Granfalloon

When I learned that the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) houses over 21 million unique materials I really didn’t believe it--I thought maybe their website had been mistaken. The number loses its meaning to me when I try to imagine a building that can hold that many things. But taking a walk through the building’s numerous vaults containing shelf after shelf of boxes upon boxes of manuscripts, books, paintings, photographs, maps, etc. etc. helps one to grasp the reality behind that number. And then you may ask yourself: what do you do with all that stuff? The first thing to do is, well, keep it there. And keep the room cool and dark and somewhat dry and for the most part, all the stuff should stay pretty much intact. But then what? I think most would agree that keeping all that stuff intact is pretty pointless if all it does is sit there in obscurity. And here we arrive at one of the many challenges of being an archivist: the balance between wanting to share archival materials