Fundraising the Dead by Sheila Connolly

office. Unlike mine, hers was almost obsessively neat. All her books were lined up on her bookshelves. There were no stacks of papers sitting on any surfaces. There wasn’t even any dust. Me, I’ve always subscribed to the theory that an empty desk is the sign of an empty mind. Let me tell you, my mind is very full. In any case, Latoya’s visitor’s chair was free of encumbrances, so I sat down facing her.
    “I’m surprised to see you here. You didn’t have to come in today.”
    Latoya sighed. “Alfred’s unfortunate death means I have to attempt to reconstruct his methods. I’m afraid I’m not as well versed in his computer system as I should be.”
    Nor was anyone else. I was glad that she was stepping up quickly. “I need to ask you something. I’ve encountered a, uh, situation, and you might be able to help me with it. And I could use a quick review on our cataloging procedures, at least as they apply to this.”
    I had her interest. “What’s the problem?” she asked.
    “You know Marty Terwilliger?”
    “Sure. I can’t say I know her well, but I know she’s a board member and she does a lot of research here, and of course there’s the Terwilliger Collection. Why do you ask?”
    “She came to me and said that some things she knew we had in that collection of hers weren’t where they should be, and she can’t find them. She says it’s an important group of items, and I believe her. Anyway, she’s mad, and I said I’d look into it. She gave me a week to work it out.”
    “Hmm. Why did she come to you rather than me? Is she a troublemaker?”
    “No, not at all. In general, she’s one of our strongest supporters, and she has a right to be mad, I think. So I’m hoping that we find what she’s looking for ASAP, and that it turns out to be some perfectly normal human error, or it was in transit somewhere in the building, or something like that.” But why did I have this ominous feeling deep inside even as I gave Latoya all the possible excuses? Unfortunately, I have pretty good instincts. And they weren’t telling me that the papers had been innocently mislaid. “When she brought this up, I realized I didn’t really know a lot about the current status of our inventory, or catalog, or whatever you all call it. I write about it a lot, but mostly I just drop in the boilerplate on collections—the stuff that you and your staff hand me—so I don’t really think about it. I have no idea if it’s accurate or even what it means. It’s pretty fuzzy.”
    The more I learned, the more I wondered if that language was deliberately vague in order to cover up some long-standing shortcomings of the system. Of course, I knew we weren’t alone among our peer institutions in the dismal state of our record keeping. We were still struggling to make our way out of the nineteenth century (spidery brown ink on file cards), and here it was the twenty-first century. We’d been blindsided by the Internet, and had been scrambling for the past couple of years to try and keep an oar in the water while figuring out what it all meant and how we could possibly deal with it, with a budget that was already running a chronic annual deficit, and with a small—very small—endowment.
    Latoya looked pained. “You want the short course on the state of our cataloging?” I nodded. She sighed. “Okay. You know the catalog room downstairs?”
    “Yes,” I said. Of course I did—I walked through it daily.
    “That was state-of-the-art fifty, a hundred years ago. There are seven—yes, seven—individual catalogs, all on file cards. Books, manuscripts, music, photographs, maps, objects, ephemera.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “And there are some subcategories for those. These are not integrated, but kept together as individual catalogs, all lined up side by side.”
    I interrupted. “You mean, if I’m looking for a particular person or a place—a cemetery, say—I have to look through multiple catalogs?”
    Latoya