James A. Michener Special Collection, University of Northern Colorado Libraries

This issue's guest columnist provides her own introduction: "The James A. Michener Special Collection at the University of Northern Colorado is compiling a comprehensive documentary picture of the author's writing career. Collections of published works and unpublished materials were originally placed in several libraries throughout the United States. Many of these collections, or copies of them, are now available in Greeley, Colorado, at the James A. Michener Library." James Michener was a saver. He kept letters he received and carbon copies of ones he wrote, family photographs by the score, his field notes and outlines, drafts and redrafts of his manuscripts, and lists of books he used. He kept his research material, maps of places he visited, recordings he liked, prizes and awards he won, and newspaper and magazine articles reporting what he thought and did. He recognized early on that he could not keep, move, preserve, organize, or deal with the volume of his personally important treasures. His timely realization was providential, because his writing career spanned more than fifty years; he wrote more than four hundred magazine and newspaper articles, numerous forewords and introductions to books written by other authors, and sixty-one books of his own, many of which are nonfiction, and some of which are surprisingly short. From 1936 to 1941, James Michener was on the faculty of the Colorado State College of Education in Greeley, where he earned a master's degree in education in 1937. Since then, the college has become the University of Northern Colorado and is the home of the James A. Michener Library. In the introduction to the university's centennial history, Shaping Educational Change, by UNC Professor Robert Larson, Michener expressed his admiration and gratitude for the experiences and education he received in Greeley. Of the library, he said: "Nothing has given me more personal pleasure than the dedication of the university's bright new library in my name."(1) Through the years, university and library administrators tried to maintain contact with the busy author; he, in turn, invested time and money to support the university and its libraries. He visited the campus several times to teach and, in 1972, spoke at the dedication of the university's new library building. In 1976, he left thirty-seven linear feet of Centennial papers with the library for its special collections. Several issues of the university's alumni magazine, The Spectrum, featured articles about James Michener; alumni who remembered him fondly were happy to hear about their famous teacher. Beginning in 1996, Michener supplied financial support for information literacy projects in the library, endowed a 5-million-dollar fund to buy library books, and gave start-up money for the James A. Michener Special Collection. He also donated to the university's CUMBRES program, which encourages minority students to go into teaching. Before his death in October 1997, James Michener chose the archives/special collections at the University of Northern Colorado Libraries to be the comprehensive repository for his professional and unpublished personal papers.(2) Since then, the executors of his estate have contacted the repositories known to hold segments of this documentation; they asked for cooperation in accomplishing Michener's intent. Options chosen by some of the repositories include the outright transfer of materials by deaccessioning them in favor of UNC's collection, or placing them on permanent loan at Michener Library. Others photocopied files for the Greeley repository. Microfilmed and digitized documents were considered as possible alternatives to hard copy transfers. Although these formats were not selected to date, in the future, they might be the preferred copy media for larger collections. A bit of historical background is necessary to explain the challenges posed by UNC's undertaking. The years of James Michener's career through 1969 are chronicled in papers left to the Library of Congress in Washington, D. …