 The first professional librarian to be associated with the Tamiment collection was Louise Heinze, who would be succeeded by Dorothy Swanson late in the 1960s.Swanson would remain in this position for 27 years, expanding the collection greatly by actively seeking out and obtaining the papers of political activists and organizations of both the historic as well as the emerging New Left.Staff hiring was broadly ecumenical, including collection assistants Ethel Lobman, a longtime member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and Peter Filardo, formerly an employee of the Communist Party-associated American Institute for Marxist Studies, founded by historian Herbert Aptheker.