Big finds aren't necessarily the papers of Really Important Person - sometimes their papers are really disappointing, because during the really productive phase of their career they were moving about a lot and not keeping things, so it's only the later stages that are well-documented. Sometimes a less eminent person who Knew Everybody's papers or who was just a massive preserver of records leaves much more exciting papers. And size doesn't always matter: we just acquired and I'm just processing a small collection of papers of a woman who went out to work in India in the early C20th - and wrote regular long letters home to her family about her life there.
One of our best collections is the papers of someone who was probably the kind of bore people avoided at parties, but an absolutely obsessive documenter of a very wide range of interesting phenomena over his very long life - pretty much something for everybody there.
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Big finds aren't necessarily the papers of Really Important Person - sometimes their papers are really disappointing, because during the really productive phase of their career they were moving about a lot and not keeping things, so it's only the later stages that are well-documented. Sometimes a less eminent person who Knew Everybody's papers or who was just a massive preserver of records leaves much more exciting papers. And size doesn't always matter: we just acquired and I'm just processing a small collection of papers of a woman who went out to work in India in the early C20th - and wrote regular long letters home to her family about her life there.
One of our best collections is the papers of someone who was probably the kind of bore people avoided at parties, but an absolutely obsessive documenter of a very wide range of interesting phenomena over his very long life - pretty much something for everybody there.