By Chad King

I have recently begun training on organizing and preserving a collection here at the Harry S. Truman Library. The collection I am working on is the Douglas G. Wright papers. Wright served as the administrator of the Southwestern Power Association under the Department of Interior, a position he served for over thirty years. While I was going through his papers, I found that he saved mostly items related to his career, and was a big supporter of publicly owned power resources, and maintained cordial ties with presidents Truman and Johnson. While Wright primarily lived in Oklahoma and his position kept him in that region, his papers, nonetheless, detail an important time during Truman’s administration dealing with public works projects and the future of public power resources. There are roughly four folders worth of material and I will share info dealing with the preservation methods I used in my next post.