"It's important to remember," said my colleague John Overholt, a rare-book and manuscript curator at the Houghton Library at Harvard, "that in most cases what's termed an archival 'discovery' was possible only because of the years or decades of effort a repository invested in arranging, describing, preserving, and providing access to the materials in its care. "That work," he continued, "is indispensable to the research process, and I hate to see it devalued for the sake a more exciting narrative. I wish there were more articles headlined 'Thorough, Accurate Cataloging Pays Off!' " - copystar