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This is the first episode in our new series THE KEEPERS\u2014stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians\u2014Keepers of the culture and the cultures and collections they keep.

We begin at The Hip Hop Archive and Research Center at Harvard. In the late 1990\u2019s the students of Dr. Marcyliena Morgan, Professor of Linguistics at UCLA, started falling by her office, imploring her to listen to hip hop. They wanted her to hear this new underground sound and culture being created, the word play, the rhyming, the rapping. They wanted her to help them begin to archive this new medium. \u201cHip Hop *is *an archive," they told her. Dr. Morgan wasn\u2019t an archivist and she didn\u2019t listen to hip hop. But she listened to her students and saw a new kind of soundtrack emerging from the cracks.

Bit by bit she opened her office and her resources and began to collect the history and material culture of hip hop. Some 15 years later the Archive has gone from her office at UCLA to Harvard, where she and Professor Henry Louis Gates founded The Hiphop Archive & Research Institute at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute whose mission is to \u201cfacilitate and encourage the pursuit of knowledge, art, culture, scholarship and responsible leadership through Hiphop.\u201d Along with gathering everything about hip hop for preservation and study, the Archive created the Nasir Jones Fellowship for scholarly research in the field, named for Nas, one of hip hop\u2019s titans, and the \u201cClassic Crates Project,\u201d a collection that aims to archive 200 seminal hip hop albums in the same Harvard music library that houses the works of Mozart, Bertolt Brecht and Edith Piaf. The first four\u2014Nas\u2019 \u201cIllmatic,\u201d \u201cThe Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,\u201d Kendrick Lamar\u2019s \u201cTo Pimp a Butterfly\u201d and \u201cThe Low End Theory\u201d by a Tribe Called Quest have been inducted into the University\u2019s Loeb Music Library.

You\u2019ll hear from Professor Marcyliena Morgan, Nas, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Nas Fellow Patrick Douthit aka 9th Wonder, The Hip Hop Fellows working at the Archive, an array of Harvard Archivists, and students studying at the Archive and the records, music and voices being preserved there.

And we take a look at the Cornell University Hip Hop Collection, founded in 2007, through a sampling of stories from Assistant Curator Jeff Ortiz, Johan Kugelberg author of \u201cBorn in the Bronx,\u201d and hip hop pioneers Grandmaster Caz, Pebblee Poo, Roxanne Shante and more.