Actress Jennifer Jones, who died today at the age of 90, has connections to the Ransom Center’s film holdings, particularly the David O. Selznick collection.

The Selznick collection, the largest collection at the Ransom Center, occupies almost five thousand document cases, and spans the career of the famed Hollywood producer. Selznick cast Jones in several films, including Duel in the Sun (1946) and Portrait of Jennie (1948). The two married in 1949.

In the spring of 2009, the Harry Ransom Center received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to catalog the Morris L. Ernst papers. The collection will be closed to researchers until the project is completed in the fall of 2011. During that time, a team of one full-time project archivist and two part-time assistant archivists will arrange, describe, and preserve the Ernst papers. They will also produce a standard finding aid (or guide to the collection), which will be available online.

During the cataloging process, the archivists aim to achieve two goals: access and preservation. The Ernst papers, despite being uncataloged, have been used frequently since their acquisition. Several lists and indexes to the papers exist, but they are…