[1] He served as reference librarian in this library while he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation under Ralph Haswell Lutz on the response of European public opinion to Woodrow Wilson, using the materials he had helped to acquire in Europe as well as the Hoover's extensive collection of wartime newspapers.
During his two years there he campaigned for funding for a research program to develop chemical processes to preserve paper, and also to investigate the new possibilities of microphotography.
[5] A year later he was called to chair the history department at the Women's College at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, filling Henry E. Bourne's place.
[8] This led to conflict with Davis,[9] and Binkley ultimately resigned in January 1939, frustrated that the ADI had not taken action towards a test case, but still supportive of the Institute.
[11] He emerged in the front rank of historians of the Paris Peace Conference in the early 1930s with his articles making use of the first collections of official documents to be published.
[15] Under Binkley's leadership the Joint Committee supported ever more innovative uses of new technologies for documentary reproduction, especially microfilm, with which he had been experimenting in his own darkroom with a Leica camera.
The agreement (which was actually negotiated by Harry M. Lydenberg for the Joint Committee) fell short of Binkley's hope for coverage of teaching and research uses of materials: he said that it "protects what libraries have done in the past, but not what they might do in the future.
[24] A project to create finding aids for archival collections in Cleveland was the pilot for the Historical Records Survey, for which Binkley did the initial planning and served as a consultant.
There has been little really original work in this field since those exciting days, and always Binkley was in the forefront: questioning, examining, speculating, and carrying forward everyone around him with his enthusiasm.
It began with Rick Prelinger's interest from the point of view of archives in Binkley's arguments for the democratization of culture and scholarship supported by new information technologies.