Excellent reminder Robert–thanks! I added a note and link within the post.

John, thanks for recommending Abbott’s book. I’ve requested it for our students… in print, as digital copies of “Digital Paper” seem unavailable through library vendors. Pirate libraries, however, still illicitly stock the publisher’s e-version for free. Sigh.

Good point, Barbara. One of my joys of this semester is rereading Orwell’s 1984 with a first year seminar I’m co-teaching, and Orwell’s Memory Hole looms large in our present. Yes, very important to copy and thoroughly the specific provenance within a collection any such documents, for all the reasons you describe.

I’ve used these sort of “personal archives,” and am never exactly sure how to best cite them, so have conferred with historian colleagues–who’ve consistently told me the important thing is to clearly and consistently cite them in a way that some other scholar at a future date could likely identify and locate these papers. Reading your question, I just looked to see how I cited one such collection in print, and see the example from the bibliography in my book Threatening Anthropology, in the section with other Archival and Manuscript Sources, which lists one such personal archive as: “WJP [the initials used in the book citation] William J. Peace Papers, private collection held by William J. Peace.”