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WHEELING — Some stories fit between two hardback covers, clearly designed for neat tucking onto a library shelf. Other tales — especially the ones that are ultra specific to the city, the county or a single institution? Not so much.

Storing these kinds of stories generally requires boxes of photos, letters and documents of every sort, according to the archival team at Ohio County Public Library. And, sometimes, even more space is needed.

Such is the case with a Santa suit that was hauled out for Christmases past at Cooey-Bentz Co. in South Wheeling and for whopper scrapbooks such as one that details even the most grisly parts of a local physician’s World War I service in France.

There’s already a designated place for these items and many, many more in the archives room in the library basement. And, if wishes come true, that space may soon double. The square footage is already there, according to Laura Carroll and Sean Duffy, both of whom are many-hatted library staffers who devote part of their time to the archive.

It’s basically a matter of moving some county records out of the way, putting up a couple of walls and, ironically, turning out the lights.

“Light and humidity are the big enemies of archival material,” explained Carroll, an Illinois transplant who previously worked for university libraries and specialty ones such as that of the American Medical Association. Her dual master’s degrees are in public history and library science.

When Carroll, also head of the library’s adult services, isn’t messing with the archive’s dehumidifier, she’s often digging through boxes of photos. In the five years she’s been working with the archives, she has processed literal masses of such stuff. Those photos are now encased in protective sleeves and filed — in labeled folders — in acid-free boxes.

About 10 percent of the library’s photos are additionally digitized and posted online — drawing about 50,000 views per month, according to Kyle Knox, who handles publicity and web content for the library.

This percentage is an industry standard given the time intensity of the digitization process, Carroll said.

The rest of the images are available only the old-fashioned way — ready for sifting through by patrons that have included academic historians, genealogists and the occasional PBS documentarian. (Hello, “Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” staff.)

That ability to handle the collection, interestingly, is part of the reason there is now an actual archive room with walls and a door, Duffy noted. “It was just wide open and unlocked,” he said of the collection’s early days.

Former library administrators and staff including Lou Horacek, Dottie Thomas and Erin Rothenbuehler saw the need to digitize, interpret what was already collected and add to the archive, Duffy said of that era.

“It was a couple shelves in the storage room and a Flickr page,” and was largely unmonitored and unprotected in spite of constant basement traffic concerning oil and gas rights and county-wide land deeds, he noted.

By Horacek’s retirement in 2014, however, it was clear the library needed a trained archivist, he said. Carroll’s arrival in Wheeling was serendipitous. Pregnant at the time, she was initially interested in working the archive only as a volunteer, but later joined the library staff.

Cataloging the various snaps and scraps of Wheeling’s archived past is one thing, Carroll noted. “(But) stuff doesn’t do any good if it’s just sitting on a shelf. We have to make sure that the public knows about it.”

Digitizing content is part of that, she noted, but the library has also committed to engaging with schools (offering content for curriculum enrichment) and creating on-site exhibits that highlight and interpret various elements of the collection.

The current main floor exhibit on civic empathy stemmed from a four-page radio address given in 1936 by the city’s only Black attorney at the time, for example. Harry H. Jones asked WWVA listeners to consider the day-to-day reality of segregation and to take action on behalf of minority citizens.

Duffy does such exhibits in cooperation with institutions such as Heinz History Center of Pittsburgh.

Carroll noted that some elements of the collection are simply there for the future public. That includes hardcore historic documents such as those she said were rescued during the sudden closure of the Ohio Valley Medical Center.

“We got the original board minutes from the beginning to the end,” Carroll said of a collection that also includes items from a nurse-training program at the hospital. “If anyone ever wants to tell that story, they can do it.”

Carroll is also doing “active collection” such as saving a homemade mask from the early days of the pandemic and digitized images of transgender city council member Rosemary Ketchum’s historic campaign.

While the collection already has other elements of diversity — a set of Victorian dance programs came from a young woman who started as a domestic worker rather than a debutante, for example — Carroll’s additionally looking for collections of photos and documents that tell stories from non-majority points of view. An example of what she’s looking for is the already-acquired photo collection of the Blue Triangle Branch of the Wheeling YWCA that existed for Black women during the 1920s and 1930s.

If all this collecting sounds like the basis for a Wheeling museum, that would be about right, Duffy added. “It’s not our goal to become a museum per se, just to be a pass through,” he said of acquiring and keeping items safe as long as needs be. “We’re still hoping that there will be a real museum.”

And, in the meantime, Carroll is learning her new adopted community one story at a time. Holding one of the dance programs that was made from fabric rather than paper, she said it is pretty easy to ponder.

“I find myself thinking about what things were like for her. You’re just feeling like you’re embodying someone from the past,” Carroll said. “I love the fact that we’re interacting with her story and these people’s legacies live on.”

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