ICWP Play Archive

Alan Woods reminds all ICWP Inc. Member playwrights that they are invited to submit their work to the ICWP Archives at the Lawrence and  Lee Theatre Research Institute:  Preserving the art of the present for our great-great grandchildren

  A message from Alan Woods.

Generally, it's preferable that archival material be in whatever order,
etc., that you keep it in. The general principle is to preserve the
organization used by the person who created the material: the organization itself can be important. Since the finding is by a finding guide, which will list box and folder number, the actual order is less important for finding than for signalling how the creator kept her work, and what she considered important about organizational ideas.

What happens when material arrives here: 

• All metals (paper clips, staples, ring binders, etc.) are removed and discarded as  they will eventually destroy the paper material.
• Documents are removed from binders, folders, etc., and rehoused in acid free folders, which are placed in acid free library storage containers. So if you keep all materials pertaining to a single play together, they'll stay together. 
• If your files are organized by classification (plays together, reviews and PR material separated out, contracts separate, programs and photos separate, etc.), then that's how we keep them.

We then prepare an initial inventory, which is available on site here in
the Institute, and a collection-level record, which is available through
the University Libraries' website and through several of the web search
engines. The collection then is listed in greater detail by a cataloguer,
to at least the folder level (i.e., each folder gets a listing), which
becomes part of the website. This last step may or may not take a bit
longer, depending on the volume of material in an individual collection,
and the volume of cataloguing taking place. Examples of both kinds are available at the OSU Libraries website's author search page.  Do a search for "Perlman, Sandra" and you'll get entries for each of the plays Sandra's donated, plus a collection level record (it's No. 12, "Sandra Perlman script collection").

Looking forward to more good work arriving for the archives--

Alan Woods

 

Sending Materials

• Since our staff is so small, when Members send their materials, we'd rather have hard copies than electronic submissions.
• More importantly, the way the author prints/formats/makes choices about presentation of the manuscript is an crucial (if small) part of the whole process of artistic creation, so we'd like to have your choices rather than ours.

Appropriate Materials to send
Materials appropriate for the archive include anything to do with the creation, promotion, presentation, etc. of your work.  This  includes... 

• manuscripts
• correspondence
• production photos
• programs
• copies of reviews
• anything else pertaining to your play. 

Copies of any performance materials for produced plays or readings, in addition to scripts, critical responses, etc., all are appropriate. And a reminder: the TRI is a non-circulating collection. We will make copies for interlibrary loan (which can be read only in a special collections), but permission from the copyright holder (i.e., the creator of the work or her assignees) is required before any material can be copied for other than personal research use.

Send material to:

Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute
ATTN: ICWP Archives
1430 Lincoln Tower
1800 Cannon Drive
Columbus, OH 43210-1230
USA

 

If there are any questions/concerns/ideas/further thoughts,
please contact Alan Woods directly.

Alan Woods - Director of
Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute
The Ohio State University
1430 Lincoln Tower
1800 Cannon Drive
Columbus, Ohio 43210-1230
614/292-6614 vox office 614/688-8417 FAX office

EMAIL ALAN

TRI

To view an example of  what Linda Eisenstein's listings look like in the OSU Library system: Click Here.