Preserving 107 years of history

The Daily Cardinal Archive Project began as nothing more than an attempt to catch up.

The stuff had been sitting around in boxes for years, in filing cabinets, folders, clip files to cumbersome to move and too obscure to throw away, in the old green metal safe which no longer locked, under desks and behind tables.

During a colossal cleaning out in the summer of 1995, the Cardinal's past emerged from the dusty corners of a seldom-straightened office.

Twenty-year-old resignation letters, pulled from a desk drawer, still crackled with bitterness and regret: "Here are my keys. My desk is cleaned out..."

Inside a rusting old metal box, the files kept on the Cardinal by the CIA and FBI still testified to the relentless FOIA requests from Gilliam Kerley that unearthed them in the first place.

More than a century of microfilm, incomplete and diordered, sat in a box on the office floor, waiting for someone to trip over it.

And gradually, from these pieces, this scraping together of echoes, a story emerged.

The Daily Cardinal Archive Project's first task upon being founded in 1997 was to get caught up binding and microfilming the newspapers themselves, a task which had fallen by the wayside, deemed non-essential and too expensive when belts tightened at the Cardinal several years ago.

Eleven years of the Cardinal had not been filmed, leaving a large gap in the most reliable and durable form of record of the newspaper's existence. Two years remained unbound.

Luckily, through the intervention of University Archives -- which needed the bound and microfilmed Cardinals almost as much as we did -- that job proved to be surprisingly expedient and relatively inexpensive.

University Archives Director J. Frank Cook, who has been serving as the project's unofficial troubleshooter since the beginning, helped us piece together the missing newspapers to be bound and microfilmed.

We also arranged to have the library system pick up half the cost of microfilming the backlog, which totalled $2,700.

One of the first tasks after this was convincing the board of directors that money should be set aside in the budget for binding and microfilming the newspaper on a yearly basis.

Getting caught up on the binding was a start. But it wasn't even close to enough.

A student newspaper is a transient place, which is its strength and its weakness. Institutional memory is all but impossible. Aside from the slender official history, which contains as much innuendo and office legend as fact, the story of the Cardinal is in essence the story of the people who are there at any given time. If they leave nothing behind, no proof, no records, only they can ever prove their time existed.

The project was founded in part to ensure that institutional memory, that record, that proof; to provide a resource for those looking at an idea they thought was novel and wondering, "Has this ever been tried before? Did it work?"

It also was founded to chronicle campus history, in stories and photographs: with bylines that have assurance, leads that have voice and passion and columns that have personal outrage and purpose. The project also sought to instill respect for the newspaper's history and the campus it covered, to give it weight, to make working at it, running it, living in it a responsibility as well as a joy.

But what does the project do?

We began with the letters.

The Cardinal has received numerous plaudits over the years, from Congressmen Scott Klug and Gaylord Nelson and Senators Joe McCarthy and Russ Feingold. J. Edgar Hoover once wrote a brief missive to then-editor Jack Zeldes, graciously declining to write a guest editorial. President Harry S. Truman, in a letter to the Cardinal, congratulated the University of Wisconsin on its centennial.

We found these while sorting through boxes and framed some of them, to hang on the office walls. Others we filed, along with other correspondence, financial records, promotional materials, major advertising campaign materials, and any and all material relating to Cardinal history.

The project, now housed in its own corner of Cardinal offices in Vilas Hall, contains over 200 files on editorial, business, advertising and directorial matters -- not to mention printing plates, antique photo equipment, vintage newspapers, and 107 years of bound and microfilmed Cardinals. A student archivist oversees the project and is in turn overseen by the board of directors.

The project also provides a safe framework for recording information like staff lists, any publicity the Cardinal receives, major editorial or business policy changes and records of Cardinal events. It ensures a safe place for donated memorabilia, more of which comes in every day from generous alumni who wish to help us complete the Cardinal's story by lending their voices and information.

We keep it all and keep track of it all as best we can in a paper catalog and in the files. Even as we gather papers, stories and tales from the past, the project looks for more ways to make the information already possessed more useful and accessible to the university and alumni.

The DCAA and University Archives have presented a grant request to the Evjue Foundation through the Office of the Chancellor to catalog and index all 107 years of The Daily Cardinal, every article, every page, to make information about the campus's past -- and the stories you wrote -- easier to find. At present, no such index exists.

The project is actively seeking space more conducive to its purposes; generous donations of material have little room in the Cardinal's offices.

This project, though off to a good start, is a work in progress. We have 107 years of history to catch up on, 107 years of voices to listen to, stories to read, facts to research, fables to prove or disprove. And once we're finished with that, we have a story to write, that of the Cardinal itself.

Your time at the Cardinal is part of that story. We hope you will continue, as you so generously have done in the past, to share with us your own Cardinal histories.

Please note: Project donations should be sent to the Cardinal offices. Questions should be directed to the author via the DCAA's toll free number: 877/THE DCAA.