Fun in the archives

The other day, research for my dissertation project took me to what I thought was going to be an archive full of scientific papers about plant breeding. I showed up, introduced myself to the librarian, and explained my project. I think it went something like this: "I'm looking for information on nineteenth-century debates on heritability. Dr. _________ from the university told me that you guys had collections on the history of breeding, and I'm interested in looking at them." Blink, blink. The librarian stared back at me like I was from Mars. "We don't do human breeding here. We work with plants and insects." "Right, well, I'm interested in anything you might have on plant breeding." "I could let you talk to the plant pathologist...". Clearly I wasn't getting through. "No, well, if you had any collections of scientific papers or anything like that related to plant breeding or practical breeders, I'd be interested in seeing that." At that point, she led me to the computer and typed "plant breeding" into the UF Library Catalog. It quickly became clear to me that, if they did have such papers, I wasn't going to have the good fortune to look at them. More likely, though, this wasn't an "archive" in the traditional sense; it was more like a "library."