Elena S. Danielson

Elena Danielson, Hoover Institution Archivist, Emerita

Biography:

Elena S. Danielson retired as associate director of the Hoover Institution and director of the Hoover Library and Archives in 2005. As Archivist Emerita, she has published two books that draw on her experience in the Hoover Archives: The Ethical Archivist in 2010, and Hoover Tower at Stanford University in 2018.

After joining the nationally renowned Hoover Institution Archives in 1978, Danielson began working in technical services, then reference, outreach, collection development, and management. She also served as curator of the Institution's West European Collection. With more than sixty million items, the Hoover archival collections constitute one of the world's largest repositories of materials on twentieth-century social, economic, and political change.

Danielson organized the acquisition of several hundred archival collections on a variety of subjects, including Romanov family letters, the papers of Soviet dissident Andrei Siniavsky, files of the Berlin organization Notgemeinschaft für eine freie Universität, and oral history interviews with German public figures.

Danielson wrote for a number of academic and archival publications, such as Slavic Review, Vestnik Arkhivista, and American Archivist, and delivered papers on the holdings of the archives at conferences in Bulgaria, Germany, Poland, Romania, and Russia. She was a regular contributor to the Hoover Digest. Her volume, coauthored with Charles G. Palm, titled Herbert Hoover: A Register of His Papers in the Hoover Institution, was published by the Hoover Institution Press in 1983. In 2004, Danielson was awarded the National Order of Merit (rank of commander) of Romania. She was awarded the medal for her "important role in the preservation and development of the extensive Romanian collections of the Hoover Archives." She received the Posner prize of the Society of American Archivists in 2005.

Danielson holds a Ph.D. and an A.M. degree in German studies from Stanford, a master's degree in library science and an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research was supported by Woodrow Wilson, Fulbright, and Whiting Fellowships.

(2018)