The first efforts to bring together the papers of Aldo Leopold were made in the early
1960s. At that time, most of Mr. Leopold's personal papers were held by his widow, Mrs.
Estella Leopold, while his professional files were at the UW Department of Wildlife
Ecology, except for some materials that had been sent to his son Starker at the
University of California-Berkeley. Roderick Nash, then a graduate student in history at
the University of Wisconsin, approached Mrs. Leopold with the suggestion that she donate
materials to the University Archives. Nash, whose dissertation was later published
as Wilderness and the American Mind (1967), recalls:
Either in late 1960 or early 1961 I met Mrs. Leopold and suggested that she place
several cartons of AL's material in the Archives. I recall her saying it couldn't be
of much interest to anyone. Also that AL was a perfectionist who would not want his
half-finished things seen. But I managed to convince her to start the collection. I
think I had a summer job at the Archives (under Jess Boell) in 1961 going through the
papers and at the same time taking notes for my chapter on AL.
Nash organized the materials available at that time into eight boxes, described in his
October 1961 report, "The Aldo Leopold Papers in the University Archives." The original
brief report may be found in the administrative offices of the UW Archives.
Beginning in 1967, Susan Flader, then doing research for her dissertation on Leopold as
a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University but also working as a project assistant at the
University Archives, took up the task of collecting, cataloging, arranging,
reorganizing, and documenting the collection, which grew about ten-fold with the
addition of Leopold's professional files from the Department of Wildlife Ecology,
records from his Forest Service career selected by Flader from the National Archives and
other repositories, documents and publications from other collections nationwide, and
further donations by the Leopold family and students. Flader's work resulted in the
first sustained study of Leopold's career, Thinking Like A
Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude Toward Deer,
Wolves, and Forests (1974), as well as other books, articles, and essays.
Flader prepared the initial 170-page "Finder's Aid to the Leopold Papers" in 1969, with
the collection organized substantially as it remains today both in hard copy and in the
digitized version. This organization was intended to restore insofar as possible the
arrangement Leopold had developed for his own files, with new sub-series for materials
from other sources. The finding aid included introductions to each sub-series,
descriptions of folder contents, bibliographies, and other contextual material. Over the
next decade, as additional correspondence, student records, and other items were donated
to the archives, she volunteered to arrange the new materials, integrate them into the
collection, and prepare descriptions for eventual addition to the finding aid.
In December 1988, following completion of his U.W. doctoral dissertation on Leopold
published as Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (1988), Dr.
Curt Meine revised the finding aid to incorporate all the accumulated additions. These
revisions were mostly minor, involving a new inventory list, slight rearrangement of
materials to allow for new accessions, descriptive entries for new accessions, and a
refined numbering system to make materials more readily identifiable.
The Aldo Leopold Foundation, the University Archives, and the University of Wisconsin
Digital Collections Center in early 2006 began exploring the potential for a partnership
to digitize the entire Leopold collection, which had long been the most heavily used
collection in the archives and needed digitizing in order better to preserve the
original documents as well as to make the material more readily available to scholars.
As it happened, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission announced a
competition that summer for a new program to establish national models for making
complete collections available in digital form in an economical manner, and the three
partners applied for and were awarded one of only three grants. Since the finding aid
was available and had been digitized some years previous, it could be used as the basis
for the digital collection, making it unnecessary to create extensive new metadata. An
advisory committee with representatives from each of the three partners, including Susan
Flader and Curt Meine, who were now on the board and staff, respectively, of the Leopold
Foundation, planned for and oversaw the process.
During early 2007, Susan Flader undertook yet another revision of the finding aid to
incorporate additional materials and work out several problems in the digitized version
of the aid. The Leopold Foundation hired Bill Meier, a U.W. graduate student in history,
to work with the advisory committee and technical staff to prepare the original
materials for digitizing and enter the appropriate codes in the EAD (encoded archival
description) system. Fortunately, Meier was able to remain with the project until August
2009, by which time most of the digitization had been completed. Remaining details of
access, citation, and dissemination were worked out by members of the advisory
committee.
