The Hoover Institution Library & Archives hosted a group of fellow librarians and archivists from Stanford’s Robert Crown Law Library for a special behind-the-scenes tour of the spaces and to explore Library & Archives collections, including the papers of two Stanford Law graduates. During the tour, Hoover staff shared insights on Library & Archives operations, including the exhibition galleries, preservation lab, digital lab, research services, and reading room.
Staff presented items from the special collections, with a focus on material related to law and legal proceedings. Among the highlights were a selection of extensive Watergate trial notes, which include various courtroom doodles of significant trial participants by John Ehrlichman, graduate of Stanford Law (1951). Ehrlichman became one of Richard Nixon’s most trusted advisers and a key figure of the Watergate era. Additionally, a law school notebook of US Supreme Court chief justice William Rehnquist was displayed, which was of special interest to the law librarians since Rehnquist also attended Stanford Law School (1951–52). Archivists discussed their work arranging and describing the collections to make them available to researchers.
During the visit to the preservation lab, the law librarians spoke with book and paper conservator Laurent Cruveillier, who showed material from the Commission for Relief in Belgium records, American Relief Administration Russian operational records, and Lou Henry Hoover miscellaneous papers. In the digital lab, collections photographer Mireya Salinas gave an overview of how collection material gets imaged and added to our digital collections site. In the Herbert Hoover Memorial Building, Library & Archives staff gave the law librarians a glimpse into the operations of research services and the Reading Room.
The law librarians were also given a tour of the Hoover Tower galleries, both the Herbert Hoover Gallery, which provides a historical overview of the institution, and the Lou Henry Gallery, where the exhibition Bread + Medicine: Saving Lives in a Time of Famine tells the story of America's relief mission to Soviet Russia during the Great Famine of 1921. The visit concluded with a visit to the Lou Henry Hoover Observation Deck.
