Comment on the SITU Archive

Nothing profound here, folks. This post is just something pragmatic so as to head off possible future internet rumors and hysteria. I'm going to toss out some of the books which came to me in the huge SITU library shipment a few years ago. BUT DON'T PANIC!! The only things which will go are books which shouldn't have been there [as an anomalies library] in the first place.

Why the culling?: I'm moving to a new place in around October, and it doesn't have the luxury of an empty two-car garage. Even though the place is large, I won't have the linear feet to swallow non-essentials and random inclusions. I'm tossing a bunch of my non-anomalistic library too [so far 40 Banker Boxes of my stuff have disappeared.]

What's going to be culled?: The boxes which came to me had a lot of irrelevancies in them. There were many books merely owned by Robert Warth, for instance, which were way outside any SITU interests. Some similar things of Sanderson's were, no doubt, of interest to him sometime in his life, but hardly belonging in an anomalies archive --- ex. an ordinary textbook on microbiology. Nevertheless, I shelved almost all of that simply because I had the space --- against my better judgement at the time. Those sorts of things, and there are plenty, are now going to go.

I'm mentioning this because some of them had the SITU library stamp inside the covers somewhere. What I don't want to encourage is someone obtaining such a book, reading the stamp, and promulgating another internet rumor like the old "The SITU Library was raped clean" falsity. It wasn't and it won't be. For near-hysterical purists, there are rather long library listings which will be kept if anyone honestly thinks that anyone in the future would want to know if there was a microbiology text on the shelves.

What I will NOT, nor never, discard: Ivan's three-ring notebook files [THE Sacred Objects here]; the SITU organization minutes and other administrational materials [in case someone wants to write a history someday]; ALL of the anomalistic books, monographs, journals, and newsletters [even the stuff I believe to be pure crap]; materials which in themselves do not contain anomalistic information, but which rather closely can be seen to be of use to the anomalistic researcher [ ex. books on early civilization; lightning phenomena; animals often mistaken for crypto-forms; etc.]; I will also keep any book wherein Ivan signed his name --- just for nostalgia.

What I will toss: ordinary textbooks if there is no sign that Ivan used them by writing in marginalia or the like --- most of these things are "clean" of anything but text; journals which might have something which Ivan was involved with, but which do not directly or strongly indirectly relate to anomalies, and do not have Sanderson notations nor articles; and, you get the idea. If things seem at all "gray", I'll keep them.

So that's the boring news. I felt that I needed to make it public, however. This culling allows me to continue to protect the collection for future researchers of anomalies.

.... don't know when I'll get out another true anomalies post... chaos reigns here.

Peace.

SITU files: status report on the "mess".

Hello folks. This is just a quick note on the state of the files now that another week+ of slinging has gone on. Physically, the boxes have amazingly vacated the entire middle of the garage, leaving one with an idea of what the "final product" will look like. [The garage/file room will look like a big square carpeted area ringed by shelving units. Through the middle of the "empty middle" will stand two sets of multi-units --- four six-shelf units backed by four more, and then another set of eight arranged the same back-to back way, forming little "library corridors" that you can walk down and "read the shelves".] With any luck, and culling out the non-SITU books which came with the library [--- apparently Warth's non-anomalistic books were all tossed together in a heap with the SITU ones], we should get the old library to fit. Those shelves would then contain all the books and the journals/newsletters, the latter in new journal boxes. The smaller amounts of "artifacts", tapes, casts, et al will have to wait until we can see what space we have to work with. I'm planning on gifting several things to the collection myself [Grover Krantz' bigfoot casts, a Gigantopithecus skull reproduction, models of Nessie, Yeti, Bigfoot, ET, and maybe even my Wasgo ceremonial mask, though I wince a little on that one]. Bottomline: it would be nice to have this stuff out for display somehow.

As to the contents: as I've mentioned before, we are fortunate in that most if not all of Ivan's notebook files have survived. We are also luxuriating in a much larger than expected SITU book and journal library. Now, having peeked into every box, I am still at sea as to whether we have anything like a complete set of the Bob Warth era files. There are a large number of boxes [hmmm...30-40???] which could be them. [and probably , mainly, are]. But they are a colossal nightmare. The typical one of these looks like a chaotic pile of of unconnected pieces of paper one after another --- often partially crumpled, and rarely with surrounding context. Placed in a file folder?? Ha!!! Surely you jest!!!. No one here but myself has any confidence that they can go down through these things and have much chance of properly sorting, culling, aggregating, and finally foldering the sharpened-up contents. It's on me, folks. Towards that end, I'm shipping ten medium-sized boxes of the stuff to Wheeling to grind through over the next nine weeks there.

The good news is that we'll be looking good on the library probably by October. The bad news is that I'll be dead and gone before the "Warth-era" files are sharpened up. Oh well. We do what we can and leave the rest to you youngsters.