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The State Papers were the principal executive instruments of the early modern English state. By 1610 they were kept in the State Paper Office, remaining there until 1854, when they were subsumed into the Public Record Office. This article examines whether the State Paper Office, over two centuries, had more characteristics of a modern archive or a library. To do so, it looks at the key archival processes of appraisal, and arrangement and description, as well as exploring whether, like modern archives, the records were understood contextually or, like a modern library, they were regarded as discrete containers of information.

Around 1940, a New York City organization known as the Dance Notation Bureau (DNB) began a decades-long effort to promote a system known as “Labanotation.” Designed to capture the ephemeral, three-dimensional complexity of dance on the flat surface of paper, the DNB believed that Labanotation held the key to modernizing the art form. Focusing on the period between 1940 and 1975, this article catalogues the Dance Notation Bureau’s efforts to make dance both “literate” and “scientific” and explores how these efforts contributed to broader transformations in the definitions of creativity, preservation, authorship, and dance itself.

This article examines the contracts at Warner Bros. for two productions by director Arthur Penn as a case study to consider how these agreements shaped production cultures during the emergence of New Hollywood. Through the 1950s, the studio employed production-distribution agreements that used strict controls and regulations to mimic its in-house procedures. But in the 1960s, it preferred short-form joint venture agreements that allowed more direct control in shaping the film’s production while turning the producers into self-regulators. As the contracts reveal, Warner Bros. reshaped their business to grant production culture control to producers while also ensuring the studios’ corporate role in the New Hollywood landscape.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the increasing use of documents to record everyday interactions generated information that became the basis of official identification practices. Based on this change, this article makes two arguments: (1) the increased use of documents in identification redefined identity in terms of procedure (systematic recordkeeping), and (2) it made concrete a relatively new conception of information as a “substance” that had presence in the world and was objective. Thus, the objectivity that became central to identification was tied to an object, to paper, that facilitated an understanding that these documents “contained” objective information.

The State Papers were the principal executive instruments of the early modern English state. By 1610 they were kept in the State Paper Office, remaining there until 1854, when they were subsumed into the Public Record Office. This article examines whether the State Paper Office, over two centuries, had more characteristics of a modern archive or a library. To do so, it looks at the key archival processes of appraisal, and arrangement and description, as well as exploring whether, like modern archives, the records were understood contextually or, like a modern library, they were regarded as discrete containers of information.

S o m e t i m e a f t e r J u l y 1851 , Mary Field Williams Gibson, a teenage orphan from Vermont, moved to Boston to seek her fortune. By the following summer, the seventeen-year-old had begun publishing poems, sketches, and short stories in several of the city’s “story papers,” weekly periodicals that imitated the format of conventional newspapers but were mostly filled with popular fiction. During the early 1850s, more than half a dozen such papers were based in Boston, each claiming a national readership numbering in the tens of thousands. In that crowded and competitive field, editors scrambled to procure a sufficient quantity and wide enough variety of original American fiction to appeal to a heterogeneous mass audience. “Stories, give us stories!,” the editors frantically demanded, and aspiring young authors of both sexes gladly answered their calls. And so, writing mainly under the pseudonym “Winnie Woodfern,” Gibson soon established herself as a regular contributor to several of Boston’s most popular story papers. Responding to the varied needs of her editors, Gibson mastered a remarkably eclectic repertoire, including prose reveries, light satirical sketches, comical Yankee dialect pieces, sentimental narratives

As a married graduate teaching assistant with a child and working on a masters degree in English, my principal income in 1958 was only about twenty percent of what it had been in my former calling, the used car business. What psychic income there was in the automobile business died with my father the year after I got my B.A., and when I returned to graduate school, I needed even more urgently to continue working part time as a singer and producer of radio commercials until I could land a full-time teaching job. At Temple University I took Joyce with Mabel Worthington, who at the time was working on an index for her co-authored book with Matthew Hodgart, Song in the Works of James Joyce. Since I had access to a studio in the Temple University radio station on Tuesday nights (making singing commercials for the Clements agency), and to professional Philadelphia actors who could do Irish accents, I offered to make a demonstration tape of a chapter of Ulysses with the actual music referred to in the text as background for Bloom’s thoughts. Mabel agreed to accept it in lieu of a term paper and I was on the way to a career glossing Joyce’s musical references. When I completed the M.A. at Temple I got a job at the State University of New York, College of Fredonia, and a scholarship to complete my Ph.D. at Buffalo, a major Joyce manuscript repository, where I was privileged to work with Tom Connolly. Fredonia’s specialty in the New York State system was music, and many of its undergraduates were card-carrying members of either the musicians union or the American Guild of Variety Artists. The campus radio station was right next door to my office, and after I smoozed around for a month or so with the student staff and faculty director, I thought