We were able to get a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and spent two years cataloging the collection.
Morgan, who spent 20 years cataloging Ginsberg's materials, said the organization process spurred Ginsberg's interest in photography.
John Carter spent years cataloging everything, and the result is "House of Cash" (Insight Editions, $40), a deeply personal, often surprising scrapbook of his home life.
The Cantor's digitization effort was led by project archivist Amy DiPasquale, who has spent the last two-and-a-half years cataloging the collection.
As it happens, in the '80s, the psychologists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley spent years cataloging the number of words spoken to young children in dozens of families from different socioeconomic groups, and what they found was not only a disparity in the complexity of words used, but also astonishing differences in sheer number.
"Every one of them is a little piece of instruction on how you are going to fix your yard," said Sam Watters, an art historian who has spent the last five years cataloging and identifying Ms. Johnston's unmarked slides and jumble of letters and documents that the Library of Congress acquired in 1953.
Though she does not own one bottle of perfume, Subha M. Patel, the director of fragrance research and development for International Flavors and Fragrances, has spent 26 years cataloging some of the most beautiful scents in nature for the company, the world's second-largest producer of artificial flavors and fragrances.
In his case, though, it did: Sotheby's hired him as an $8,500-a-year catalog trainee.
Beginning with "Flow Joe," his 1993 debut single, he worked his way through an almost 20-year catalog: "Success," "John Blaze," the terrifying "My Lifestyle," the surprisingly moving "Gangsta," even curios like "1, 2 Pass It," by the D&D All-Stars.
Last year, Yahoo ! signed an exclusive one-year deal with Broadway Video to license the 38-year catalog of Saturday Night Live content.
