My first semester here, I finagled a trip to the UMN archive and special collections caverns as part of a campus look-see for a visiting scholar. The idea fascinated me: what could be more scholars-on-the-tundra than caverns full of archives, possibly run by a race of archivist gnomes?

Our East and West Bank campuses are indeed situated along the bluffs and banks of the Mississippi, and those sandstone bluffs are full of caves. The U makes use of all of it. For instance, the Weisman Art Museum garage is built right into the bluffs:

It’s a rather deep garage (six stories, perhaps?), and driving down into it often feels like you're descending into part of the river itself, even though that's not actually the case.

In the archive caverns, you have the sensation of being even further down. There’s a four-story service entrance carved into the bank, but we entered through the secured elevator system in Anderson Library. Access is limited to staff, but Jean-Nickolaus Tretter, the founder and head archivist of the extensive Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies*, which we were visiting, was nice enough to guide us through. There are two humongous caverns, each two stories high and the length of two football fields. Jean put it in perspective by explaining that they had the space to archive the Washington Monument several times. Caves being what they are, they naturally featured a year-round temperature in the mid-50s and very stable, high humidity. It doesn’t take too much doing for climate control technology to stabilize the rooms at 62 degrees and 50% humidity, the optimal conditions for paper storage. The Immigration History Research Center has posted a photo tour, and the cavern photos are about halfway down the page. They don’t really convey the sheer size of the caverns, but they do give some sense of just how much material is stored down there.

There were no archive gnomes, as it turned out — just human archivists who are managing a truly vast amount of materials, tucked away in the banks with enough sump pumps to survive a 500-year flood.

*The Tretter Collection is remarkable, and Jean is knowledgeable, chatty and very nice. Some of you would have a fine time doing research there. The collection contains all the usual paper as well as a surprising array of non-paper materials. The queer pulp collection alone could take up years of my life.