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Five years ago on Feb. 14, the first protest of Act 10, aka the “Budget Repair Bill,” began with a hundred or so UW students carrying valentines to Gov. Scott Walker’s office in an event dubbed “I [heart] UW. Gov. Walker, don’t break my heart.”

The next day, large crowds began to gather on the Capitol Square, and protest signs began to appear. Homemade, heartfelt, these were often created on the fly with a Sharpie and a piece of poster board on the way to a rally. Banners were hung from the Rotunda balcony. Ian’s pizza boxes became a common vector of sentiment.

All of it is documented in thousands of photos on memory cards and hard drives across the state. But the objects remain, too, in the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

“This was Wisconsin history — everybody knew it,” says Matt Blessing, state archivist and director of the society’s archives division.

Buttons, bumper stickers, a “Livestrong”-style red rubber bracelet and, yes, pizza boxes were collected. And of course, posters and signs. “You have to collect in the moment for the future,” says Blessing.

Many of the protest signs were acquired after the Capitol was cleared of protesters in early March. All signs were removed from the building and taken to a state office building at 1 W. Wilson St.; for a week, their owners could sort through piles and claim them. Archivists from the society and the Smithsonian also went through the signs. “If there were 20 signs on one topic, we took one example,” says Helmut Knies, collection development coordinator. “We took a broad range.”

The themes they’re filed under form a broad taxonomy of the protests: “Capitalism.” “Class warfare.” “Collective bargaining.” “Fab 14.” “Kill the Bill.” “Koch Brothers.” “Our House.” “Solidarity.” “Strike.” “Walker, Scott.”

To Knies’ knowledge, none of the original protest valentines are in the collection.

There are pro-Walker signs in the collection, from several rallies, for balance. “Archivists are completely neutral,” Blessing notes.

It turns out, even more ephemeral than this ephemera are websites having to do with Act 10, including tweets and Facebook pages, which the Historical Society has also archived, thanks to a tool called ArchiveIt that captures the state of a web page at a point in time. “That’s the big thing for the 21st-century archivist. Things are so fluid,” says Blessing.

Even harder to preserve is the passion behind these objects. Divorced from their life of active demonstration, separated from the hands that penned them and lofted them, protest signs are just pieces of paper in an acid-free folder.

Or are they like the art of schoolchildren, stored away in a box to  look at years later and ask ourselves, “Who was I then? Who am I now?”

Or are they more like Langston Hughes’ dream deferred?

Does it dry up / Like a raisin in the sun? / Or fester like a sore— / And then run?/... Maybe it just sags / like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Amount of collected material:

17.2 cubic feet, consisting of three archive boxes, 12 flat boxes and 23 oversize folders, 16 compact discs containing photos, 10 photographic prints and four DVDs

Items of note:

Podium placard from an American Majority rally on Feb. 19, 2011, that featured Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher; a school essay, “Scott Walker Shouldn’t Be Governor,” by Gracie Ann De Broux, 11, of Madison; original “Now Settle Down, Kitty” poster

Time it took to process the collection:

Nine to 12 months

Archivists involved:

Four; two collecting, one curating, one processing

Official names under which the material is catalogued:

Wisconsin budget bill controversy and recalls; Wisconsin budget controversy