Handling with care

On December 1, 2025, when the Sylvia Plath Family Papers were opened to the public, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library was buzzing with the arrival of researchers and literary fans in the reading room, all eager to see the material firsthand. Some recounted their campus visits to view the newly acquired archival collection on Instagram and blog posts, including Heather Clark, author of Plath biography “Red Comet,” who said, “So excited to dive into the new Sylvia Plath papers at Yale.”

Behind the scenes, Yale archivists had recently finished 11 months of work to steward the archives from their boxed arrival to their organized debut. These archivists apply the same care to every new Yale acquisition, ensuring that Beinecke special collections are accessible locally, nationally, and internationally.

“We get to see items at the very beginning, in all forms, from all different kinds of places,” says Rosemary K. J. Davis, head of the Beinecke’s archival accessioning team. “There’s a powerful feeling in knowing the place that archives come from, who made them, what’s in those boxes, whose lives were lived, and then getting to be the first ones to untangle the contents so that other people can use them and learn.”

21 linear feet of bankers’ boxes

Sorting the Plath Family Papers, like other collections acquired by the Beinecke, followed a set process, with one exception: responding to nationwide anticipation required more collaboration and speed than usual.

Davis and Curator Nancy Kuhl initially met with Plath’s niece at a Connecticut storage facility to take a first look at the papers. “It was immediately clear that this would be an exciting addition to the Beinecke’s collections,” Kuhl said. “Our preliminary review suggested many exciting avenues for new research among the letters, photographs, family papers, and other documents that had been saved for decades by Sylvia Plath’s family.”

Once the acquisition was complete, Davis, Accessioning Archivist Elise Riley, and Matthew Gorham, assistant director for archival description, prepared to take their places at the Beinecke’s Technical Processing Facility at 344 Winchester Street when the papers arrived in early January 2025.

Accessioning is one of Riley’s areas of expertise, and it’s also one of the earliest phases of archival labor in the acquisition process. An accession record is created in ArchivesSpace, an archival description database, which marks the first official archival record of the collection’s stewardship at Yale.

Letters, letters, and more letters

A detailed verification phase comes before the creation of the accession record. “We had to ensure that everything that Nancy agreed to take was physically here on site,” said Riley. “This meant we had to check lists against the items in each box.”

Verification for the Plath Family Papers was particularly intense, Riley added, because the collection came with a 50-page guide of correspondence that included details of who wrote the letters and on what dates. It required that Davis and two other members of the accessioning team, Tina Evans, archives assistant, and Janet Lopes, lead library services assistant, along with Kuhl and Riley, dedicate over two weeks to cross-reference the papers against the family’s comprehensive catalog.

Once all the items were verified, the collection was accessioned and then assigned to Riley and Gorham to be processed. They moved it along as quickly as they could, knowing that it was bound to get a lot of attention from scholars.

The first step in processing, Gorham noted, is to prepare a survey of the collection, looking through every box and in every folder.

“This is not to study the contents in detail,” said Gorham, “but to get a feel for the collection; to understand what it’s about, what types of documents there are, and what physical condition issues there are, if any.”

One of the things that comes to light during this time, he explained, is the original order of the papers; more often than not, the order is established by the papers’ creators or custodians and is largely retained. In some cases, if the material is in disarray, the archivists impose an order for the sake of the viewing public.

Fine-tuning the finding aid

Once the survey is complete, the archivists, Riley and Gorham again, write a processing plan that details how they are going to arrange the materials, how they are going to describe the collection, and at what level of detail, and what needs to be done physically to stabilize the materials.

The processing plan is reviewed by stakeholders like Kuhl and Davis, but also by the Preservation and Conservation Services department, and Gorham too, when he is not authoring the plan himself.

Moving forward on an approved processing plan is a combination of arranging and rehousing the papers and describing the contents for researchers.

“There was a large amount of descriptive work that needed to be done because of the anticipated use,” said Riley.

Creating the finding aid and the description for the collection is Gorham’s favorite part of the process. “It’s where it all comes together for me because you’ve arranged the collection, you’ve been doing the physical work on it, and now you have to synthesize everything in your brain and convey it clearly and accessibly to potential researchers, which is always a fun and interesting challenge,” he said.

Face to face with fascinating

When the collection was open to the public, every seat in the reading room was taken with those eager to lay their eyes on new original source material. One of them was Joey Berger, Yale sophomore and Plath aficionado, who was not researching but refueling a love for the poet that began in 9^th grade after reading “The Bell Jar.” To date, he has read all of Plath’s poetry, the Heather Clark biography, the unabridged journals, the prose and short stories; watched the Gwyneth Paltrow biopic; and collected first editions of Plath’s books.

“I was really excited when I found out about these papers,” said Berger. “I definitely wanted to see all the photographs in the archives. I’d found many of them online before but just seeing them in person and reading the little inscriptions was really cool to me.”