The New York Public Library announced last week that it acquired the personal “archives” of Lou Reed. Included in this haul are 600 hours of audio and video recordings, photographs, personal documents, original manuscripts of poetry and lyrics, and Reed’s own book and record collection. The archive spans Reed’s creative and personal life from high school to his death in 2013. It will be indexed and then housed for research and posterity. The library will also exhibit some of the items from the collection. The collection is expected to open to the public sometime next year, after the archivists have taken a stab at boxing and organizing the items.
Reed’s archives will be housed in the American Music Collection and The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound at the Library for the Performing Arts, which collects music and documents related to music from a wide range of sources and disciplines. In addition to the work of musicians, the library collects recordings and texts of notable speeches from people ranging from John F. Kennedy to Tennessee Williams. In conjunction with the acquisition, the library is hosting two events to celebrate Reed’s work. On March 13, a performance of Reed’s poetry will take place at the Library for the Performing Arts, and on March 15, Laurie Anderson’s (Reed’s widow) film Lou Reed: Drones will be shown at the Schwartzman Building.
The New York Public Library houses the archives of more than 10,000 writers, artists, and notable people. That is a lot of paper, and it’s fair to wonder at this point, when so much is digitized, what the point of continuing to amass such things is. But librarians in particular remain bullish on the value of such collections.
Jonathan Hiam, curator of the American Music Collection and The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, said that “Paper archives create a tangible connection both to individuals and important moments from the past directly — a chance to handle the same document held by Miles Davis, for example, has an emotional power often lacking in a digital representation.”
Though some collections are not available to the public, researchers and biographers make use of archives small and large every year to make new discoveries both small and large. In 2015, British biographer Claire Harman newly identified a self-portrait of the author Charlotte Bronte on the page of a book the author herself owned. The discovery was hailed as “massively significant” by Bronte scholars as very few images of the writer exist. And it was there, in a book that had been available to researchers for years. And just a few weeks ago, David Reynolds, a graduate student at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, published a never-before-identified short novel by the American poet Walt Whitman. Reynolds identified the work by searching old newspapers, which have been scanned and archived online.
The durability of paper, which burns, rots, and is easily discarded, is often questioned. Hundreds of thousands of books that were undoubtedly quite popular have been either lost entirely to time or exist in just a few copies scattered in libraries and private collections. But paper, ironically, Hiam said, “in many cases” will “outlast their own digital versions.”
