Bloom’s Butler’s Taxonomy

Abstract

Two years after Octavia E. Butler died in 2006 due to a stroke, The Huntington Library sent a truck to her home in Pasadena, California and proceeded to cart away her papers. Although Butler had been hesitant about donating her papers, after multiple conversations with Curator of Literary Manuscripts Sara S. “Sue” Hodson, who spotted her at a conference and boldly inquired, “Do you have plans for your papers? The Huntington would be interested,” she gradually embraced the idea of donating her writing to this institution. In 2008, Natalie Russell, then a library assistant at The Huntington and now the Assistant Curator of Literary Collections, was tasked with cataloging Butler’s files. The catch? When she assumed the job, Russell did not have any familiarity with Butler’s writing whatsoever. Russell reflects on her experience of arranging Butler’s manuscripts and miscellany movingly in “Meeting Octavia E. Butler in Her Papers.” In a conversation with Russell at the start of 2021, spurred by my own inability to access Butler’s papers due to the pandemic, she reiterated, as she does in her article, a personal connection—a friendship—that developed with Butler over time as she learned about her life throughout her files. What I findmost instructive about Russell’s reflections on working with Butler’s papers is how she details what factors archivists receive training in when cataloging a writer’s collection. Expected usage, for instance, is taken into account as is time and date of publication. With regards to the grammar of archives, archivists rely on what Russell calls “controlled vocabularies,” which are a “set of terms that ensure uniformity.” Most intriguingly, Russell provides an overview of respect des fonds or,