Fundraising the Dead Read Free Page A

actually lived somewhere deep in the stacks), no one knew for sure. But it was clear that the collections at the Society were the one true love of his life, and if anyone knew where something was, it would be Alfred. He had been lobbying the other staff members, and what board members he could bring himself to approach, for upgraded computer systems and more support for a full recataloging of the collections. He and I had been on great terms ever since I found funding for his new, state-of-the-art computer system and cataloging-software a couple of years ago.
    Our collections management procedures could certainly use the electronic assistance. Together, the books and manuscripts in our collections total about two million items, which is rather mind-boggling when you think about it. I should add, we think it’s two million—it depends on how you count. I mean, are five pieces of paper in a folder one item or five? It’d been counted both ways, as far as we could tell. So we just used the figure two million and hoped for the best. It was at least that and possibly quite a lot more.
    And although our original mandate is closer to that of a library—focusing on historical books, manuscripts, and other documents—over the course of the Society’s century and a quarter, we’d also somehow accumulated paintings, furniture, and other memorabilia. Many of them arrived in the early days, over a century ago, when the Society was grateful for anything. Some came lumped in with estates or bequests, and how could we say no? The problem was, we were fast running out of space. Worse, our handsome building was never set up for the storage of articles like these. And some things, like paintings, could be rather finicky. They liked the right conditions, such as certain temperatures, humidity, exposure to (or avoidance of) light, and so on. If you don’t treat them nicely, the paint tends to fall off the canvas, which leaves you with a mess. But selling or otherwise getting rid of these gifts could be tricky, so we compromised by putting the best examples on public display and keeping far more odds and ends stuffed into dark and dusty corners, unused spaces, wherever they would fit, for a very long time.
    Bottom line: we have a whole lot of stuff, and it could be anywhere in the building. It was Alfred’s job to try to keep track of it—and he was the first person the Society had ever hired to do that specific job. It wasn’t easy. In theory, each item had an identifying number, which would tell you when the item came in, but that number had to be linked to some sort of map, which would tell you where it was right now. I shudder to think what this process was like before the advent of computers. Still, Alfred handled all of it with good cheer. He massaged his computer programs and made them sing. He prowled the dark corners, and he had unearthed some unexpected treasures in his wandering. He was the man I needed to talk to.
    Alfred and his machines lived in a cubicle constructed of modern movable partitions, which gave limited privacy—not that it seemed to bother Alfred, even though it meant that everyone had to pass by his cubicle to get to either the restrooms or the coffee room. Inside his cubicle, he had two desks, one where he worked and one that housed his computer and a scanner-printer; behind him loomed a massive array of filing cabinets holding all the earlier paper records, which he was slowly transferring to electronic format. Luckily, Alfred was extremely conscientious about the transfer process. Though it made a slow job slower, he took very little on faith, usually insisting on seeing the item and verifying its number and current location, before entering it into his precious database. He estimated he’d completed perhaps ten percent of the total to date. Barring any disasters, Alfred could count on doing exactly what he was doing now for the next twenty years, before retiring at seventy or so.
    I poked my head around