Fragile Material

Among my discoveries: personal correspondence between editors and authors, receipts for bills long since paid, three-ring binders overflowing with correspondence from subscription companies like EBSCO and JSTOR, microfilm reels in acid-free storage boxes, promotional pens from Texas Christian University, a vintage-looking stapler, and an embossed stamp bearing the journal's name. In my role as editor, I joined a long line of caretakers who have preserved the physical history of Composition Studies by overseeing the archive's journeys from Fort Worth to Chicago in 1996, back to Forth Worth in 2003, on to Winnipeg in 2010, to Cincinnati in 2013, and then back to Fort Worth in 2019 (more about that below). Understanding that luck runs out and preservation requires intention and planning, I arranged, with Brad Lucas at TCU, a stable home for Composition Studies' archive. [...]the field's longest continuously publishing online peer-reviewed journal, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, recently created a voluntary membership model that asks readers to help cover increasing server expenses-costs traditionally covered by the senior editorial staff out of their own pockets (the journal's open-access status is unaffected by membership) ("Kairos").