At what stage were permanent recorder cards created (and stopped to be)?

There is not much about the organizational cogs that presided to the wax and wane of permanent recorder cards. The other records of the different Rockefeller-endowed organizations, including the digitized versions of officers’ diaries, are silent on the topic. And, certainly, the subject does not sound so exciting. Yet, we had to understand this history in order to appraise the major original source for our database. We needed a chronology of when permanent recorder cards were created and updated at the level of each individual recipient and of the different organizations –not as a type of record as explained in the former section. To do so, we had to rely on clues provided by the cards themselves.

Close examination of the cards revealed variations in layout, typeface, vertical and horizontal alignment, ink density, the nature of the information recorded, and the presence of handwritten notes in the margins. We began by sorting the four sets of cards by organization, division, year of approval, and award type. We then compared cards to identify differences and similarities, as well as patterns of continuity and change. Cards corresponding to awards that were approved but never taken up (referred to as “cancelled” or “lapsed” by Rockefeller-endowed organizations) proved especially valuable. Frozen in time at a point before any travel or work was undertaken, they contain only basic information on the intended recipient and none on the award term itself. As a result, they provided precious clues to the evolution of card layouts, the careful analysis of which allowed us to better assess the strengths and limitations of permanent recorder cards as a source for historical research.

Gaps in Production

Although Rockefeller-endowed organizations and their leaders eventually came to see card indexes as a key resource for recording, managing, and accessing vital information, there was a time when permanent recorder cards simply did not exist. In most cases, cards documenting the earliest mobility awards granted to individuals by a given organization were created years or even decades after the fact. For instance, in 1914, the China Medical Board became the first Rockefeller-endowed organization to grant such awards. But from all indications, it was not until 1920 or 1921 that a few cards were produced for awards dating to between 1914 and 1918. And, most of these cards for early awards were created some 50 years later, in 1966 (figure 13).

Figure 13: A permanent recorder card retroactively created in march 1966 for an award
granted by the China Medical Board in 1914.

We found a similar pattern for other Rockefeller Foundation divisions, including the International Health Board. The cards corresponding to its earliest awards, granted in 1917 and 1918, contain features dating their creation to the 1930s or the 1950s. Likewise, permanent recorder cards for General Education Board awards granted in 1922 and 1923 were produced in the late 1940s. And as already mentioned, no cards were created by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial while the organization was active.

In fact, it was only in the case of the International Education Board, which began granting mobility awards to individuals in 1924, that cards were created from the outset. All other Rockefeller-endowed organizations waited at least a few years after granting their first awards before starting to create a card index. This all lends further credence to our argument that the challenge of managing information on a rapidly growing number of awards and recipients was decisive in convincing these organizations to begin producing permanent record cards. Based on a careful reading and cross referencing of the cards, we figure out that somewhere between 500 and 1000 were created after the fact -a neater estimation would be very demanding.

Furthermore, the Rockefeller Foundation set clearly contains cards that were re-created to replace earlier versions. The latter may have been worn out, created using an out-of-date format (some cards include a hand-written note marking them “to be re-written and re-arranged”), or lost amid changes in staff and organizational structure. Although it would be very difficult to estimate the number of such replacement cards, a comparison of layouts and approval dates strongly suggest that they are especially common for awards dating to the 1920s and 1930s.

With respect to the attributes of individual cards and regardless of the organization involved, we were able to identify two significant patterns. Most obviously, layouts changed substantially over time, adding to our conclusion that most cards were created “on the fly” shortly after the relevant committee approved the corresponding award.¹ A card would then be ready to receive information on the recipient and their activities as soon as the award term began.

The second pattern concerns cards created after the fact. Most were produced at particular moments that usually corresponded to an institutional challenge facing a specific Rockefeller-endowed organization. For instance, when the General Education Board began preparing its Directory of Fellowship Awards in the late 1940s, staff realized that no record cards were available for awards granted in the early 1920s. Accordingly, they went about gathering the information necessary to belatedly produce such cards. At the Rockefeller Foundation, a new management paradigm prompted the creation of several dozen cards in 1966. This was the year when all card contents were entered onto IBM data forms (figure 14). Permanent recorder cards were selected to test the “automation” of Rockefeller Foundation record keeping, because they contained “a considerable volume of names” (having gone through four full sets of cards, our team would certainly agree!).(( “Oral Histories: Kenneth Wernimont,\” p. 31, Rockefeller Foundation Records, record group 13, box 26, folder 1, Rockefeller Archive Center.))

Figure 14: A permanent record card whose information was entered onto an IBM data
form. Note the “IBM form” annotation on the right and the data entry
code on the left, both added in the same handwriting.

Plans for replacing the Foundation’s existing card index with a computerized system were drawn up in 1964 , and the contract with IBM was signed early in 1965. At some point further down the line, those filling out the data forms cards realized that the Rockefeller Foundation sets lacked references to many award recipients mentioned in other sources. For instance, permanent recorder cards were missing for early China Medical Board awards, as well as for awards granted to “Mexican scholars” and “Latin American scholars” in agriculture during the late 1940s. Staff proceeded to retroactively create cards for the awards and individuals concerned, adding them to the existing sets in preparation for producing data forms. However, in the context of our research, we had no way of determining whether this process captured all missing award recipients.

Outside forces also inspired efforts to fill record-keeping gaps. For instance, World War II-era reflections on European reconstruction triggered the creation, between 1941 and 1943, of permanent recorder cards for awards granted by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial.

This brief review of circumstances surrounding the creation and upkeep of permanent recorder cards offers three key takeaways.

1. Generally, the decision to begin creating permanent recorder cards did not coincide with the decision to begin granting mobility awards to individuals. The resulting delays bring into question the accuracy of cards created after the fact. Often, by the time cards were belatedly produced, key information had been lost or forgotten. Furthermore, latter-day names were anachronistically applied to home and host institutions; cities, countries, and other places; as well as Rockefeller-endowed organizations and their administrative divisions. And although we have been able to correct many errors related to geographical and institutional nomenclature, there was little we could do to address missing details. Even large-scale biographical research would have yielded uneven results, depending on a given recipient’s public profile and the extent of print sources (and their digitization) for a given period.
2. Permanent recorder cards were introduced under a wide range of circumstances. Individual organizations and even different divisions within the same organization started producing them at various times. It was not until the mid-1920s that the use of card indexes for tracking award recipients became commonplace. And in the case of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, no cards were created until long after the organization had ceased operations.
3. With the exception of the International Education Board, Rockefeller-endowed organizations rarely had at their disposal a comprehensive record of awards and recipients. For decades, the main sets of permanent recorder cards remained incomplete. Missing cards were somewhat haphazardly added between the 1920s and the mid-1960s.
   
   In other words, this has been a not perfect tracking system, and only a weak version of Buribunkdom: it was far from being systematically implemented and the information was not entirely accurate. Moreover, a complete set of cards only became available a few years before permanent recorder cards stopped being created and maintained, as we are about to see.

The End of the Paper Trail

The International Education Board stopped granting awards, and therefore creating permanent recorder cards, in 1924. As for the General Education Board, its last permanent recorder cards date from 1953, the last year when awards were granted. Books were closed in 1960. By contrast, individual mobility awards were still being provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, and permanent recorder cards were still around in the 1960s.

At the Foundation, the crucial moment was 1966, after the content of existing permanent recorder cards was transferred to IBM data forms. From that moment, aside from a few exceptions (the reasons for which remain unclear), the Rockefeller Foundation staff stopped updating existing permanent recorder cards with details on the activities of recipients during and after their award terms. As for new awards, a mixed system was in use for a few years: basic basic facts on each award and its recipient was still typed on a cardboard card, and it was also loaded onto an IBM computer (as attested by the data code added to every new card produced).

In the four sets of cards we used, the most recent cards were created for Rockefeller Foundation scholarships and fellowships approved in 1970, with award terms set to begin during the first half of 1971. Many of these final cards remain incomplete, with the “termination date” field left empty or filled by hand using a pencil or ball-point pen. This suggests that flat-platen typewriters were no longer available and that cards were only occasionally updated. Thus permanent recorder cards were gradullay forsaken once the new computerized “permanent fellowship record” system was implemented and tested. Their disparition is the milestone that delimitates our database.

1. At the Rockefeller Foundation, the biographical details included on permanent recorder cards were phrased in the same way as on the “Officers’ actions” sheets used to record the formal approval of awards. This suggests that the cards were filled out by copying the information from the sheets [↩]

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