July is a sleepy time on the University of Vermont campus in Burlington, and ordinarily the basement of the Bailey/Howe Library would be sleepier still. However, in recent weeks it has been bustling—not with students conducting academic research, but outsiders conducting political research. They have all come with one purpose: to dig through the Bernie Sanders archive.

Some are national journalists, but others are more mysterious figures. A reporter for local alt-weekly Seven Days recently speculated that "two casually dressed twentysomethings" at the archive were opposition researchers for Hillary Clinton—which her camp later denied, though not before Drudge Report picked up the story. Ever since then, a retinue of young men has streamed through the library basement. They refuse to identify themselves, and the librarians on duty do likewise, citing Vermont privacy statutes and their own code of ethics.

These men work for Sanders's presidential campaign, the headquarters of which is a stone's throw away, and they have been tasked with digitizing the entire archive—a gargantuan effort that left the librarians flummoxed when staffers announced their plans last week. It's a vast trove of some 30 boxes of documents chronicling Sanders's eight-year mayoralty of Burlington and other early political activities. As material is not allowed to leave the special collections room, Bernie's workers sit for hours on end, scanning every last leaf of paper onto thumb drives.

They say little, but in a rare moment of candor, one did ask me whether I was “with Hillary." Otherwise they refuse to engage, operating under strict orders not to speak with media under any circumstances. Asked if these men are paid Sanders staffers, campaign spokesman Michael Briggs said, "Interns are staff, and staff are paid." Otherwise he declined to comment on their task, what prompted their arrival, or how many there are. Campaign manager Jeff Weaver said of them, “Just collecting information for ads and to document his record of effective leadership as Mayor of Burlington."

Sanders’s ad hoc 2016 operation in some sense is a reflection of the Vermont senator himself, who famously eschewed neckties until first entering elective office and reliably projects an image of rumpled earnestness. The campaign is powered thus far more by passion than structure, lacking the hyper-organized, corporatized polish of the Hillary Clinton juggernaut. Whatever the upsides of such an approach, the goings-on in Bailey/Howe Library suggest that the campaign might have been unprepared for the sudden surge of interest in Sanders’ past.