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Deborah L. Miller Narrator

Lora Bloom Interviewer

June 15, 2000

Minnesota Historical Society

Saint Paul, Minnesota LB: This is Lora Bloom. Today I’ll be conducting an interview with Deborah L. Miller. Debbie is the research supervisor with the Publications and Research Department at MHS [Minnesota Historical Society]. Today is the 15th of June 2000. We’ll be doing this interview here in the Acquisitions Room at MHS. Debbie, what I wanted you to start out with today was to tell me about how you came into the Research Department and how you came to MHS to start with. DM: Okay. Well, I was wrapping up my graduate degree, a Master’s in Scandinavian studies at the University of Minnesota, and thought the Minnesota Historical Society might be an interesting place to work. So I came over to apply for a secretarial job because I had some skills in that area, figuring maybe I could maybe work from there into something that I would enjoy more. Ardene Flynn, who was [Director] Russell Fridley’s secretary at the time and office manager, took one look at me and my résumé and said, “I don’t think so. You’re not going to stick around here very long. But Carlton Qualey is hiring research assistants for the Minnesota Ethnic History Project starting in the fall. So why don’t you come back then?” So I did, and Carlton hired me. I had the educational training and the language skills that he was interested in. He wanted people who could read sources in a variety of languages for that project, so I got on as a half-time research assistant for Qualey, who was working through the Publications and Research Division under June Holmquist. Then to keep my husband and myself alive, I also took on ten hours of work a week at the gift shop. So that was my beginning. LB: Was that in 1975? DM: Yes. LB: Okay. Because I know you just celebrated your twenty-fifth year.

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DM: That’s right. That’s right. Which is why we are here, I assume. LB: Yes. I believe it was in 1983 that you became supervisor of the Research Department. DM: That's right. LB: I think I had read that in one of your reports. And I read that you felt that the mission of the department was somewhat unclear. I wonder if you could talk a bit about that. DM: Sure. I had done a number of things up until that point. I had been a research assistant, had been an assistant editor, and I’d worked on Minnesota History magazine for a year. The Research Department, as I recall, was really started when June Holmquist, who had run the Publications and Research Division for a long time, decided that she wanted to step down from that job and create a small department. I would be her assistant, and then the first job would be to produce a book, a new one-volume history of Minnesota, with funds that had been provided by the St. Paul Companies, in connection with their anniversary, a big anniversary for them, because they’re the oldest corporation in Minnesota, and the Historical Society, I think, is the oldest organization, or something along that line. So June had decided that the two of us would do that, and we would essentially be the research department. Then she died very suddenly of cancer, so there wasn’t really a slot, that is to say an opening, for the research supervisor, because it was something that she was sort of moving over to rather than creating a new position in another kind of way. So after some discussion among managers, it was decided that I would just be moved up and become the research supervisor. My first job, main job, would be to move that new one-volume history of Minnesota project along. What that turned into after some—we tried to make it work as a three-author book. William Lass from Mankato State University, Lucile Kane from our staff, and Russ Fridley were going to be the three authors. I think it became clear that Russell, even with good research assistants, wasn’t going to have the time to do his piece of it while he was running the Society. So we kind of ground to a halt on that. Jean Brookins, the new head of Publications and Research and I went back and redesigned the project so that it became a collection of essays on twentieth century Minnesota, and we identified what kinds of topics we wanted to have covered, found authors, negotiated with them for writing and some research assistance, and eventually published a book on the subject—Minnesota in a Century of Change: The State and Its People Since 1900. LB: Do you think June had a clear idea of where she wanted Research to go before she died?

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DM: I think she had a clear idea of what she wanted that book to become, and I think that she may have thought that the research department would be a kind of way of getting more material for the press to publish, that it could be a good channel, that we could be commissioning people or working with people in a variety of ways. She had arranged for a small amount of money from the legislature—with John Wood's able assistance—to be devoted to grants to people to help pay their research expenses. So I think with that small program in place and her ideas about what we ought to be publishing, then she was going to take a step back into how you get the material that you want to publish in the first place. I think that was kind of the way that she was thinking about the research department. LB: So at that time it was very project-driven. DM: Yes, yes. LB: Is there a time when you started to feel a mission, sort of a routine that you wanted to move things toward, toward a point where you sort of visualized something? DM: I worked hard for a number of years with Jean Brookins' guidance to create more of a sense of a research department, other than just a funnel for what became the MHS Press. I think one way in which that happened, the legislature for a number of years gradually increased the amount of dollars that we had for a research grant program. For some time that was handled very informally. If people came to us that we knew and they had an idea and it sounded good, then we gave them a grant to help fund some of their research. Jean and I, after John McGuigan left as managing editor, really developed that [research grants] into a more formal program, the kind of program that it is today. That, I think, is a big piece of what the research department has become. That’s only a piece of it, but a pretty important one. So that now we have the three deadlines per year. I recruit people to apply for research grants in areas that we are particularly interested in seeing more work done in. We figured out what some of those areas are, and we set up a number of types of grants to try to encourage more work in a variety of areas. So we have major project grants for book projects or other large-scale projects, oral history documentation projects, for example. We have article grants for people who are going to be researching an article for Minnesota History. We have visiting scholar grants because a piece of this grant program that has been very important to me has been the idea that you need to make some resources available to bring people to the collections of the Society, even if they are not necessarily working on a Minnesota history topic. That’s because I think the collections here cover a very wide range of things, beyond strictly Minnesota history. So we set up that piece of the program, and then a couple of years later we set up a mini-grant program that was for only five hundred dollars. It went to a wider variety of people, because it

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was a fairly modest amount of money, and it was also more flexible because you could really apply at any time, and it would only take a month before you got some kind of a decision. So I think all of those categories of grants that we’ve worked on have been helpful and have turned up some very interesting projects for the Society, many of them for ultimate publication by the Press, and for Minnesota History. LB: I wanted to talk a bit about the role that research plays within MHS and as an organization. Maybe you could just say a bit about what the research department’s role has been over the years with MHS, and has it changed over the years, how the role evolved, and so forth. DM: Okay. I’d be glad to. When I started working at the Society in the mid and late 1970s, I would say that the two parts of the Society that had the highest status—Russell Fridley, I think, was most interested in what those divisions were doing—were the Division of Archives and Manuscripts and the Publications and Research Division. As a result, those people who ran those divisions got a fair number of resources to do what it was they needed to do, and they had a fair amount of power in terms of institutional decision-making as well. So you could say that when I came into what became the research department, it was kind of at the top of the heap in terms of status. When we moved into the new building, I think things changed quite a bit. Even in anticipation of the move, it became clear, I think, to management that we needed to work a lot harder on our numbers and get the building filled and make sure that we had large numbers of people at the various programs that we did and that sort of thing. As a result, I think the publications and research area became somewhat less important than it had been. The Division of Archives and Manuscripts had already been merged into a larger research center or library. That’s a whole other aspect of institutional politics and evolution. But I think that research, while it is still in the institution’s mission statement as an essential piece of what we do, has taken much more of a back seat to some of our outreach activities that reach larger numbers of people. I have tried to make the case over those years that it’s not possible to do good outreach to school kids, publications, public programs, and exhibits unless you’ve got the basic research done that you can draw on to repackage it for different audiences. I think that nobody exactly disagrees with that. It just hasn’t been as high-profile an activity in institutional terms as it was earlier. So that’s been an interesting and occasionally frustrating kind of evolution. LB: Why do you think that happened at that time? Do you think it had to do with the move to the new building and the pressure was on? DM: Definitely, definitely. I think that the new people who were hired to do exhibit work had a very different idea as well about what exhibits ought to contain that did not necessarily begin

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with the kind of research that the exhibits that we’d done in the old building—wasn’t the same kind of research. They were much more interested in starting with what people already knew and giving them some additional information that allowed them to connect with their own lives. I think the previous exhibits staff, Nick Westbrook, Joan Seidl, Carolyn Gilman, in particular, looked at our collections to see what was very strong. I think the Hidatsa exhibit was a wonderful example of a collections-driven exhibit that was absolutely excellent. I still hear comments from museum professionals about that exhibit today. I think that also they just thought about what kinds of things people would like to see. They revisited some perennial topics in Minnesota history like the fur trade, but looked at them very differently. It was a very different kind of research topic project that was involved in the old exhibits than has been involved in the new ones. So they still do a lot of digging, but not all of that is in our own collections. It’s been much more working with people outside the Society. LB: Would it be fair to say that in the early days of the department, research was undertaken more for its own sake rather than to support other functions of the Historical Society? DM: Possibly, although I think that June Holmquist always was thinking in terms of a publishable product. She had that very much in mind, whether it was an article for Minnesota History magazine or a book for the press to publish. I think occasionally there were research projects that the idea was to help develop the collections as well. So that when we took on—this is really after June’s time—when Jean Brookins and Russ Fridley decided that we ought to document radicalism in twentieth century Minnesota at the suggestion of Carl Ross, that was a kind of project where it was clear that we would develop collections in that area and that we would be able to spend some time identifying material that was already in the collections. We would get some more oral histories done, and we hoped that we would get Carl Ross himself to write a memoir, an autobiography, as one of the products of that project. But the publications piece of it was somewhat less in the forefront than some of the other opportunities, I think, that Russell and Jean saw. Indeed, we’re still hoping that Carl might produce a memoir some day. But there have been a number of articles in Minnesota History based on the radicalism project research, and I think those have all been very good. We have a wonderful collection of materials, and a published bibliography that guides more people to the material that we have, including the oral history interviews that were done as part of the project itself. So I guess the answer to your original question is, yes, there used to be somewhat more research done for its own sake, but even then there was certainly the intention that there would be some kind of publishable product involved as well. LB: Something else that I picked up in going through your annual reports was that you feel a commitment, that part of your role should be representing the users’ perspective and being an

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advocate for the users of our resources. I wonder if you could just say a bit about why you think that’s important and how successful you’ve been able to be. DM: It’s been kind of a mixed bag, but I think it’s an important role. I think that in recent years I’ve come to see my role as research supervisor as the sort of person in the institution who’s particularly interested in supporting scholarly work on Minnesota history, and that involves both the grants and the set of research offices that we have in the [Elizabeth K.] Knight Suite in Publications and Research. But it also involves, and has from very early on, an interest in making sure that we have the materials that we need to support that kind of scholarly research. So, early on, after I became research supervisor, I started working with Pat Coleman, our acquisitions librarian, on making sure that we got all dissertations and master’s theses that related to Minnesota history. We had some of them in the library before that time, but there wasn’t really a systematic way of making sure that we identified what was out there, what had been produced. Not just at the university, but in other places as well. So I think that that’s one of the examples of my interest in stimulating collecting in certain areas that I thought would make the collections better for researchers interested in a whole variety of Minnesota history topics. Then another area of that has been my work on the Acquisitions Committee, which I’ve been a member of for many years. I have tried to, as items were proposed for acquisition or disposition, to make a case one way or another for what I thought researchers would find most useful. I think I’ve gotten a reputation as someone who wants to take everything. I don’t think that’s quite fair, but it’s true that the way that I see historical research proceeding, whether it’s done by historians or people in other fields, is that it’s difficult to do it on the basis of a sampling. That is, occasionally there’s been discussion of things like, well, we can’t collect all county records on whatever, county probate records, and maybe if we just picked out, you know, twelve counties in the state that would be representative of a number of different kinds of ethnic groups and geographical distribution and regional variation and so on. But my response to that has been, that’s not the way historians work necessarily. They're not always social scientists who come at it from a sampling point of view. If they have a source about a woman who migrated from Sweden, and she and her husband started farming in Mille Lacs County, and they want to follow that source, which is a reminiscence, then they need the Mille Lacs County information. The information from Chisago County or Pine County isn’t going to do them any good. So I’ve tried to make that case, too. Collections people have been up against the problem of resources for acquiring things and storage-space issues over the years. I just think that that’s a way it’s been—I’ve tried to speak from the users' perspective, both for people outside the Society as well as for fellow staff members who have not been on the Acquisitions Committee. So things that I thought that editors

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would need to use or exhibit researchers before they got to be on the committee, tried to think about the whole user group and what would be useful for those folks. LB: You went into another area that I wanted to ask you about and that I found interesting, and that is your involvement on the Acquisitions Committee, some of your involvement there. I wonder if you’d say a bit about how much you think research demands should drive what the Historical Society collects or how we collect, and what kind of influence research trends should have on collecting. DM: That’s a good question. I think that with resources as limited as they are now, that collectors can’t afford to ignore the users of their collections, that they have to be paying some attention to the kinds of materials that users want. At the same time, I think that acquisitions people, no matter what they’re acquiring, curators, need to take advantage of their own expertise to be collecting what they think is important to document about the present so that future researchers—and we don’t know what those trends will be—will also have some good materials to work from. So I think it really needs to be a balance. I wish that there were more conversations actually between archivists in particular and historians and other scholars. Because my experience of that over the years as I listen to one side or the other is that they’re usually not talking to each other. Archivists just sort of smack themselves on the forehead and say, “Well, they think we should take everything. They have no idea what constraints we're up against.” And then the historians assume that of course we’ll take everything that somebody actually thinks to save and has offered to us. So the idea that there’s some limit on what can be taken and that there are standards set up about what gets taken and why and the format of things that we’re able to take, I think those groups need to be talking a lot more to each other than they actually are, and I think that it needs to happen on both sides. But the people that we have more of here at the Society are collectors, and so that’s something that I’d kind of like to see happen on a regular basis, that we just have a chance to consult with scholars who are using collections, because I think that the commitment the Society has to its collections is a very strong one. That’s really a basic part of the mission, and the resources that we spend on those collections are enormous. If we don’t get good use of the collections, then you start to wonder about how long you can keep up making those resources available. I think that it’s been very heartening over the course of my time here to see the increase of people interested in their family histories, house histories, and other kinds of personal projects. To see the increase in use by students at History Day, I think is wonderful. But I also think the kinds of records that those folks use are fairly limited. It’s clear what kinds of things that genealogists are interested in, for the most part. The History Day students, because of the constraints on their time as well as their skills, have, you know, sort of a top level of collections, I would say, that they kind of look at. Scholars really go into and make more thorough use of many, many kinds of collections from railroad records to personal papers. I think that that we need to continue and

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expand that kind of use of the collections in order to be able to keep justifying the care and acquisitions of the collections that we have. LB: How would you say the Historical Society has done over the years in promoting research in various ways? DM: Well, I think that’s been largely my job since I became the research supervisor. Well, that’s not entirely true. Promoting scholarly research has been a lot of my job, and certainly other people in the publications and research area have played a large role as well. LB: How about how responsive has the Society been able to be to the needs of researchers? DM: Well, I think with our grants program we’ve been able to be responsive to those kinds of needs. I think that with the opportunity of the new building, I think Jean Brookins came up with the idea of a suite of offices. The library staff did not want stack studies anymore in the new building, so Jean came up with the idea that we would have a set of offices that weren’t in the stacks, but they could be used in the same way as stack studies are often used. I think that’s been a wonderful opportunity for scholars to come here, have a place to base themselves. They’ve been able to get stack access, which is very rare for people other than staff members here. I worked very hard to set up monthly research meetings where everybody in those offices and retired staff who are still working on research projects, and sometimes people who have been in the offices but are now working on other kinds of things, get together and talk about their research projects. There’s a lot of cross-fertilization. People like Alan Woolworth, Lucile Kane, and Rhoda Gilman, who know enormous amounts about the collections here, come every month. They have answers to questions about when we got certain kinds of things or why we don’t have other kinds of things. They can suggest certain collections to look at. So it’s been very fruitful and especially for people who are away from their own institutions, who don’t have a peer group to go to. David Mauk’s [book] project on the Norwegians in the Twin Cities, for example, he’s been very enthusiastic about this monthly meeting where he’s been able to get some very good feedback on what he’s up to with that project. I know that a couple of graduate students [Jocelyn Wills and Mary Wingerd] who worked on dissertations here for a year in the research part of that work have found it very, very helpful, because they were far away from their institutions, Texas A&M and Duke. And just to have a group of people that cared about what they cared about, knew what they were talking about, and were able to give them some feedback on a regular basis [was valuable.] So I think that’s been a very good thing about the new building and the opportunities that we’ve had here. In terms of supporting other kinds of research, I think it’s been a bit of a struggle in some ways. The number of people on the reference staff hasn’t really increased very much since we moved into the building, even though I think the number of people researching their family history, certainly on History Day also, has increased enormously. So I think that piece of it has been a

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little bit more questionable. I really would like to have seen more support for additional staff in the Reference Department. I think one of the difficult things about that has been that when scholars do come in, the amount of time that the reference staff has to spend with them is very, very limited. When I first started working at the Society, the reference staff in the library and at the Division of Archives and Manuscripts got to know scholars very well. They looked out for things for them. They had a very different kind of relationship with the people doing scholarly work than they are able to do now. I think that is somewhat of a frustration for members of the reference staff. Some of them, I believe, have left the Society on that account. I think it’s too bad, because they are the people that know the collections very well, that have the chance to make connections with the scholars doing research. So I’ve tried in a variety of ways when Dallas Lindgren—that was part of her job assignment on the reference staff—I would suggest to many scholars that we gave grants to or that had offices in the Knight Suite, that they consult with her and other members of the Reference Staff for more advice about MHS collections. It’s probably true of card catalogs as well. The more they can list the topics and manuscript collections and that sort of thing as part of what get searched in the PALS [online library catalog] database, the more likely it is that people will find everything that there is. I think, for instance, that the WPA [Works Progress Administration] collection that we have, a manuscripts collection, is a wonderful collection on all kinds of topics, but it’s not something that researchers will find unless they are specifically looking for WPA material, without somebody saying to them, “You really ought to look at WPA records.” So I think that that’s a role that I can play to some extent after twenty-five years here, and I regularly do give people advice, whether staff or outside scholars. But I think that the reference staff keeps up much more with that kind of thing, and I miss their opportunity to spend more time with scholars than they really are able to now. Does that answer your question? LB: Yes. And you just sort of touched on something else that I wanted to ask you about, and that’s this role that you personally sort of take on, and that’s this person that’s this contact point of information, linking up people with other people and topics with people and resources with people and so on. I’ve picked up somewhere in your reports that you sort of take on this role somewhat reluctantly because it’s very time-consuming. I wonder how you feel about that role. DM: Well, at this point, and I’d say for the past few years, I’ve felt like it’s probably one of the key things that I actually do around here. It’s a very behind-the-scenes kind of role. I’m very comfortable with that. Initially, I think there were some questions from my supervisors about, well, “What does she do with herself all day?” When I wrote up my annual reports, I think there was an expectation that I would be doing more research and not so much administrative and consulting work. So as that has evolved over time, and I myself have come to know more people

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who are working on different topics, and more of our collections, both, I have seen that as a more important part of what I do rather than trying to make excuses to my supervisors for spending so much time helping people connect with either resources or with other people. At this point, I think that’s one of the useful roles that I play institutionally, is that people can call me up and say, “Well, who do you know is working on this? Who can we get as a consultant for that?” And I will have some names to mention. For example, Kate Roberts recently e-mailed me. They are trying to get an advisory committee, a scholarly advisory committee, together for the St. Anthony Falls huge project. She had several names and wanted to know what I thought about those people and then who else would I recommend. So I just sat down and just talked about, “I think these couple geographers would be good and here’s a couple of those and I think a variety of type of people. I think urban historians would be good, and here’s a couple of those.” She seemed to find that very helpful in at least having a list that they could pick from in trying to put something together. So I think that that has turned out to be—I don’t know, maybe it has to do with the commodification of knowledge, which was always a commodity, and certainly has been a commodity at the Historical Society since I’ve worked here. But there’s something about computerization, I think, that’s made it even more that way. There’s two ways of looking at that. One is, “Knowledge is power, and I’m going to keep mine to myself and the fewer other people that know what I know, the more powerful I am.” That’s not been my view. My view is that you get a whole lot more accomplished by spreading it around as widely as possible. So I have tried to make that kind of my philosophy of how I work here with both staff members and outside researchers. I have had an interesting period of time as Alan Woolworth’s supervisor over the many years that he was in the research department. Alan played many roles at the Society before I ever got here. He was the head of archaeology for a while. He was head of the Museum for a while. In his earlier years at the institution, there were a lot of turf battles. There are probably a lot of turf battles now, but they were quite noticeable then. He kind of took the view that the material that he gathered was his and that he wasn’t necessarily going to share it with people. Over the years that I worked with him, we came to an understanding about the value of what he had done was at least partly in being able to share it with people on a kind of topical basis. He didn’t have to put everything out there for everybody, but if in particular, Indian people, in his case, came and really wanted some information about the Dakota War or the fur trade or whatever it was—the many things that he knows a lot about and has huge notebooks of information full of—then it really was important for him to be willing to share that information. So I think that I’ve been able to accept that as a kind of an agenda in the Research Department as it has existed while I’ve been here. I think that that is why at this point a lot of people come to me

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both from inside and outside the organization looking for information, because I know a lot of people and try to help make those links. LB: When so much of the research process seems to be dependent on these sort of informal contacts, and you mentioned just having stack access and the elements of serendipity and so forth, it seems as though technology and computerization is sort of butting up against those elements in the research process. I wonder if there’s a necessity to sort of change how we make things available to researchers in response to that. Is our old way no longer going to work, where you can sit down with the reference person and chat about this or that and connect people up just by who knows who and so forth? DM: I don’t know. I think that the wonderful thing about the computerized catalog is that people from all over the world can get at what we’ve got at some level. People are just thrilled that our catalog is online and that they can find materials and figure out what they would like to order on interlibrary loan or prepare a plan for what they want to look at before they come here. I think there are a lot of good parts to the technology that we're into. The more inventories of manuscripts collections that we get online, in addition to the shorter descriptions that are online right now, the more finding aids in general that we can put into a format that will allow it to go on our website, the more expansive the network of people who will be able to get some access to what we have. Then I think there’s the whole question of putting the collections themselves online, which has started with the visual resources database and the small biographies database with the authors. I think there’s a huge amount of biographical material that people have been collecting around here for one reason or another for many years. So if we can gather both the resources and the design to gradually start putting more of that material online, then people can look up individuals and actually get some data about them. I spent a lot of time with Bonnie Wilson and Alan Woolworth, putting his photographers database—one of his many collecting areas—into a form that could be looked at as a database that's now going to go online, if it’s not already. So I think that putting not only access to information, but information itself, out there is going to have an enormous impact on what our role as an institution is for researchers, as well as how we create the best access for people. Because no matter how many resources we have to put things on to a computer so that people can get at it, there’s still always going to be some use for guidance. Even for scholars, they're not always going to know which source is the best source. Or when you are inundated with a whole bunch of, you know, a thousand entries, when you type in a keyword, there still has to be some kind of way of figuring how to narrow that down, figuring out what a good starting point would be. So I think the expertise factor is going to continue to be important. I just don’t know exactly how that’s going to work out. Mary Klauda and I have talked a little bit about knowledge management and the whole idea that businesses are concerned about, that people who develop a body of expertise in their years of

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work at a job, then leave to go someplace else or they retire and the expertise goes with them, I think that’s exactly what’s happened around here with Jon Walstrom leaving as map curator, with Dallas Lindgren leaving as reference staff member—it just kind of walked out the door. I think that the decision not to replace those people is part of the problem. The way that reference staff has divided up the work now is somewhat different, but there really isn’t anybody who has that sort of assignment to be the expert in the manuscript and archives collections so that that person can work particularly with scholars to make sure that those collections get looked at as they should. The decision, again, not to hire a new map curator, simply because there aren’t that many more maps for us acquire, I think that completely ignores the expertise dimension, which is more important than ever. I mean, it’s one thing to be able to say that reference staff can take you to any map that you want, but if you don’t know what maps are out there for your project, that’s where the expertise comes in, and we’ve just lost that. I’ve talked with some of the researchers who have been very unhappy about not being able to have that dimension as much a part of their projects as they had hoped and intended to do. So I think there’s some real tradeoffs there. I think that expertise will continue to be important, even as we put more and more actual information out there so that people can get at it in an unmediated kind of way, which is fine. But sometimes then there’s the question of selectivity and sequence and that sort of thing. LB: So no matter how much computerization, the researchers are still going to want and need a person to sort of connect them to— DM: That’s at least my present view of things. I just think that unless we can set up the technology in such a way that it's got sort of levels of access points, so that people can go in at different levels and find different kinds of things and then get an overview of what’s out there, I’m not really seeing very much evidence of that yet. There’s a huge body of material here and limited resources for the computerization. But I think certainly people are being very thoughtful about that, and they're trying to make things as useful as possible. I know the reference staff, in deciding what to put on from their point of view, has decided to put on as much as they can about things that they get inquiries from all over the world and all over the U.S. So I think that’s a response from our clients that we know about, but I’m not sure that it gets at some of the scholarly stuff that I’ve been spending more time working on. I even think that county and local historical societies, when I talk to people from there who are working on a book project or a research project, don’t always realize that we have material here that they don’t have in their collections, and that in order to do a thorough job on whatever topic they’ve taken on in their county or locality, they ought to be looking here. That is something that the computer could really help with, because if they have access, they can go in and look up a

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particular county and see what kinds of school records and state archives and manuscript collections that they might have so that they know at least what that universe is and can make appropriate decisions and try to raise money to come here and look at materials. LB: You’ve talked some about your visiting researchers program and your awards of grant monies. How did those two programs come about? You talked a bit about that, but if you could say more about how those came about, was it a struggle to institute them? DM: The grant monies came about—and I’ve heard this story somewhat secondhand recently, so I’m not remembering it directly. The head of the National Endowment for the Humanities was visiting one day in the 1970s, and June Holmquist told him that we could get more research done and published if we could give researchers a little support with their expenses, and that it’s sometimes hard to get certain topics covered at all because you need to go to Washington to look at the records or someplace else to look at the material or you need to come to the Minnesota Historical Society to do that. So the NEH head, whose name I don’t know, gave June some money from his discretionary funds, and that money was given out to, I think, three different people to work on various kinds of projects, which eventually turned into a series of Minnesota History articles. That was kind of the beginning point. Then John Wood took this idea to the legislature to say, “Well, we got some money from the NEH to do this. This has turned out well. We’ve gotten articles on these various subjects and people in the magazine. If we had a little bit of money on an ongoing basis, then we’d be able to do even more good work like that.” And the legislature decided this was a good idea, so they appropriated some money. Then during our kind of growing years, in the seventies and eighties they added a bit on to that each time, and that is kind of how that project got going. That’s how the funding for it, at least, got going. I’ve talked already about how we developed the program from being more informal, who do we know, what are they working on that we want to support, sort of thing, to a much more organized and far-flung kind of program. The offices for visiting scholars really came from Jean Brookins’ idea that instead of stack studies, we still wanted to have a place where people who were doing long-term research in our collections or some research in our collections and some in other collections in the Twin Cities would be able to keep their materials over a period of time, not having to schlep everything back to their hotel room or their house or whatever. It was originally set up with an idea that people who would be traveling from far away would be the major users, and they certainly have been major users. But it has been interesting to see that even local people who are taking on a research project, depending on their personal circumstances, have really appreciated the chance to have a place to come away from their regular office or their home office so that they could not be interrupted and could keep materials

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while they were working on them over a period of time. So that’s worked out very nicely even for local people who are working on that kind of concentrated research. LB: Because the Research Department has moved into the area more of supporting research by outside researchers rather than conducting it internally, has that been a deliberate move and has that had any advantages or disadvantages? DM: Well, that’s a good question. We have done a number of projects that have been what I would call in-house research projects: the radicalism project that I talked about, another project on women’s history that resulted in both a series of grants being done to encourage more women’s history research and a bibliography that we published, and now this Norwegians in the Twin Cities Project, which is also kind of an in-house research project. I think that one of the frustrating things about working here, not just for me, but even more so for people in other departments, is how little time there is to do research as part of your job or at least as something encouraged on the fringes of your job. I have talked to many staff people over the years who would love to use some of their expertise to do some research and produce something as a product. I was on a committee that helped set up the rules for sabbaticals for MHS staff members quite a few years ago now, and the idea that you could get a research leave was a piece of that. I think that’s been great, but it’s so underfunded compared to the demand and the number of talented, well-trained people on the staff who would be very interested in doing more. Several years ago, both Marcia Anderson [Head of Museum Collections] and Denise Carlson [Head of Reference] started doing a very small-scale version of that for their own staff members, where they said, well, you can have two months, the equivalent of two months, or something like that, off of your regular work, and it was set up in terms of time in different ways, in order to do some research in an area that you’re particularly interested in, thinking of this both as staff development and as producing a product that would be of use to the institution, to the reference library or to the Museum Collections Department. I know that one of the projects, Sherri Gebert Fuller’s research on Chinese Americans and the museum collections—eventually she went on to get a Flandrau research leave and is writing an article that is going to published in Minnesota History. She has also developed more collecting opportunities in the Chinese community. So I think that those things always have rich payoffs, but there just has been both fairly low interest on the part of administrators in encouraging more of this kind of work and definitely not enough financial resources behind it to make that happen. So there’s an enormous amount of interest in various departments in doing more in-house research and it’s been very frustrating for me not to be able to encourage more of that kind of stuff as well.

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That’s one reason why I started a staff research monthly meeting back when we were at 690 Cedar Street, just to sort of give people a chance to come and talk about what they were working on, whether it was work-related or something that they were working on on their own. This place, it just seems so vast, I couldn’t imagine that we could get around a table of people working on various kinds of projects. So I haven’t figured out how to make that work yet here, but I’m still thinking about it. LB: You just mentioned that one of the tendencies seems to be low funding for a program like this to support staff research, but in particular not a whole lot of interest in funding something that doesn’t produce a product. I wonder how much pressure has there been over the years on the Research Department producing something tangible and there must be a product, and how has that influenced the department and what kind of pressures has that put on you? DM: Well, certainly in the beginning, as I said, June Holmquist had always had in mind that there would be some kind of publishable product specifically. As Jean Brookins and I worked out the grant program in particular, I was kind of the one pushing for, well, you know, we really need to have some support for people coming just to use the collections, even if we won’t get a particular project out of it directly. Also I had the idea that we could support oral history documentation projects, which might not result in something publishable. They might, but not always. Because we would be able to support the documentation for future research. So certainly I’ve tried to move things a little bit in that direction. I think in recent years there’s been more interest in what can we get out of it, certainly from management, making sure that if we give so-and-so some money for an oral history and here she proposes doing an article that we say that the article needs to be something submitted to Minnesota History and that sort of thing. So I think there’s more interest now from above in making sure that we get some kind of a product from most of these grants. At the same time, I think that over the years this pot of money, which now amounts to about forty-two thousand dollars a year—for a while it was fifty-nine thousand, which was huge—but then we used it for partly in-house projects and partly for grants, so it wasn’t always a grant-only program. It’s been an area where I think the Society could take some risks. A bureaucracy like this, especially with as many people who now work here, it’s hard to make change or start doing things differently or get something going that doesn’t have a connection to much of anything else that we’re doing. This pot of money, because of the kind of money it is, has allowed the institution to do some things that I think we wouldn’t have done if they’d been more directly in-house kinds of projects. I think that we have funded some things that we were pretty sure wouldn’t produce a project, because there was some political reasons to do that, or because we wanted to support the institution’s outreach mission to underserved groups, and we figured this would at least be a way to help support some of that kind of work, even though the payback wouldn’t be necessarily a publishable project.

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So I think that it’s been, in my mind, an area where we’ve been able to take some risks and where people haven’t been looking over my shoulder saying, “Well, you know, we only got about a 10 percent return on that one.” There hasn’t really been much of that. I’m now working on a statistical report on the first twenty years of the grant program where there’s actually been a structured program to look at. Jenny Hill and I are trying to pull some of those statistics together to say, well, what have we really funded both in terms of topics, and who are the people who’ve gotten money, and what has come out of it in terms of oral history collections, in terms of publications, whether we’ve published them or not. Because sometimes people publish something elsewhere if we turn it down, or with our permission in advance, something along that line. So we really are trying to pull some of that information together and look at what the product of twenty years of funding of this kind of thing has been. But we don’t have that done yet, so we can’t say what exactly we're going to find. It was interesting, Nina [Archabal] had to talk to a group of Asian American journalists a couple of years ago, and she asked me for a report of what kinds of things we had funded in the way of Asian American history. I kind of dug through my list and came up with X number of Asian Americans we had funded, and then X number of Asian American topics, which wasn’t necessarily totally overlapping kind of things. Some of the Asian Americans weren’t working on Asian American history, and some of the subjects weren’t being worked on by Asian Americans. But it was a bigger list and a more interesting list than I had sort of thought when I went into it. So I think that a report based on some statistical work, will turn out to be pretty interesting in terms of what this program has produced over the years. I’m kind of looking forward to getting back to that once the Rural Women’s Studies Conference is over. LB: I was just about to ask you, in an atmosphere such as has been in the past several years within government agencies and a lot of private institutions where you have to show your products and justify yourself in order to get funding, in that kind of atmosphere, how do you argue for the value of research? What would you say is the value of research? DM: Well, I think there’s a couple of arguments that I would make in that context. One is that we have all these collections, and if they're not being used, that’s what research is about, getting our collections well used, and that’s why we have the collections in the first place so that they are there for researchers to use. I think that’s a piece of it. I also think that we need some kinds of basic research. Scholarly research to be done based on the kinds of questions that scholars are asking in a variety of fields, and published, out there in a variety of forms. Otherwise we can’t adapt some of that information and use it in teaching classes to K-12 students, kids in history camp, in exhibits, in a whole variety of other kinds of products that reach larger audiences than scholars usually do. Without research, there’s no material to draw from and that has to keep being done and refreshed and kept up in order for our programs, our public programs for kids and adults, and our exhibits to be of good quality.

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So I think that in some ways research is the background for the larger outreach that we do and in some ways it's the justification for the collections that we have. Beyond that, I think that both our mission statement and what the legislature seems to be wonderfully interested in, in this state, is the value of history in and of itself. I think that the books and the articles that we publish or that we help researchers get the research done for, that they even publish elsewhere contributes to doing the history of Minnesota, which is a valuable thing in and of itself. The publications are a more permanent form of that research than most exhibits are, than most talks are, so that the value of that research goes on for many years, and if you’re starting research on a topic like labor history in Minnesota, well, you still want to go to the guy who did the dissertation at the university in 1955 and look at his stuff. Even if you don’t agree with him or you don’t have the same questions, you need to be looking at that, George Engberg’s thesis, because that’s part of the work on Minnesota labor history that has been produced over the years. So both the historian tendency to look back at what’s been done in the past and not pretend that they're the first person to look at some issue means that the kind of published work that research produces is something that has a very, very long shelf life. I think that was another justification. LB: Somewhat related to that, as you look back on the various projects you’ve been involved with, what would you say is the best use of limited resources that research may have available? DM: Interesting. Well, we’ve been able to kind of leverage other resources in certain projects, and I think that, for example, if we give a grant to a large-scale project, that has been a kind of a sign to other funders that the project has been very carefully reviewed and vetted and therefore that will attract other funding. So I think that’s been a piece of what’s been valuable. Our grants are quite modest, really. Five thousand is the maximum amount of money that we give. So we have to count on [other funders] for larger projects like videos, for example. We just funded a video documentary project on Hubert Humphrey. Five thousand dollars does not go very far in making a video. But the idea that the Minnesota Historical Society has given a grant, however small—its maximum grant—to a project then helps other funders look at it as a credible project and something that deserves funding. The whole question of what have been the worthwhile projects, is that what you’re saying? LB: The best use of the dollar when you have a limited amount. It just seemed to me when I looked through your reports that you really felt this concern about how is the best way, we’ve got this limited amount of money and how can we best use it? DM: I guess I tried to do that in a couple of ways. One is to identify some subject areas that we're particularly interested in, and, two, to place a little higher priority on applications that come in in those subject areas. Those have been rural history, urban history, labor history, historic preservation, women and underserved groups, people of color in particular.

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So that’s been a way of trying to set some priorities for what we have funded. On the other hand, we can only fund the ones that come in, and there’s been a very important screening factor in terms of quality that Jean Brookins and I have both worked very hard on. No matter how great the topic is, unless the proposer has credibility and the proposal is good and is well reviewed, they're not going to get funds. So I think it’s a combination of putting some targets out there that we’re particularly interested in and then being very careful with screening the quality of the work. And, I think, being willing to leap in and say, “Have you looked at this, this and this?” and passing on comments. I mean really helping to shape a research project at that stage is something that we’ve been able to do, even with the small amounts of money that we’ve had. So we can take reviews from colleagues on staff or from outside experts or from my own personal knowledge and send essentially a development letter to a researcher saying, “Well, you're really are going to have to look at this. This is a great project, but you’re going to have to look at this, this, and this.” So you really get to be a part of what the project eventually turns out to be. So I think that’s been a way in which we’ve been able to improve the quality of what we receive as a result of these grants. I don’t know whether that answered your question either, though. LB: Yes. You touched on some things there. DM: The other thing that I wanted to say was that we’ve tried to say to people, “Don’t ask for more money than you need. Yes, this is the maximum grant for this, but if you only need twelve hundred dollars to come here for two weeks to do research for a Minnesota history article, then please don’t ask for fifteen hundred, because then we’ll have three hundred that we can put to something else.” I'm very, very conscious that this is taxpayers’ money that we are using. These are not private funds. This is money from the Minnesota legislature. I say that to applicants all the time, you know. “These are our tax dollars at work, so please be very cognizant of that when you request support for your work.” So I think that’s been another piece of it. LB: Something you mentioned when you were talking about prioritizing, I’m reading here. Some of the qualifications for a research grant, “Especially encouraged are projects that add a multicultural dimension.” I wonder if that movement toward more diversification and encouraging research in underserved areas, was there political pressure on the department to come to those priorities? How did you come about that? DM: No, I was more of a leader than a follower in that area, I’m afraid. I’m an ethnic historian by training and by primary interest, so I was already so interested in this through my work on the

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Minnesota Ethnic History Project and my own background in history in Scandinavian studies, that this was something that I very much wanted the program to be able to do. One of the things that we’ve tried to do in that area that I think has been quite successful is to fund Indian people to research and write about their own history. Now, these grants haven’t always produced something that we can publish, but because not just whites, but the Minnesota Historical Society itself has basically expropriated [American] Indian history for so many decades, it seemed to me the Society has a special obligation to not only encourage [American] Indian people to tell their own stories, but to help support them in doing that. I don’t want to give any particular examples, but I think that that has been very much in my mind as we’ve both talked to potential grant applicants and decided on funding. I think there's just a special obligation that we have. We’ve also tried to do work with other underserved communities, and have had some pretty good luck in some of those areas as well. But I think the case of [American] Indian people is a particular one because of the Society’s own history. LB: And that came about, you said, more from your personal convictions rather than—? DM: I certainly did not encounter any pressure, no, no. LB: Do you feel you were a little bit ahead of things? DM: Well, I think I was a leader among a number of people interested in these kinds at the Society. I think I was in good company, a lot of people interested in doing more documentation of groups that we had very little on. I remember Lila Goff and Jim Fogerty trying to put together a grant application to do a set of oral history with Hmong people in the early eighties when nobody much had been doing anything. We didn’t get funding, but that’s because the NEH gave the money to somebody at the University of Minnesota who had put in an application at the same time. So I think there’s been a lot of interest around here in a variety of ways in doing some of that kind of work, so I think it’s not been a scary place to be. You know, I haven’t felt like I’ve been sort of out here all alone on that issue at all. LB: Have there been times throughout your tenure in the Research Department where things have got sort of politically charged? DM: Institutionally? From an institutional perspective or sort of more legislative? LB: Well, I was thinking more in terms of the projects and the topics and so forth. But I guess in any way, funding or any particular struggles that you’ve had.

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DM: There was a time when I expected that we would take some political heat, and that was really when we decided to go ahead with documenting radicalism with the Twentieth Century Radicalism in Minnesota Oral History Project. There was a big picture of Carl Ross, wearing a red beret, on the steps of the Hill House, where his office was, talking about the radicalism project. I can’t remember whether it was the St. Paul paper or the Minneapolis paper. I thought surely we would get, or Nina would get some grief from people about this. But apart from some very minor kinds of letters saying, well, not all of the Farmer Labor Party was left wing, you know. We had a couple of donors—of donor-type folks expressing concern, but it was very, very minute. I thought we’d get a lot more grief. Actually, that was a much more problematic project because of the way that the left feeds on its own, sort of internecine strife among people who were associated with the Communist party as opposed to the Socialist Workers party, those people, there was a lot of strife among them in terms of personnel issues that we had when we worked on that project. We did not renew the contract of one person who was working on the project for a while, and he called in big guns from all over the country to write us nasty letters and all kinds of things. So there were certainly some political issues, but not the ones that I expected. It was a very educational project all along the line. The other thing that was very interesting from a political standpoint was because the head of the project, Carl Ross, was a former Communist Party member, some people who were former socialists or people who had been kind of stabbed in the back by the C.P., the last thing they wanted was to have their papers, if they donated them, be seen as part of this radicalism project that Carl was directing, but they wanted to make sure that their papers got here. We got a number of donations of materials from people who said, “Don’t make it part of that radicalism project.” But it was because that project was happening that they thought to give us the materials. So it was very, very interesting in a whole lot of ways to see what the politics of doing a project like that is and what kind of an effect it has on an institution like this. I would imagine in more conservative states it would have been impossible. But in more conservative states there wouldn’t have been as big a story to tell. It was the fact that radicalism was such a big part of the political landscape in twentieth century Minnesota that made the project worth doing at all. So, you know, history is a part of the reason for getting it done. Other kinds of political pressures? I don’t think so. I certainly had to do jobs, especially when I was a research assistant, you know, early in the game, if Russell got requests from legislators and other people to gather information and give them information for a talk or for something else they were working on, he would assign whatever lowly researcher was running around to do that work, and I certainly have done a bunch of that. It stood me in good stead. I got into collections and got to think about topics that I wouldn’t otherwise have thought about, so it’s all sort of grist

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for the mill. But that kind of thing happens much less now in a much bigger organization, in a more bureaucratic structure. There were people called Russell’s angels who were often hired for the summer, college kids, bright college kids, who would essentially go around and do whatever it was that Russell needed them to do, whether he was working on something or trying to answer questions for legislators or somebody else in state government. That was kind of their task for the time. That’s about all I can think of on the political. Did any of the other annual reports make you think something else? Because I could be just sort of blanking out on this off the top. LB: No, just a question that occurred to me. If you ever found yourself having to argue or defend why you were engaged in a project or why you were funding a particular research or researching a topic? DM: I don’t think so. I think I was sort of seen as kind of a “PC queen” there in some ways, so that maybe the women’s history piece of all this was, you know, there would be certain site managers who would roll their eyes at why all these resources would be going to women’s history occasionally. But it wasn’t anything that ever stopped me from doing what I was already doing and what we had already gathered the resources to do. So I don’t think so. Again, the ability to be around here for a number of years lets you see that even though change can be slow in an institution like this, it does happen. So those same site managers, you know, have got quite a few women’s history-related programs at their sites and have had for several years, so change does happen, especially if you’re willing to spend a little time waiting for it and put a little work in on it. LB: Any other of those changes that you’ve noticed? DM: I was thinking recently about some projects that I never thought we’d get done that finally had gotten done, but I can’t remember anymore what those are. I think there have just been a lot of things that people started talking about early in my work time here and a lot of that stuff actually has gotten done. It’s just taken a while, and not everything has gone along as speedily as I had hoped, especially in the matter of staff development and more research by the kind of experts we have on our own staff. I’d like to see more of that kind of thing supported. But it’s been interesting. LB: You talked a lot about supporting scholarly research. I wonder how you feel about the importance of supporting local historians and more sort of the hobbyist historians. Has the research department been able to facilitate research there? DM: To some extent. And I have not wanted to—it seemed to me that the scholarly piece was a manageable-size piece for one person or one small department to be dealing with, and I also have

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not wanted to step on the toes of the Reference Department, so I’ve always been very careful to work things out with Dallas [Lindgren] and others over the years as to how we were going to inform each other what was going on and encourage communication both ways. I’m always really happy to talk to county and local historians who are working on projects in their areas, especially to encourage them to come and look at the Society’s resources as well, but also to help think about the kinds of questions that they might be asking. I remember giving a talk at one of David Nystuen’s workshops for county and local historical societies quite a number of years ago that was published in The Interpreter, [an MHS newsletter] that suggested some kinds of ways that local historians might broaden out the kinds of things that they think about. On the other hand, I’ve always been of kind of two minds about that. The sort of professionalization part of that where you try to raise the quality of the product in some way, that has seemed to me appropriate if the Society is doing the funding. So when I’m reviewing the grant applications from the SHPO office, [State Historic Preservation Office] from county and local historical societies having to do with research and publications, I will say, you know, here’s one from a Minneapolis suburb that doesn’t even mention the word “suburb” once. These people need to be thinking about what they're about, and make some suggestions for consultants and other kinds of things. But on the other hand, as kind of a “small-d” democrat, I have made so much use of, and watched other scholars make use of, the publications produced by county and local historical societies over the years without this kind of professional input, that I think that those are kind of primary sources in and of themselves. They look like secondary sources, but they’re primary sources in their own way. So I’m a little torn between those two poles. I’m always happy to give advice when asked, but that hasn’t been often. I think that may have to do with the way that county and local historical societies are dealt with here. They've pretty much been handled through Historic Preservation, Field Services and Grant Department folks. David Nystuen and those grant programs have been their primary contact with the Society. I wish it were more broad so that there could be more give and take. I frequently send researchers to county and local societies, if I know that they have material or if they have a question that it seems to me county and local societies may have material that would help them answer. For example, for Steve Keillor’s book on co-ops, Co-operative Commonwealth, he did a lot of work at county and local historical societies, and we funded some of that work. There’s a researcher now who's interested in rural medical practice, and I’m sending her to the editor, Jim Smith to do an article in The Interpreter so that people can write in if they’ve got doctor’s records and clinic records. I’ve thought of county and local societies both as resources

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and as people who produce history. I’m happy to be helpful, but I haven’t been able to play as much of a role as I would have liked to. As far as individual family historians and History Day students, I’ve been much more limited in my ability to deal with that, just because of time primarily. On the one hand, I think that genealogists are a body of people who have wonderful potential to get interested in larger historical questions. We miss a chance as an institution not to do that, so that if you’re interested in your own life and your family, then you can get interested in your neighborhood or your ethnic group or whatever. I think that the more Americans know about the history of not only their own families, but the context in which those families have lived their lives, that the better it is. I’m a historian and I believe that history matters, so I’ve got to believe that. But we haven’t done as much as I’d like to see in that area. I just haven’t had the time to do it. With as tiny a staff as the Research Department had, that hasn’t been possible and I regret that. LB: I wonder how much time have you needed to do on publicizing the services that you do offer, for instance, your grant monies that are available? I wonder how do you find credible researchers and how do you get the word out? DM: Well, when I became researcher supervisor, I decided that I needed to have an ongoing self-education process if I was going to possibly keep up in at least some of the fields where we hoped to attract researchers to the institution to use the collections here and, once the grants program got going, in that as well. So I just started going to talks, conferences, any kind of place that I could get to that I thought would have some relevant material or people I could interest in looking at Minnesota history—or people who were already working on Minnesota history. So I’d go to conferences. Basically, it’s kind of a one-on-one process with scholars. You can talk to a roomful of people occasionally, but mostly it’s buttonholing people after a talk or pointing out a collection that we have that they might be interested in, pointing out that we have grants and research suite offices. So that’s what I spend a lot of time at conferences doing. The advantage there, or with someone that I’ve read an article or a book by, is that I have some idea of the quality of their work to begin with, and so I know who I want to encourage and who I’m less interested in encouraging. We also have a program that we’ve developed over the past few years in advertising the grants, where we send an announcement every year in the summer to a whole variety of Upper Midwest history and related departments in local colleges and universities. We also send advertisements to a lot of newsletters, and so that gets the word out. Now we’re starting to send it to listservs and so on and so forth, so that people learn that these grants are available in subject areas that we’re particularly interested in.

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We’ve sent these announcements to historians” lists and geographers and other disciplines. I’ve recently put the grants program on some lists for disability studies, because I’d like to see us be able to support more work in that area. So I think that’s been a part of it. Then there are all these publications, most of them I think are still in book form, that advertise grants, and they have gotten to know about us over the year so they send a questionnaire every year saying, “Please update the information on your grant program,” and then that gets published or put online as part of their series. So we do it both directly and listed in other kinds of grant sources. Some people just call up and say that they’ve heard by word of mouth that we have a program for offices or for a grant program. LB: The question that occurred to me that I wanted to ask you is something about our collections—since I’m a collections person—that I’m interested in. Since you have spent now twenty-five years here at the Historical Society and your experience with the collections and researchers using our collections, would you say that there’s still plenty of materials that are underused, underutilized? And if so, I wonder why that is. Why aren’t we making the connection between researchers and collections? DM: I would say that there are still a great many things that are still underused, and there are a whole lot of reasons for that, as I see it. Sometimes, as in the case of the railroad records—we have both the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific records—it’s because they haven’t been processed enough to let people know what’s really there. You have to sort of figure out this odd system, that the President’s subject files are probably where much of the stuff is that many researchers would want to see. That’s not necessarily something that you would think to look at right away unless you get some expert guidance from the reference staff. I think in some cases with very large collections we acquired, we knew we didn’t have the time right away to do a big processing job, and we haven’t had the resources since either. It would make a difference in how much they were used if we could go after some money specifically for some of the big collections that need more description than they’ve got. So that’s a piece of it. I think that because of the emphasis on numbers since we moved into the History Center, and bringing numbers of people to events and exhibits, that some important collections that we’ve acquired haven’t gotten the kind of attention and publicity that they deserve. In earlier years if we had brought in the Harold Stassen papers, we would have had a symposium. We would have sent the word out far and wide in all kinds of places, to let people know that at last these records were available for research. Now, this is something that happened before Mark Greene left, so he was e-mailing me to ask me about what I thought we might do, and I said, “Well, we can certainly do a note in Minnesota History. You ought to put it on listservs for political history and a variety of other kinds of

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historical topics that would be interested as well. It would be great if we could have some kind of symposium that made use of the records and brought them to people’s attention.” But I think that the numbers of people that would be attracted by something like that is small enough in the larger universe of how many school kids can we get in here and how many people can we get to an exhibit, how many people can we get to a public program, that that just hasn’t been seen as an institutional priority. So of course we're not going to get, you know, unless I’m running around out there saying to people, “Hey, you know, we’ve got the Harold Stassen papers,” they're not going to know and they're not going to come to the History Center to use them. Now, that’s one thing that the computer can really help us with. People who are looking up Harold Stassen in our collections to see what we’ve got, they’re going to find him and then they'll know. What I’m not as clear about is, if they’re doing a search for Stassen material more broadly on the net, using a variety of search engines, are they going to get to our site? I don’t know. I sort of don’t think so because it’s not until you go into PALS [the online library catalog] that you realize that we have Harold Stassen papers. So if they know enough to come here and look on our website in PALS, they'll see it. If they’re just kind of looking around out there, they’re not necessarily going to. So I think that’s another piece of it. The numbers game doesn’t really help with good use of the collections that we’ve got. What else? I’ve spent quite a bit of time working with artifact collections, curators, and photo collections people here, trying to work on getting scholars, historians in particular, to look at something besides word sources. I’ve had reasonable luck with that. More people have been interested in the photo angle so that you don’t write the whole book and then look for the photos, but that you look at the photographs of what you’re researching as you’re going along so that they inform the research as well as being illustrative of the points that you want to make. Artifacts are a little harder sell. Historians are not trained to deal with three-dimensional objects for the most part, and they don’t always understand how they can fit into a research plan. But I think people like Annette Atkins writing about shoes, sort of telling the story of twentieth century Minnesota through shoes. That may be starting to change, at least in the case of some researchers. So I’ve tried to broaden the ideas of the scholars who come to me about the kinds of resources that are available, so that they don’t just look at what they expect to find, but that they consider other kinds of material as well. I’ve sent people to the State Historic Preservation Office files for the same reason, depending on the project. I think that’s been a part of the underuse, as I see it. That really is why I was so pleased, not only that we’re all in the same building [the History Center], but that we're going to have a merged catalog eventually for all kinds of things.

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That way, if you look up Harold Stassen, you notice that we’ve got his armchair and twenty-five political buttons, as well as his manuscript collection and a number of books published by him. If you even see those, if a scholar even sees those things, I think it can start the mind working in some different directions. So I think those have been underutilized by scholars. Now certainly there are material culture people coming here to look at the material culture, and there are people who know they want photographs for any of a series of reasons, coming to look at the pictures, so I’m not arguing that those collections are underutilized. But from the point of view of scholarly research, with the people that I mostly deal with, I’ve been trying to open up some of those doors and push people through them as well. Other kinds of underused documents? I think the State Archives material could be much better publicized as well, and part of that, I think, is that people on the reference staff aren’t as acquainted with the archives materials as they are with manuscripts. There are a couple of people who are formerly manuscripts archivists. Dallas [Lindgren], before she retired. Ruth Anderson, and Hamp Smith. I don’t think there are as many reference people who are as well acquainted with the State Archives material. So the reference staff gets to know the stuff that genealogists need, maybe, but they don’t know about county biological surveys or some of the other rare and wonderful stuff that comes up in State Archives material. I think that’s an area where a lot more could be done to publicize the kinds of things that we’ve got among people who would certainly be interested. I mentioned the county biological surveys. I think environmental history is a real growing area that I’ve been trying to encourage more work in as well. The DNR [Department of Natural Resources] records, the Department of Conservation Records, we have as well, are incredible, incredible material. I’m not sure that a lot of environmental historians have thought about the Minnesota Historical Society as a place that would have a lot of that kind of material, so that might mean that people should start going to environmental history conferences. That’s kind of how I’ve tried to do it when I’m trying to encourage more work in an area, but at the same time, there’s a limited budget of how many I can go to. I’ve also got to get a lot of other work done, so I can’t spend all my time that way. But when I do go to conferences, I try to both promote collections and support for more work in Minnesota history generally. Does that answer your questions about underutilized collections? LB: Yes. It’s interesting to talk to someone like yourself who is attuned to what’s going on in the research community, and to hear your impressions of why that connection is not being made. It’s useful. I’m looking at my notes here to see what else I have down. Maybe I’ll just ask you one more question. Since we are here at your twenty-fifth year at the Society, it’s clear that you have a strong commitment and you’ve certainly worked to encourage research done in certain areas and

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in areas where you feel strongly about. Do you feel like you’ve left a mark, and in your twenty-five years now what would be your legacy, would you say? DM: That’s a really interesting question. Well, I hope so. I think in some cases the legacy would have to be some of the in-house projects that we did, like the radicalism project, and the women’s history project. I hope that some of the rest of the legacy would be the effects of water dripping on a stone, you know, the questions that I’ve asked at acquisitions meetings or that sort of thing to try to represent researcher concerns and user viewpoints, that that would have made an impression on my colleagues, both here and those who have gone on to other places. I also hope that I will have encouraged more people to consider Minnesota as a place to do historical research. I remember talking to a variety of people, African American researchers at conferences, and trying to convince them that it’s also interesting to look at a small group of a particular ethnic and cultural group because that experience is so different in, say, Minneapolis or St. Paul than Detroit or Chicago and having many of them sort of snort and basically laugh at me. But over time, there are a whole lot more people who have become interested in the history of African Americans in Minnesota and who are working on projects of one sort or another along that line. Some of that I can take credit for. Others, you know, people came to it on their own and I was only involved in helping give them a grant along the way, something like that. I also should say that while we set up certain categories that we were trying to encourage research in, we’ve continued to get grant applications in a whole bunch of topic areas, and we’ve supported all of those things if the quality of the application has warranted it. We haven’t just said, “We're only doing this stuff.” We’ve continued to do architectural history and military history, you name it. I think there may be some feeling that there’s been less interest in military history or something like that, but when I’ve gotten an application—which hasn’t been a huge number—I’ve often been able to fund that sort of thing. For example, a big guide to collections on the War of 1812, which wasn’t going to be published by us, but he [the compiler] wanted to come out here and see what we had. I wrote around to folks at the fort [Historic Fort Snelling] and others to say, “What about this? What do you think?” We got their feedback, and awarded the grant, and now people will know more about it. We have actually a surprising number of collections on the War of 1812, as I discovered when I started digging into it and was able to give him [the researcher] some hints about things that he hadn’t expected to find in looking at PALS as well. So I think that when you do state history, you can’t afford to eliminate anything and say, “That’s not really of interest.” It’s just not a big enough arena. You can try to get people to go in a particular direction and to do more stuff that you notice there are big holes in, but you can’t afford not to keep supporting all the other stuff as well. I think it’s just essential to have as many different kinds of work going on as possible.

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Partly because historians revisit, as part of their scholarship, issues that people have written about for years, such as the fur trade, I’m not going to say to somebody, “We’ve done so much on the fur trade. Go away.” No, that’s an essential piece of Minnesota’s history, and the new questions that historians ask about it deserve research support just like the old ones did. So I think that I’ll end there. LB: Is there anything else you’d like to say, areas that maybe I didn’t question you about and that you’d like to add anything else to? DM: No. I just have to say that it's been a pretty interesting twenty-five years. I’ve hardly had any boring days at all. I’ve had some wonderful chances to meet and spend time with some incredibly interesting people, not only staff members, but staff members included. But just some wonderful folks who’ve come in through the research grant program, including a man named Richard LaCourse, who’s a Yakima Indian from Washington State, who wanted a grant to get access to our Wounded Knee legal offense and defense papers. And he was going to be doing a book [on the history of the American Indian Movement] that we weren’t going to be able to publish. He and a colleagues of his, Paul DeMain, who publishes an Ojibwa paper in Wisconsin, and Minnie Two Shoes, a Montana Indian person who is an AIM founder, the three of them wanted to come and go through these records. So we gave them a major grant, even though what was going to come out of it for us was nothing that we could forecast at that point. Just having the chance to talk with this guy, LaCourse, was amazing. He had been through so much. He was at Wounded Knee. He was not an AIM member. He was stabbed in the back by people—figuratively—by people that he thought were his friends. He just had amazing stories to tell, and he was perfectly happy to sit around at lunch with several staff people and tell those stories. Another example, Carl Ross, the C.P. [Communist Party] leader in Minnesota, listening to his tales of growing up Finnish American in Superior [Wisconsin] and getting into the Communist Party and riding the rails down to Minneapolis and organizing Communist Party activities on behalf of African Americans and unemployed people. It’s just been amazing, the chance to talk to certain individuals who, while they haven’t been celebrities. I mean nobody would recognize these people’s names, for the most part. That’s fine with me. I tend to be sort of a celebrity avoider myself. But it’s just been a rare privilege to spend some time with these folks and help them a little bit with their work. So that’s been a real rewarding piece of my twenty-five years here, too. LB: Very good. Thank you, Debbie.

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