The Lifecycle of an Archive Donation: An Intern’s Perspective
Shannon Muir Broden inside the WGF Archive.
Shannon Muir Broden graduated in December 2024 from San Jose State University with a Masters in Library Science and Information Systems, and spent the fall of 2024 as an intern with the Writers Guild Foundation Library and Archive.
I chose to come to the Writers Guild Foundation Library and Archive to intern for two reasons. The first came from wanting to experience a hands-on internship in an archive setting. The other, perhaps more compelling reason is that I studied radio and television for my undergraduate degree and spent time in the animation production world here in Los Angeles prior to pursuing my master’s in library science and information science at San Jose State University. I strongly feel that through this internship, I also found a way to give back to the entertainment community that I have been fortunate to be a part of.
So, what happens when someone donates materials to become part of the Writers Guild Foundation Library and Archive? In my case, writer and producer Joseph Dougherty donated a wealth of materials he worked on for television series, television movies, and film.
Materials are generally scripts, but can also include outlines and treatments, or even production schedules. I worked with a large portion of his overall donation to the Writers Guild Foundation Library and Archive, which included his work on thirtysomething, Presidio Med and Hyperion Bay and well as a variety of TV movies such as those featuring a fictional investigator by the name of Lovecraft (the second of these, Witch Hunt, was also a recipient of a CableACE Award for Writing).
Then, the materials must be sorted through. This is not solely for organizational purposes – in fact, some collections like Joseph Dougherty’s arrive extremely curated but others can be very loose and unorganized with archivists needing to figure out specific categorizations – but there is a need to compare and see if any duplicates exist. This can either be within the material being donated or looking for duplicates with items that the Writers Guild Foundation Library and Archive have already acquired.
During this process, all the brass brads (the fasteners that go through the holes of script paper) and black plastic clamp clips attached to the materials must go as they are not good for archival storage purposes. Having done this personally, I can tell you it is a painstaking but worthwhile process. One’s hands can get a bit tired from bending brass fasteners back straight to pull them out of holes, or exerting force to remove a clamp clip that was forced on in the first place.
Once materials are selected to be retained, they are sorted by date and placed into acid-free storage folders, which are then labeled as to contents and stored in boxes the same way that files are stored in a filing cabinet. The use of acid free folders helps protect the paper contents against damage. The contents of these folders are then categorized in an Excel spreadsheet, with one line per item. This allows for tracking different draft dates of a script, for example, when multiple versions are donated. Since different drafts of a script are inevitable, either due to creative or production reasons, I found it to be an amazing education to see how this evolution takes place. For example, an interesting anecdote is that most of Joseph Dougherty’s scripts began as handwritten on yellow paper and then were typed up into software programs, as can be seen in the collection.
After that, the boxes that contain the acid-free folders are assigned numbers to make them easy to identify, and barcodes are applied. These numbers are then added to a column in the Excel spreadsheet so that the boxes and their contents can be cross-referenced. This way they can be easily located and requested when researchers come asking for items that the boxes contain.
Once all the boxes are accounted for, the finding aid about the collection needs to be created, or in the case of the Dougherty collection, brought up to date due to the donation of previous materials such as Pretty Little Liars that Joseph Dougherty had made several years ago; there had been a delay in getting in the bulk of the collection and I ended up being the one that processed it. A finding aid is what is used in directories such as the Online Archive of California so people everywhere can find out what is at the Writers Guild Foundation Library and Archive to come view for themselves.
Overall, I really appreciated the experience, both as someone with a passion for entertainment history and as a writer. I learned a lot about the history and craft of teleplay and television writing working on this archive, and I hope that others will as well.
Written by Archive Intern, Shannon Muir Broden. Want to learn more about Joseph’s collection? Check out Shannon’s other blog post, Donor Spotlight: Joseph Dougherty, here.
To learn more about the WGF Archive, including how to donate, see https://www.wgfoundation.org/archive