OSU Receives Grant To Preserve Sen. Inhofe's Records

The career of Senator Jim Inhofe left a large footprint on the state and national politics, and soon, all of his papers will be housed at Oklahoma State University.

In total, 55 years of public service will be stored in a single collection on campus.

“There is a lot of material,” Mary Larson, the Associate Dean for the Special Collections Library at OSU, said. “It’s quite a responsibility.”

Larson and her team of archivists at the Edmon Low Library are tasked with processing and displaying this collection.

“We were very excited,” Larson said, recalling the moment they found out. “A little overwhelmed.”

Who wouldn’t it be? The records placed in boxes, set side by side, would reach 1,400 linear feet. As Larson points out, that’s a little more than a quarter of a mile in length.

The library team was relieved to learn they will soon have help. OSU received a $1.2 million grant to prepare and store the collection.

“In library funding that is an incredible gift,” Larson said.

The funding will be used primarily to hire personnel.

“We’re looking at about 15 hours per linear foot,” Larson pointed out. “It’s over 21,000 hours of work.”

Work that requires specific materials like acid free boxes, acid free folders and special archival paper clips that don’t rust. In total, the papers will require more than 3,500 boxes and nearly 150,000 folders.

Those boxes and folders will contain everything from legislation to Inhofe’s daily schedule.

“Political scientists are going to be fascinated by some of the stuff here,” Larson said.

They have the opportunity to track 55 years of changes in Oklahoma and 35 years of change in American politics, all in the single collection in Stillwater.

OSU expects the processing to take close to five years.