Personal Archive: Some Notes on Index Cards.

I am back home in New Mexico after a grueling week of research in the Library of Congress. DC was at its springtime best — blue skies, greenery and flowering trees, shining white marble. But I only caught glimpses of it in the morning hours and then a sliver of the evening, because every single day of the five days we were there was spent in a windowless reading room from 8:30 until 5:00. I’m not complaining, really…I still pinch myself that someone is paying me to fly to our nation’s capitol to do research in one of the country’s greatest research libraries and archive, that I get to lose myself in old documents for a living. It’s pretty incredible.

I was there to do preliminary research for the interpretation of the Oppenheimer House in Los Alamos, which is part of our museum campus. I’m not a historian or exhibit designer or really anything to do with exhibits, but we are a small non-profit with a tiny staff, and we all wear many, many hats. The entire week was spent neck-deep in the J. Robert Oppenheimer Papers, which is a vast collection of material spanning the length of his life.

In the Finding Aid for the collection, I noticed a box labeled simply “Index Cards, 1946-1966.” We were strategically moving through the massive collection, focusing mostly on dates before and during the war, but I couldn’t resist. I requested the box on my next cart and felt a frisson of anticipation when it arrived as a small, unassuming box the perfect size for a personal card catalog. I am fascinated by the ways people of the past used index cards for their personal knowledge management, and it was thrilling to think how a polymath like Oppenheimer might have used them.