American Shakespeare Center Archive Project

The James G. Leyburn Library at Washington and Lee University has a Special Collections and Archives division that houses materials belonging to the American Shakespeare Center (ASC). The collection “includes 65 Shakespeare plays, additional plays by George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Molière; 12 Beta videotapes and audiocassettes; 26 cast scrapbooks with photographs” (American Shakespeare Center, n.d.) and correspondence between the ASC founders and the dean of Washington and Lee. This collection is interesting because it’s one part archive and two parts institutional repository—but not for the institution it’s housed at. Instead, the library at Washington and Lee collects, organizes, and preserves materials related to the history and development of the ASC. 

The ASC began in 1988 as a college touring troupe under a different name and has grown into “a premier resident and touring troupe of Shakespearean, Modern English, and New Contemporary plays from the only American recreation of Shakespeare’s indoor playhouse, the Blackfriars” (Pearson, n.d.). Its archive project collects materials in three locations: larger physical objects like costumes and posters are kept and displayed at the ASC building in Staunton, Virginia—scripts, smaller printed materials, and film are housed at Washington and Lee—and digital materials are available online. According to the ASC, “The goal of this redundancy is to allow a variety of access to the holdings, as well as to more accurately serve academic, research, and otherwise interested communities” (American Shakespeare Center, n.d.). For the purposes of this library visit, I’ll focus on the Washington and Lee collection’s finding aid. 

The Washington and Lee finding aid looks familiar and very professional. It clearly outlines the scope of the collection and the restrictions researchers will face in advance. For example, the archives are governed by the Actor’s Equity Association rules—meaning that the materials are for private research and teaching purposes only and recordings of performances cannot be duplicated or streamed online. The collection is organized by board member correspondence and budgeting records, marketing and media materials, and then show- or tour-specific boxes and folders. Cataloging the collection by institutional relevance or by show/tour instead of by a person’s name is incredibly useful for researchers familiar with Shakespeare but unfamiliar with the players, directors, or staff at the ASC. However, there is a lack of detailed information available online when it comes to the contents of each box and folder. For example, the phrase “This folder contains [materials] relating to [title of the production]” is repeated frequently without any details about who participated in the production. It would be useful to have name authority copied from playbills, for example, for research purposes. Constraints like staff resources or budget required to make cataloging these kinds of details possible are understandable—because the ASC has donated their materials to Washington and Lee, they are likely beholden to whatever services the library there has the capacity to provide (Rubin & Rubin, 2020, 181).

There are no digital materials available remotely through the Washington and Lee repository. Developing and maintaining a digital archive is a relatively new project for the ASC, which maintains a less professional-looking finding aid through their archive project website. They seem to be in the early stages of deciding what to include in that particular archive and how to share it while maintaining the requirements of the Actor’s Equity Association. Their hope is that a digital archive will be able to expand the ASC’s community beyond their immediate area, “to share the wealth of our history here at ASC with others across the country, while encouraging them to come and see our holdings in person at ASC or WLU by detailing the physical locations of objects within the archive” (American Shakespeare Center, n.d.). I could imagine that the ASC will seek to digitize items like the early correspondence between board members and ASC founders to provide access to their institutional memory. This would be an easy way to give their funders and patrons a sense of security in the transparency of the organization they donate to—in addition to showing researchers how something as complex as recreating the Blackfriars theater in another country was!

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REFERENCES

American Shakespeare Center (n.d.). Mission post [Photograph]. Mission, Staging, and Beliefs. https://media.americanshakespearecenter.com/app/uploads/2017/12/16192741/Mission_Post-1024×576.jpg

American Shakespeare Center (n.d.). The ASC archive project. American Shakespeare Center Archives. https://www.americanshakespearecenterarchives.com/project

Millar, L. (2017). Archives: Principles and Practices (2nd ed.). Neal-Schuman.

Rubin, R. E., and Rubin, R. G. (2020). Foundations of library and information science (5th ed.). ALA Neal-Schuman.