An example

take this 7 January 1983 letter from Charles Van Doren https://steintimeline.netlify.app/pdf/ce76bfe9-b713-4723-805f-8dd0febb1a84

Here is a list of just some of the subjects it touches on . . .

-the reliability of the postal service

-the mention of seven other individuals

-a plan to translate the EB into Arabic

-travel logistics

-putting “the ways in which electronic treatments of various subjects might differ from print treatments” onto a meeting agenda

-a mention that part of any Atari/Britannica deal might include EB selling computers

-the glacial slowness of Britannica’s dealings with Atari

-the status of the Britannica Junior relative to EB and Compton’s

-the idea that an electronic BJ might be the best (giveaway) premium EB ever had

-the status of Compton’s

-Steve (Weyer’s) research proposal

-a mention of the letter being hand-typed

some of these are basically incidental to the encyclopedia project; if we were assigning keywords to this doc, do we have a responsibility to cover these incidental subjects. my instinct of course is yes . . . to a point if a point can be established. for example, I’ve no idea if the rundown on the status of BJ and Compton’s is commonly available info or if this might be really interesting to people studying the history of encyclopedias.

and this raises the even thornier problem of how to establish a useful set of keywords that could comfortably cover the breadth of the archive.

I begin to appreciate why archives are so under-used . . . because of the difficulty of alerting people to what’s there.