The Mudd Man­u­script Library has fin­ished the first phase of an NHPRC-funded project to process the most recent records of the Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union. After an exten­sive sur­vey, we have a record of the con­tents of each of the 2,461 boxes. This is an increase of nearly 500 lin­ear feet of mate­ri­als from what we had ini­tially esti­mated would be included in the project. To put that in per­spec­tive, instead of a project the length of 5.5 foot­ball fields, it is closer to 6.8 foot­ball fields. Many of the addi­tional mate­ri­als are case files and project files, but there is also a sig­nif­i­cant increase in the num­ber of orga­ni­za­tional records.

Emma Watt ’13 with 1200 boxes of ACLU Records

The records will be divided into the six series, closely fol­low­ing the arrange­ment of the ear­lier ACLU records to aid researchers in tran­si­tion­ing between the two sets:

Series 1: Orga­ni­za­tional Matters

Series 2: Project Files

Series 3: Sub­ject Files

Series 4: Legal Case Files

Series 5: Regional Offices

Series 6: Printed Mate­ri­als and Audio­vi­sual Materials

The next phase in the project is to cre­ate an inven­tory of the col­lec­tion, which will be the main tool for researchers to locate rel­e­vant doc­u­ments. Work began in Sep­tem­ber with the return of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity under­grad­u­ates to cam­pus who will do the actual work of typ­ing the inven­to­ries. The able assis­tants on this project are Jamie LaM­on­tagne (Class of 2011), Bran­don Joseph (Class of 2012), and Emma Watt (Class of 2013). Simul­ta­ne­ously, project archivist Adri­ane Han­son will be review­ing the records for mate­ri­als that should be restricted due to legal require­ments, ensur­ing that the max­i­mum num­ber of records can be opened at the com­ple­tion of the project.

Despite the addi­tional lin­ear feet involved, the project is still sched­uled to be com­pleted on time in Sum­mer 2012. We will pub­lish a tra­di­tional find­ing aid online to describe the con­tents of these records and also cre­ate a guide to link together the numer­ous col­lec­tions related to the Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union at the Mudd Man­u­script Library. In addi­tion to the records for ear­lier peri­ods in the ACLU’s his­tory, some of these include the per­sonal papers of: