Senators, Thieves, and the Garden of Eden:

The Research Center at The Chicago History Museum

Sara Calkins
LIS 701
October 27, 2014

In a city full of first-rate institutions, The Chicago History Museum is often forgotten as a
destination for tourist excursions or weekend outings. With a collection estimated at nearly 20
million items, however, the citys oldest cultural institution offers an extensive in-depth look into
Chicagos past that should not be overlooked.1 Amongst the various dioramas, exhibits, and
artifacts on display onsite, the museum contains its own Research Center, a separate department
manned by librarians rather than curators, which serves a diverse collection of print materials for
patrons to use firsthand for research of all kinds.
The Chicago History Museum was founded in 1856. The institution, then known as the
Chicago Historical Society, housed a growing collection of materials at their first location on
Dearborn and Ontario, only for the majority of it to burn in the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.
Three years later, the society once again opened what remained of the collection to public
display. In the 1920s, a new construction was proposed, and in 1932, the society opened the
museums current location at 1601 N. Clark Street. In 2006, alongside major renovations to the
building, the Chicago Historical Society announced a new name, The Chicago History Museum.2
An information center has always existed within the museum, but the research center too
has adapted with time. Previously, the library of the Chicago Historical Society was for members
only, with services relating to the collection spanning as many as three separate rooms. Today,
the Research Center is open to the public, for a fee, with materials served in one large space on
the third floor of the museum. Entry to the Research Center is $10 for the general public, with
museum members and students in grades 1-12 can enter for free. During the school year, the
Research Center is open Tuesday-Friday 1:00-4:30 PM and Saturdays 10:00 AM-4:30 PM, while

1
2

"About the Building." Chicago History Museum. 2012. Accessed October 26, 2014.
Ibid

they are closed Sunday and Monday. During the summer, the facility is also closed Saturdays.
The facility is additionally closed for the Thanksgiving holiday, and for the two weeks
surrounding Christmas and New Years Day. Those with a specific collection in mind can
reserve morning appointments on Friday mornings year-round and Thursday mornings during
the school year.3
Today, the Research Center is helmed by Ellen Keith, a graduate of Dominican
University with an extensive history in academic librarianship, most recently in the Sociology
department of Johns Hopkins University. In 2012, she took up the position of Director of
Research and Access and Chief Librarian for the Research Center, which is considered to be a
separate department within the museum. As such, she is responsible for the hiring, budgeting,
and planning for the Research Center. The center currently employs seven individuals: five fulltime employees, including Keith, and two part-time staff. In addition to Keiths role as Chief
Librarian, current positions include Reference Librarian, Research Center Assistant, Technical
Services, Chief Cataloguer, Aide for Photocopying, and Page. One staff member is also a
registered notary, speeding along the process of requesting access to more restricted collections.
Two staff members are scheduled to be on hand at the reference desk at all times, making it
possible for one employee to assist a patron while still having another available to answer
questions and sign in visitors. Of her current staff, four have library science degrees, with others
coming from backgrounds of history and museum studies. All employees are especially
competent on subjects relating to the history of the city of Chicago, of course, which is said to be
vital to working in the museum. Ellen Keith handles the hiring process within the Research
Center, but explained that she generally interviews applicants alongside the staff members they

Research Center- Hours and Location, Chicago History Museum. 2012. Accessed October 26, 2014

would be working with most in that position.4 Employees are not a part of any union, and the
Director of Human Resources for the museum handles much of the in-service training for all
departments under the museums purview. In addition to this in-service, however, the staff often
visits other museums and institutions on their Mondays off during the summer, providing them
with ideas and advice from facilities facing the same struggles as the Research Center.
The primary duties of the staff include serving materials to patrons, assisting them in
research onsite, supervising their use of resources, and answering research inquiries by email,
generally within a week of their arrival. Email inquiries seem to come in waves, according to
Keith, with one topic being popular for a period of time with repeated questions on the same
subject. She explained this is often due to academics citing the Research Center and its materials
in their publications, tipping others off to the fact that the collection contains such information.5
Previously, inquiries could be made to the Research Center by both email and phone, but after
layoffs in the early 2000s, phone inquiries were eliminated due to reduced staffing. Librarians at
the Research Center also do not perform subject interviews, as the smaller staff does not allow
for it.
As their own department within the museum, the Research Center has its own
independent budget, with no competition amongst the departments to get better funding. The
budget, planned out each year by the Chief Librarian, Ellen Keith, contains funding from four
major sources: admission fees, endowments, income acquired by the fundraising office, and, as
the museum itself is on park district land, funding from the Museums in the Park program,
which offers financial support to numerous Chicago museums housed on city park lands.

4
5

Ellen Keith, interviewed by author, Chicago, IL, October 4, 2014.

Ibid

Unsurprisingly in this technological age, online resources account for much of the Research
Centers budget. The primary online catalog for the department no longer being in active
production, much of the budget now goes to maintenance costs, which rise 7% every year. The
cost of ProQuest, their primary online database, rises every year as well, at a rate of 5%.6
After the cost of online resources, as well as that of compensating employees, not much
of the budget remains for the acquisition of materials. This is because much of the material
available in the Research Center has been donated rather than purchased. In some special
circumstances, however, materials have been bought. For example, the museum purchased
papers from Ann Landers estate upon her death in the early 2000s, while one of the centers
most famous acquisitions, the Gunther collection, was purchased in the 1920s following the
death of its owner,. Charles F. Gunther. A well-known Chicago confectioner and collector,
Gunther collected many oddities, but was particularly interested in the Civil War, at one point
reassembling a Confederate prison in Chicago to serve as a museum for his many artifacts.
Eventually, the museum was torn down, and upon his death, the Chicago History Museum was
able to purchase many of his artifacts and printed materials, including what he claimed was skin
from the serpent from the Garden of Eden, which Ellen Keith pointed out as the most unique
piece of the Research Centers collection.7 Collection meetings are held for the museum on a
monthly basis. Librarians from the Research Center are present for the meetings, but generally it
is the archivists and curators of the museum proper that process and acquire materials, whether
donated by organizations and community members wishing to preserve their history or
purchased from estate sales.

6
7

Ellen Keith, interviewed by author, Chicago, IL, October 4, 2014.

Ibid

The collection of the Chicago History Museums Research Center, a widespread array of
books, photographs, microfilm, ephemera, recordings, and more, is ever-growing. Including
materials from events as recent as the 2012 Chicago Teachers Strike, the stacks span not only
the main space on the third floor of the museum, but also overflow across the hall, into the
basement, and even to a warehouse offsite. Storage space is increasingly becoming an issue for
the information center, with the east basement quickly filling to capacity. Such varied types of
materials also require specialized spaces. Because many of these items are one of a kind, special
precautions must be taken to preserve them. For instance, negatives and color images much be
kept in cool and cold rooms, requiring forty-eight hour notice before use.8
Due to the rarity, and often fragility, of many of their materials, the Research Centers
collection is non-circulating. All materials accessed by the public must be done onsite or through
email inquiry. In cases of long distance researchers desiring a more in-depth study of the
materials, freelance researchers can be hired from a list of professional researchers provided by
the facility. Institutions are not immune to this policy, but occasional exceptions are made in
special, often quid pro quo, circumstances. For example, the Library of Virginia requested a
specific series of microfilms in hopes to make a copy for their own collection. The resulting
written agreement allowed the library to borrow the microfilm on the condition that they make
an additional copy for the Research Center to keep for themselves, as copying microfilm requires
a specialized facility. Thus by lending the microfilm to the Library of Virginia, the Chicago
History Museum Research Center received a free backup copy of their original material. The
Research Center also wrote up an agreement for the University of Chicago to access their
collection of The Chicagoan, Chicagos answer to the New Yorker in the late 1920s and early

Ellen Keith, interviewed by author, Chicago, IL, October 4, 2014.

1930s, in order to digitize the collection for public use.9 Outside of these special circumstances
and formal agreements, however, access to materials is limited to in person visits, email
inquiries, and online resources.
Even onsite, the restrictions of donors can further limit access to information. As many of
the collections have been donated, the wishes of their original owners must be respected by the
center as part of the original deed. As such, some previous owners require advance notice of who
wants to view their donated collection and why. This can cause a great deal of back and forth
between the patron and librarians and the archivists and original owners. Carol Moseley Braun,
former US Senator, donated various papers and other material from her time in office, but with
the stipulation that she be notified as to who is requesting access. Such conditions have run into
more serious problems than inconvenience in the case of the Northwest Community
Organization, which dissolved in the years following their donation of materials to the Research
Center. Their original agreement required that someone from the organization be contacted to
provide permission for access to any material relating to their operations, but with no one willing
to take responsibility for these permissions, their papers are now essentially inaccessible to the
public. The Red Squad file is another example of a collection with strict access regulations, in
this case due to legal requirements. A 1987 court order required that police surveillance of
suspected subversives cease immediately, with all notes and files given to a neutral party, in this
case the Chicago History Museum. For the first twenty-five years, one of the five lawyers
working on the case had to be contacted for permission for researchers to access the files. Now,
patrons have to swear to keep the information contained in the files private. This agreement must
be notarized, which is why one of the librarians has been trained as a professional notary. Still

Ellen Keith, interviewed by author, Chicago, IL, October 4, 2014.

other materials and collections are held up in processing, meaning they cannot be accessed until
properly assessed and prepared by the archivists and librarians, even though they may be listed in
the catalogs.10
Keeping track of such a widespread collection is a difficult task, and in the case of the
Research Center, multiple methods are utilized to catalog the information. Two different online
catalogs are kept for materials throughout the museum, one for the staff, which includes where
the materials can be found in the stacks, and one for the public, nicknamed ARCHIE after
archivist Archie Motley, who brought many materials into the museum from various social
service groups. Librarians and archivists at the museum are currently looking into finding a new
catalog that can be used for both purposes, especially now that their current catalog has rising
maintenance costs. Unfortunately, not everything available through the Research Center is
currently listed in the online catalog, as it has only been actively used for about ten years. To get
the system entirely up to date, the museum would need a grant to hire a team of staff specifically
for that purpose, as they did when their original card catalog was created. Because of this
discrepancy, the card catalog is still housed in the center itself. In addition to often being more
complete and correct than the online catalog, it is often more detailed for individual items, such
as specific letters within a collection. One positive aspect to the online catalog, however, is the
cataloguing of individual images within the collection, something Keith claimed is less common
in other institutions.11 One resource that particularly stands out amongst the many materials and
resources of the Research Center is the Encyclopedia of Chicago. A joint project with the
Newberry Library and Northwestern University, it contains entries on a variety of people, places,

10
11

Ellen Keith, interviewed by author, Chicago, IL, October 4, 2014.

Ibid

and events within Chicago, with maps and other original materials available in their entirety in
the online edition. A printed edition, published in 2004, is available as well, and Keith stated that
they would very much like to update the resource, as both the published and online editions have
been static since then.
According to Keith, patron use of the Research Center is about 50% in person and 50%
online, through email inquiries and use of online resources from as far away as England and
France.12 Their primary audience consists of students, academics, architects, and tourists.
Students from Northwestern University, Loyola University, the University of Illinois Chicago,
and DePaul University often use the collection for various research projects and theses. DePaul
students and faculty, in fact, have a special agreement which allows them free access to the
Research Center. In addition, local students in grade 6-12 can reserve appointments for
assistance with the History Fair on Saturdays from October through March. During the History
Fair, students in the Chicago Metro area compete with presentations on history topics on a
different Chicago-related theme each year. In these appointments, staff sit down with students to
help them access the information they need and learn research methods.13 During the summer
and the month of January, many academics coming from out of town visit The Chicago History
Museum to conduct research on anything from history to environmental studies, while the spring
is a popular time for architects to visit the Research Center to look through the architecture
collection, some of which must be brought back onsite for the occasion, as half of the collection
is held in a warehouse in Broadview. Visitors in the summer often include tourists stopping in to
see if they can find any information about ancestors that lived in the area. Chicagoans also stop

12
13

Ellen Keith, interviewed by author, Chicago, IL, October 4, 2014.

Ibid

by throughout the year to look into anything from genealogy to neighborhood history to whether
their house might be haunted.
Because the Research Center suits the needs of the museum and historic preservation
above all, the patrons preferences toward material do not often sway the museum staff as to
what materials should be acquired or decommissioned by the institution, but Research Center
staff do decide what to display based on what patrons are most interested in, especially as they
have learned the patterns of patrons. In spring, when architects are expected to visit often, much
more of the architecture collection is on hand than during the rest of the year. Similarly, during
the History Fair, they bring out materials related to the current years theme in order to best serve
their audience. With its rare materials, built in audiences, and small staff, programming is not a
primary focus for the staff of the Research Center. However, in addition to History Fair
appointments, they do work with various schools to host class visits and offer assistance for
specific classes such as the Historic Preservation Class at the Art Institute of Chicago.14 They
also participate in various museum programs such as the Urban History Seminars, a ticketed
lecture series hosted at the museum.
Utilizing the Research Center comes with many rules, in an effort to keep the materials
safe and preserved. Before entering, patrons must sign a form at the admission desk stating what
the object of their research is, as well as presenting a photo ID at the front desk and paying the
$10 entry fee. They also ask that patrons leave all backpacks, coats, and purses at the downstairs
desk, taking only what one might need for your research. Upon entering the Research Center,
another sign in is required, listing ones name and research topic in the sign in binder. No food,
drink, or gum is allowed in the Research Center, cell phones must be turned off, and only pencils

14

Ellen Keith, interviewed by author, Chicago, IL, October 4, 2014.

can be used in the room. Photos must be handled with gloves, and glass negatives can only be
handled by staff. The center has six computers with access to the online catalog and databases,
along with other apparatuses with which to view or listen to recorded materials, and even a
machine that can convert microfilm images to a USB drive. At the tables, call slips are available
to request materials to be pulled from the stacks, with a limit of three materials at the table at a
time, and no call requests after 3:30 PM.
All requests must be made in writing, and call slips are kept for five years to ensure that
staff will be able to find who last used an item should it go missing. This policy made it possible
for the Research Center to find what materials notorious thief Barry Landau had accessed in the
years before his arrest, and thus what items he had stolen from the center.15 Unfortunately, items
do occasionally go missing from the collection without such a blatant explanation, especially in
the case of ephemera that can easily be slipped in with other materials. In these cases, if there is
no suspicion of thievery, staff simply set aside the call sheets in the hopes that the item will turn
up. In addition to requests to view items, all requests for reproductions must come in writing as
well, whether handwritten or in email. The Rights and Reproductions department is its own
individual branch of the museum under Collections, and major requests must be discussed in
library staff meetings. There is a cost for both digital and photographic print reproductions as
well as photocopies. Photocopying is only allowed for items sturdy enough to withstand the
process, but even researchers from abroad can request photocopies of information done by staff
as long as it is less than fifty pages.16

15
16

Ellen Keith, interviewed by author, Chicago, IL, October 4, 2014.

"Rights and Reproductions." Chicago History Museum. 2012. Accessed October 26, 2014.

The Chicago History Museums Research Center offers an extensive and rare collection
of materials with a friendly, helpful staff, but there are a few concerns weighing on even the
staffs minds. In addition to desiring a more comprehensive online catalog, Keith raised ethical
concerns regarding both the entry fee to the Research Center and the sign in process. 17 One of the
ideals of librarianship is free access to information, so to charge admission to an information
center seems to go against this principle. In addition, the sign in process requires patrons to
disclose their research topic not only to the staff of the museum, but also on a sign in book left
out where anyone can see. Keith mentioned that more than once, a patron has commented on a
previous users research topic, violating the privacy promised by most libraries in regards to
what knowledge a consumer is accessing. Though both of these ethical concerns have been
broached with the board, it seemed unlikely that either will change soon, leaving questions of
what can be done to provide both the monetary and security needs of the facility as well as the
protection and freedom promised to patrons under the ideals of the ALA.

17

Ellen Keith, interviewed by author, Chicago, IL, October 4, 2014.

Works Cited
"About the Building." Chicago History Museum. 2012. Accessed October 26, 2014.
Ellen Keith, interviewed by author, Chicago, IL, October 4, 2014.
Research Center- Hours and Location, Chicago History Museum. 2012. Accessed October 26,
2014
"Rights and Reproductions." Chicago History Museum. 2012. Accessed October 26, 2014.