiving My Life

By Linda K. Kerber April 27, 2015
Archiving My Life 1
Justin Renteria for The Chronicle Review

I’m a historian. Books are my trade. A historian guards memories, including her own; a historian’s duty is to gather books, to save correspondence, to keep. I filled my shelves — in my office, in my home — to overflowing.

Despite repeated resolutions to build coherent collections (of first editions in the history of women, of ephemera from the days of the Vietnam War), I acquired my books haphazardly. Books by historians. Books I assigned to my students. Books written by my friends. Books I wrote. Or edited. Books I wanted to read. Books I read carefully. Books I intended to read but didn’t. Books I never intended to read.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

I’m a historian. Books are my trade. A historian guards memories, including her own; a historian’s duty is to gather books, to save correspondence, to keep. I filled my shelves — in my office, in my home — to overflowing.

Despite repeated resolutions to build coherent collections (of first editions in the history of women, of ephemera from the days of the Vietnam War), I acquired my books haphazardly. Books by historians. Books I assigned to my students. Books written by my friends. Books I wrote. Or edited. Books I wanted to read. Books I read carefully. Books I intended to read but didn’t. Books I never intended to read.

I’ve got worn books from my days at Barnard (Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return), graduate school at Columbia (all of Richard Hofstadter’s); my husband’s from Columbia’s required “Contemporary Civilization” course, anthologies in which no woman except maybe Hannah Arendt seemed ever to have had a thought worthy of study. Biographies and autobiographies. Some fiction, some poetry (Robert Penn Warren’s Brother to Dragons: “All night long History drips in the dark / and if you step where no light is / the floor will be slick to your foot”).

These books conjure up my life. Thus Martin Duberman’s Charles Francis Adams — there’s not much in it now for me, but it surely helped me develop a sense of the rhythm of language. Another book so dense that I’ll never open it again, but I once chaired the committee that gave it a prize, so now it’s part (isn’t it?) of my own history.

Now that I’ve retired from teaching, I have to clear out of my office — 226 feet of shelves of books; 21 file drawers in three cabinets and two desks; four cartons of copied research materials, though I no longer have any idea what is in them.

This is much harder than anyone warned me it would be. “Freaking out” is not a phrase usually in my vocabulary, but now it could be the title of this essay. I make a first pass, pulling several dozen books off the shelves and offering them to the graduate students’ book sale. I segregate many of the women’s-history books and offer them to my successor, but she already owns most of them.

I consult old friends from other universities. One took a few home and then arranged for everything else to be boxed up for a good cause and hauled off by the relevant nonprofit organization, which was happy to have them. Another friend, who was at the center of the psychological transformation of what it means to be a feminist historian, did something similar with her books and (I can’t believe this!) trashed her files.

Over crepes one Sunday morning I whine about this to a friend, a wise psychiatric social worker. He warned me back in 2011, when I was cheerful about the prospects for my retirement: “All very well, but don’t be surprised if you find it harder than you predict.” He was right, and not in any of the ways I would have predicted. Now he hears me out — why is it so hard to give away my books?

“Oh, Linda,” he breathes.

“It’s not about the books you won’t read. It’s about death.”

ADVERTISEMENT

The rightness of that stuns me. Of course. It’s about time, which once stretched out before me, time without end. Now the time has an end, though I don’t yet know precisely when it will be.

The books are relatively easy:

Books that speak to my current research interests, books that our grandchildren might want to read someday, books that have inscriptions (even if I don’t remember the signer, it seems crude to give them away), books that have an aura — these are boxed to come home with me (triggering another wave of deaccessioning there).

Then, one book at a time — I select books specifically for a former student or a colleague or a friend, a gift that I discover does not hurt to send away with the inscription “From my shelves to yours …"

ADVERTISEMENT

Books that a start-up library will welcome, like 10 volumes of the Papers of James Madison. These volumes and others fill six boxes and counting for a new college whose founding faculty includes a former student.

Finally, the books that don’t fit the first three categories, for the Graduate History Society’s annual book sale.

As for the papers — though I’ve relied on archives since the days of writing my senior thesis, I have no idea how to make one. But seasoned archivists teach me how to think. Under their gaze, my messy teaching materials are transmuted into valuable assets. For the University of Iowa, the materials are significant for its history of women’s studies, and indeed, for its own history. For the Schlesinger Library of the History of Women in America at Radcliffe, my teaching materials are evidence of the rebellion that forced women’s history into the academic curriculum the 1960s and 70s and kept it there.

Guided by a generous former graduate student with extensive archival experience, my papers slowly emerged from their cabinets. We sorted them into categories: biographical — CVs, awards, ephemera from college and graduate school; book manuscripts, arranged in subseries for each title, in chronological order of first date of publication, including correspondence with libraries about research, with publishers and editors, with co-editors; essays and talks, in chronological order; teaching materials, organized by courses taught, with syllabi, examinations, some lecture notes; correspondence, some organized chronologically, some by correspondent.

ADVERTISEMENT

And so on. As I write, two of us have already invested 50 hours each, and my guess is that each of us will spend at least another 30 hours. So far, we have filled more than two chin-high recycle containers.

As we work, I cry out to my younger self: “Date every syllabus! Put the year on every letter! Link each syllabus with your notes on what worked and what didn’t! Print out substantive emails! Don’t keep piles of duplicates! Track your essays from handwritten to print! Why didn’t you take a picture of the students at the end of every course? Indeed, why didn’t you make sure we took more photographs? (Few of the colleagues who welcomed me when I joined the department are now alive; I have no pictures of us at informal gatherings.)

I ricochet between demoralization (how could I have been so sloppy?) and delight: From the debris emerge letters from old friends and former students I have forgotten I ever received, essays I don’t remember writing, the only poems I ever wrote.

Sometime in January I stopped freaking out. Once a book has been marked for elsewhere, it ceases to trouble me; indeed, I reserve future time for future books, yet unwritten. The fat folders, stuffed cabinets, and piles of paper that once testified to a productive, busy life now register as clutter. Clear surfaces and open bookshelves calm my spirit.

It’s OK to be a historical artifact. The bare shelves and empty drawers of 117 Schaeffer Hall await my successor. May there be joy in filling them.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Opinion
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Joan Wong for The Chronicle
Productivity Measures
A 4/4 Teaching Load Becomes Law at Most of Wisconsin’s Public Universities
Illustration showing a letter from the South Carolina Secretary of State over a photo of the Bob Jones University campus.
Missing Files
Apparent Paperwork Error Threatens Bob Jones U.'s Legal Standing in South Carolina
Pro-Palestinian student protesters demonstrate outside Barnard College in New York on February 27, 2025, the morning after pro-Palestinian student protesters stormed a Barnard College building to protest the expulsion last month of two students who interrupted a university class on Israel. (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP) (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)
Campus Activism
A College Vows to Stop Engaging With Some Student Activists to Settle a Lawsuit Brought by Jewish Students
LeeNIHGhosting-0709
Stuck in limbo
The Scientists Who Got Ghosted by the NIH

From The Review

Vector illustration of a suited man with a pair of scissors for a tie and an American flag button on his lapel.
The Review | Opinion
A Damaging Endowment Tax Crosses the Finish Line
By Phillip Levine
University of Virginia President Jim Ryan keeps his emotions in check during a news conference, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022 in Charlottesville. Va. Authorities say three people have been killed and two others were wounded in a shooting at the University of Virginia and a student is in custody. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
The Review | Opinion
Jim Ryan’s Resignation Is a Warning
By Robert Zaretsky
Photo-based illustration depicting a close-up image of a mouth of a young woman with the letter A over the lips and grades in the background
The Review | Opinion
When Students Want You to Change Their Grades
By James K. Beggan

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin