Custodial and Donation History

    My name is Carston Anderson, and I in between November of 2025 and February of 2026 founded, funded, and currently run this project independently of The University of Massachusetts, Boston. 

Originally, I searched for grants to support the maintenance of this archival project. This fell apart. I continued on, regardless. Despite this setback I simultaneously reached out to several institutions in the hopes that this research project could enter a formal archive or library under professional management and preservation policies. 

Donation was declined by The Massachusetts Historical Society for the fact this work falls outside the scope of their collection mandate. Donation was not attempted at The Boston Athenaeum, given that I knew they were reorganizing their collection of periodicals and were not looking to expand their holdings simultaneously to that based on prior conversations. The BPL was approached, but after requesting several pages worth of forms filled out before a conversation could even be had, I declined. This left the archives at The University of Massachusetts, Boston. 

I thought that the UMB Archives would be an ideal holding for this work, given the fact that it is exclusively about UMass and its community. Initial outreach was made on July 5th, attempted again on July 17th, a finding aid requested shortly after and provided on the 20th of that month, followed by a period of silence. There was a meeting on August 10th via Zoom where I had to explain to them that the website containing 60,000-70,000 words of reconstruction was the main engine of the work containing funding patterns, print run statistics, and editorial recollections.

Even then, the interest remained mostly focused on the actual books, lists of physical holdings, and documentation of variants in those physical books, and aspects of the website (such as the page titled A Tentative Publication Record) over the contextual system built around it. As early as August 10th, I became deeply alarmed that I was left uncertain about how extensively the larger project had been reviewed compared to the statement I made in my initial outreach email on July 5th: “If I had to do really quick mental math I think the number of books exceeds 60 total?” (This would turn out to be a conservative estimate of my holdings.) 

Negotiations fell apart due to UMB being unable to resolve clearly the singular request I had: a named collection in exchange for my work. This was not a secret condition. In fact, it was the only condition. I asked in my initial outreach on July 5th about the possibility of a named collection verbatim by saying: “I am writing because I am tentatively interested in potentially exploring a rather large and, in my mind, significant donation to the archive. I am writing to explore the possibility of donating in exchange for a named collection? How would that work? It is important to me that the work remains coherent and is not split into various sub-collections, personally.” 

This question was never directly answered, either verbally or in writing, beyond the word “possible” on the August 10th zoom. The subsequent appraisal demonstrated attention to the physical texts: staff compared my inventory against existing holdings and identified specific volumes and variants of interest, and my concern was that I could not identify equivalent clarity about the status of the research apparatus to which those objects belonged. Archivists even informed me verbally that they had only about 50% of the materials I had. 

All the while I sent emails from July 5th, July 17th into July 20th, into an August 10th Zoom meeting, into August 12th, into September 10th, before I ended the process on September 17th. If I had to describe the situation with one word, it would be: asymmetric. 

A named collection was important to me, personally, because this work was not done for credit, grades, a capstone, or any other administrative or bureaucratic reason. It was done because I value the subject and the work found herein. This is not a simple donation of a box of unorganized papers. It is the donation of an entire scholarly apparatus built and maintained independently by one of its students in the MA program. The provenance of the project matters as much as the products of the project. 

I thought I had explained this clearly when I brought up Andria Ward and the degraded history of Volume #21, and told the archivists present that without the website you would lose 90% of the context. I spoke with the former Student Editor-In-Chief Andria Ward. Her name is actually Andrea Ward, she told me in our first email correspondence. Her issue was denied release while she was a student, released later without her knowledge (as she described it), and her name was misspelled not just in the issue she edited, but in subsequent issues as well. 

Building off of that, this is not just exclusively my work. I may have constructed the apparatus but it is just as much the product of the submitters, editors, contributors, and journal-founders documented herein. It is an attempt at reconstructing and situating their artistic world between the years 1970 and 2026. It became, over the course of my research, important that this work maintain intellectual coherence even if it was housed physically separately, something I later consented to.

One alternative was proposed: the materials could be housed according to existing archival arrangements while my name appeared in the relevant finding-aid documentation, providing a common point of attribution across the dispersed materials. I appreciated that this would preserve donor provenance and provide a means of linking the materials. I did not consider it sufficient to preserve the intellectual identity of the research project itself. I explained this in the meeting and told them that if this was the deal, I was not able to consent to it and would be withdrawing my offer. 

At the time, I experienced the distinction (perhaps unfairly) as reducing a monograph-length but website-shaped independent reconstruction to a donor acknowledgment. Negotiations continued but only under what I at the time believe had been explicit communication that I was offering the books and the research. And at this point my September 17th withdrawal should be characterized as a loss of trust in the process where there was considerable and sustained interest in the physical material but not the intellectual apparatus. 

For me, the experience exposed a gap between institutional encouragement of independent student work and the mechanisms available for preserving a student-created research project of this kind. It is disappointing that my work could not be added to the broader centralized record at UMass Boston. I therefore withdrew the proposed donation on September 17, 2026. The research project and associated physical collection remain independently maintained by me. 

After donations collapsed, the university responded with: Thanks for writing and for this update. I wish you all the best as you continue to work on this collection.

--Carston Anderson, September 18th 2026.