The Office of Special Collections was founded on a simple insight: important stories are preserved when archival systems work is done right.

My work began twenty years ago at a local historical society and has expanded to institutional archives — the Library of Congress, National Archives, and the British Library. I learned how preservation infrastructure functions, where it succeeds, and where it systematically fails. That isn't just research skill. It's systems expertise.

It's also how I know where to look when a family wants to find someone.

What We Do

OSC works at two scales. For organizations, we design and navigate archival infrastructure — the systems that determine what gets saved, what gets found, and what gets lost. For families, we do the harder work of recovering the people those systems compressed into footnotes.

Both require the same thing: knowing how the record was built, and what it left out.

Our research packages — The Dispatch, The Dossier, and The Record — are designed for families and individuals ready to document the story properly. We work primarily with military families, though the work follows the story wherever it leads.

Reach out directly at staylor@oscarchive.com or fill out our inquiry form.