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A typical day

Open a box that has not been opened since it was donated. Sort the contents into a logical order, throw out the duplicates, the rusted paperclips and the mouse-chewed newspaper, and rehouse the rest in acid-free folders. Write a finding aid that describes what is there so a researcher can find one letter in forty boxes. Between all that, answer reference questions by email, sit with a researcher in the reading room, and fight with the storage budget. Some weeks it is quiet and repetitive. Then you find something nobody has read in a century.