The best choice is usually a scientist's home institution. If it has an appropriate archive, that is where scholars will look for the scientist's papers, which will become part of a collection that includes the institution's own records, papers of colleagues, and other materials that help to paint a picture of the person's working life. If your institution has no archive, or if it lacks the resources to accept your materials, then we invite you to consult with us at the Liebeskind Collection. We cannot store everything at UCLA, but we can help to identify the best and most suitable repository for historical materials and to work out a transfer schedule so that materials can be donated when you no longer need them. We can also set up on-line links between the Liebeskind Collection and other archives containing the papers of pain scientists and clinicians, so that scholars researching the history of the field can use our Web site to locate many of the resources they need.
Archival processing has three steps.
The first is preservation. As you may know, most paper used since the 1860s contains acids, which degrade the paper over time. That is why the pages of old volumes of the Journal of the American Medical Association crumble when you open them. Archival papers are filed in acid-free boxes to preserve them as long as possible. Particularly fragile items can be photocopied onto acid-free paper or kept in mylar sleeves.