Late Nights with Senator Dianne Feinstein
Stanford University Libraries received the Dianne Feinstein Senatorial Papers in 2024, in line with the United States Senate's initiative to preserve the historical records of its members and in accordance with the late Senator Feinstein’s wishes to archive her papers at Stanford University. Feinstein, who was elected student body vice president during her time at Stanford and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History in 1955, was a transformative figure in American politics and an advocate for women in leadership roles throughout her tenure as a United States Senator representing California from 1992 to 2023.
The Dianne Feinstein Senatorial Papers offer researchers and historians invaluable insights into her legislative priorities, decision-making processes, policy development, and constituent engagement. A dedicated team of five archivists is currently processing the collection: Lead Archivist Rebekah Valentine, Digital Archivist Sabrina Gunn, Associate Archivist Tiana Taliep, and Assistant Archivists Cali Vance and Queenie Don. In this series of articles, the team will chronicle the processing of the extensive collection and highlight its most intriguing aspects. A list of previous installments follows this article.
When we signed on as the overnight staff at Green Library, we foresaw a future of dark nights, long silences, and endless book processing, so when we were offered the unique opportunity to do something different and collaborate with the Department of Special Collections on creating descriptive metadata for the audiovisual material from the Dianne Feinstein Senatorial papers, we readily accepted. Our main responsibilities as late-night access services specialists are naturally more front-facing. Still, before the rush of the overnight hours, we had the bandwidth to apply ourselves to learning new skills, and the attention to detail needed for the task meant that we had something to keep our minds sharp and occupied even on the slowest nights. We had a lot of questions about the big words and big concepts involved, but we were excited to begin, and with the guidance of Rebekah Valentine, Feinstein Papers Lead Archivist, and Sabrina Gunn, Feinstein Papers Digital Archivist, we began to listen.
Metadata, broadly, is data that gives information about other data, and descriptive metadata does what it says on the tin: describing the information contained in a record and making it easier for researchers to find the information that they want. If the physical cassette itself is the data, then the metadata would be the improved title, the date it was recorded, the people featured, the subject categories, the abstract, and so on.
Rebekah and Sabrina had us start by working on the metadata for the videos on Senator Dianne Feinstein’s official YouTube channel, which already had a lot of metadata for us to draw from, such as video descriptions or upload dates, most of which we essentially adjusted for formatting before sending to Sabrina and Rebekah to review and finalize. Since we aren’t metadata experts, the YouTube videos gave us a convenient gateway to see metadata in action before we dove into more complex digitized audio recordings from her office.
Compared to the YouTube videos, which were published on an official channel and demonstrated a heightened degree of focus and polish, the audio tapes were often on the informal side, containing test runs, static, overlapping sounds, or clips from different events. Tasks that had seemed easy with the YouTube videos, like identifying places or people through video visuals, were noticeably more difficult when we only had an audio file, and limited descriptions or visuals to work with, such as a lone word on a label, “WACO”.
Sometimes, it just came down to us turning the volume up, holding our headsets down, and listening again. Being able to pick out names and topics is only part of the challenge; in order to ensure that the metadata is concise and effective in expressing the most important information about the item, we were limited in the number of contributor names or subject headings we could add. We had to consider the effects of choosing subject headings that were general or specific and whether one subject was more central than another. A key piece of advice that we received was to consider the researcher: what would a researcher most want to know about this particular item in the Dianne Feinstein Senatorial papers?
This question came back to us again and again as we listened our way through the files. Many times, the answer was straightforward. Recordings of speeches, press conferences, and Senate sessions often involve famous figures and political talking points that make for straightforward research keywords and connect to each other to demonstrate the processes behind Senator Dianne Feinstein’s work. Take the California Desert Protection Act for example. By searching the title of this bill in the collection in Searchworks, we now can see the journey this bill went through and a bit of the variety of things Senator Dianne Feinstein recorded about it. From the first day she was elected California Senator on November 4th 1992, this bill was on her mind. The same cassette that recorded her victory speech also has several on-the-go impromptu interviews she did and in one of these she is asked about her plans for this bill. The bill had been workshopped for years, and in fact had originally been introduced to Congress by the prior California Senator Alan Cranston in 1986.
One of our personal favorite recordings from the collection is a very casual interview that Senator Dianne Feinstein did with Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Glenn Bunting, a year into working on the California Desert Protection Act. In the recording, she talked for more than 30 minutes about the many influences on the bill and her struggles to compromise between them all while keeping the bill true to itself and her. Even after getting the bill to a satisfactory state to put in front of Congress, she expressed her frustrations on the Senate floor about how the bill was being held hostage by partisan gridlock despite her going through great efforts to ensure that the bill was bipartisan. When the bill was officially passed by the Senate, she held an official press conference with some of the bill's key supporters. Finally, from the day that the California Desert Protection Act was approved by the House, we have a recording of her briefly reflecting on the experience. The metadata referencing the California Desert Protection Act helps thread each of these components together and provides researchers with something to follow as they explore the collection.
However, not everything could be so clearly traced, and we faced multiple files that challenged us to think carefully about the implications of metadata and the context it provides for researchers: What would people want to know about files like uncut recordings of public service announcements, recorders left on too long, or thankful compliments sent by a slightly overenthusiastic supporter? What type of research would those records support, or what kind of story do they tell?
Despite, or perhaps because of, all that we’ve learned, we very much still see gaps in our understanding of these records that Senator Dianne Feinstein left behind, questions about how these files might connect to some greater picture. It has really driven home for us the significance of this metadata in ensuring that this collection might one day find the people who will piece together Senator Dianne Feinstein’s story.
This archiving of the Dianne Feinstein Senatorial papers and our involvement must eventually reach its conclusion, so our late-night shifts at Green Library might one day be filled with other tasks or collaborations. However, this first collaboration has been an inspiring glimpse into archival work. Between the content of the files themselves and the research we did to help ourselves better understand and create accurate metadata for those files, we found ourselves learning a lot about Senator Dianne Feinstein, her colleagues and collaborators, and socio-political issues and moments that she was deeply involved in. We were even warned during our training that we might start hearing her voice everywhere after listening to her voice in all those files. Even so, we found ourselves pleasantly surprised by the little instances in the audio files where the curtain was pulled back and we got to see the living, working people behind the public face of Dianne Feinstein, the politician.
Prior Articles
- Senator Dianne Feinstein’s Career in Photos by Digital Archivist Sabrina Gunn (April 2025)
- The Dianne Feinstein Senatorial Papersby Elinor Aspegren, an intern from the MLIS program at the University of Maryland (August 2025)
- From Draft to Distribution: Senator Dianne Feinstein’s Digital Press Releases by Digital Archivist Sabrina Gunn (November 2025)