In Los Angeles, a city known for discarding history, Mayme Clayton defied convention by collecting it.

For four decades she prowled garage sales, flea markets, attics, used-book stores, even dumps. From these waste heaps of memory, the soft-spoken librarian rescued thousands of rare and unusual books, movies, sound recordings, photographs, letters and ephemera, much of it dating to the slavery era.

With limited funds but boundless determination, she eventually amassed what experts today regard as a valuable and eclectic collection of black Americana. Its most glorious holding is a signed copy of the first book published by a black person: ex-slave Phillis Wheatley's "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral" of 1773.

A bit of an eccentric, Dr. Clayton piled the Wheatley book and all her other treasures in the garage behind her humble home. She filled it to the rafters and prayed that the roof wouldn't leak, all the while maintaining faith that one day she would share its riches with the public in a more suitable setting.

Her dream moved an important step closer to fruition last week, when a group of local officials toured the future home of the Mayme A. Clayton Library, Museum & Cultural Center: a 21,000-square-foot former courthouse in Culver City. It is conceived as a temporary resting spot, but a crucial one, where an estimated 30,000 items can be conserved, cataloged and protected from humidity, insects and other hazards that made Dr. Clayton's garage an archivist's nightmare.

Dr. Clayton, who had pancreatic cancer, was too sick to join the tour but heard from her family that it had been a success. Early the next day, Oct. 13, she died at a hospital in Inglewood, Calif. She was 83.

The Clayton family's long-term goal is to build a world-class museum and research center in Los Angeles with the collection as the centerpiece. But their immediate objective is to raise $50,000 to move the materials out of Dr. Clayton's garage before the rainy season begins. Rep. Diane Watson, D-Calif., helped obtain $150,000 in federal start-up funds, but that money will not be available until early next year.

Plans call for a $6.8 million campaign to renovate the Culver City building, hire a staff and prepare the collection for a grand opening in 2008.

The full worth of what Dr. Clayton left behind awaits the assessment of scholars and conservation specialists, but those familiar with the collection describe it as an extraordinary achievement by a woman of modest means.

"Mayme Clayton performed an absolutely vital act of generosity and foresight in collecting what she did," said Sara Hodson, curator of literary manuscripts for the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. She said Dr. Clayton should be remembered as a hero who has "ensured that cultural treasures that might have been overlooked have been preserved and will be made available in the future."

Ms. Hodson is one of several scholars who consider Dr. Clayton's collection one of the most important of its kind in the country.

"It's probably the most important outside the Schomburg in New York," said Darnell Hunt, a sociology professor and director of Ralph J. Bunche Center for African-American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library, is the home of the United States' most prestigious black history archives, with more than 5 million items documenting the African and African-American experience.

Born Aug. 4, 1923, Dr. Clayton caught the collecting bug as a child in Van Buren, Ark. The daughter of the town's only black merchant, she grew up with an awareness of black achievements. Her parents told her about pioneering educator Mary McLeod Bethune, the daughter of former slaves who went on to found schools for blacks and advise several presidents. Dr. Clayton's search for books on Bethune led her to become a librarian and eventually a collector.

After studying briefly at Lincoln University in Missouri, Dr. Clayton moved to New York, where she found a job in a photography studio. She met her future husband, Andrew Lee Clayton, when he came in to have his picture taken. They were married in 1946 and moved to California, where they began to raise a family. In 1954 she became an assistant to the librarian at the University of Southern California. Two years later, she was hired as a library assistant at University of California, Los Angeles, law library, where she stayed 15 years.

She told the Los Angeles Times in a 1973 interview that she tried to persuade UCLA to invest in out-of-print works by such authors as Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar for the Afro-American studies library it was developing, but found the response discouraging.

So in 1972 she left to became co-owner of Universal Books, a used-book store in Hollywood. When the store closed, she was given its complete inventory of books by and about blacks and opened Third World Ethnic Books out of her home. She specialized in buying and selling works by Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois, among other noted black authors.

While running the business, she earned a bachelor's degree in history from UC Berkeley, in 1974. She received a master's in library science from Goddard College in Vermont in 1975 and a doctorate in humanities from now-closed Sierra University in Santa Monica in 1983.

In 1972, she founded the nonprofit Western States Black Research Center to promote the preservation of African-American history.

Over the next four decades, the center -- basically a one-woman operation -- mounted various programs, including film festivals that showcased her extensive holdings of black talkies and black westerns.

Her archive, which features 1,700 films dating to the early silent era, includes a special collection of works by prolific director Oscar Micheaux. His three-decade career began in 1919, when he became the first black to make a feature film. Among Clayton's Micheaux holdings is an original copy of his 1925 masterpiece, "Body and Soul," which featured Paul Robeson in his screen debut.

Film historian Donald Bogle, an author and expert on black Hollywood who has conducted research in Dr. Clayton's film library, has called her collection "unmatchable and invaluable."