Throughout the summer of 2015, Stanford undergraduate and graduate students have contributed time, expertise, and enthusiasm toward the cataloging of rare materials at the Hoover Library & Archives. In this article they share their experiences of working with archival material—from researching little-known biographies of professional roller skaters to evaluating future careers processing collections.

Andrzej Czechowicz was probably the best known communist-era spy who was an active agent while working for RFE in the late 1960s. Employed for five years in RFE’s media analysis service in Munich, this Polish Security Service (Służba Bezpieczeństwa) operative collected considerable information on the personnel of the Polish section and on RFE sources of information within Poland and photographed thousands of pages of internal documents. After more than five years, Czechowicz returned to Poland in 1971 and participated in programs aimed at embarrassing Radio Free Europe and the US government.