Reading Archives

Signing Off

2009-05-26T09:54:00.003-04:00

Spruce Head, Maine, 2009

This is my last post on Reading Archives, by my calculation the 250th post since I started this two and a half years ago. I have been thinking about doing this for some time, and recent comments about indexing the site and upgrading it in other ways helped to speed up the process.

Doing this has always been a personal pleasure, for I have always been an avid reader, and I constantly am in search of references to archives in order to enhance my own understanding of archives and their importance to society. I have also been disappointed that the blog did not generate more discussion about publications about archives, but it is obvious that few in the archival community either have the inclination or the time to contribute in such ways (this is not intended as criticism, just a statement of fact).

It is time for me to move on. Early next year I turn 60 years of age, and I move into my final decade as an academic member of the archival profession. I also am just finishing a three year stint as the LIS Program Chair, and I have various of my own research projects piled up in various states of incompleteness that I need (and want) to finish. Other personal issues have emerged as well, so it is the right time to bring this project to a close.

I will leave the blog up for whatever value it has. And I thank those of you who have commented and sent encouraging support. Now, it is my aim to have more time to paint and write.

Records, Historic Sites, and Public Memory

2009-05-26T09:52:00.001-04:00

Seth C. Bruggeman, Here, George Washington Was Born: Memory, Material Culture, and the Public History of a National Monument (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008).

Archivists are becoming fascinated with how they and their repositories connect (or don’t connect) to local communities. Bruggeman’s study of the supposed birthplace of our first president is also an analysis of how historians relate to the making of historical meaning, in this case examining the debate over the relevance and accuracy of the birthplace of Washington. Bruggeman states that he has written a history “part social, part cultural, and several parts intellectual” (p. 9). Much of this study concerns the battle over a reconstruction of the birthplace house which seems to have been built in the wrong place and in a manner looking nothing like the original house seemed to be, but which nonetheless became the center of both Washington’s boyhood interpretation and a contest between local residents, historians, and site staff. There have been other complicating factors, ones that have plagued other historic sites as well, such as how to interpret slavery and race at sites that have taken on iconic and even religious overtones as well as the battles and tensions between historical and museum professionals with the activities of well-intentioned amateurs and community activists.

Bruggeman’s book is an excellent case study of historic site interpretation and collective memory, part of a growing scholarly literature that those interested in archives ought to be familiar (but which very few of the latter seem to be well-versed in). Such studies, and Bruggeman’s is no exception, often offering commentary on the value and use of records and record generating technologies. Here are some examples. In trying to understand how late 19th century Americans were relating to the increasing number of historic sites and parks, Bruggeman writes: “No turn-of-the-century technology brought American object fetishism into relief more so than the easy-use personal camera. The practice of taking postmortem photographs of departed loved ones – common during the turn of the nineteenth century – was perhaps the most striking permutation of the same phenomenon responsible for the Washington reliquary rings of a century prior and the grand pilgrimages of centuries long past” (p. 57). Later on, in describing some of the debates between the private citizen Memorial Association and the National Park Service, Bruggeman how certain of the Memorial Association’s records, upon their transfer to the National Park Service were discovered to be missing (either the result of careless management or purposeful destruction).Bruggeman, when considering the running of the Washington birthplace site by the more professional and bureaucratic Park Service also notes that the latter’s records “grow increasingly impersonal” in comparison of what is reflected in the records of the Memorial Association (p. 177). The donation, in 1996, of the records of another citizen group, the Wakefield Memorial Association, to the National Park Service is seen as the final stage of private groups administering the historic site.

Antiques, Sort of Like Archives

2009-05-19T20:24:00.002-04:00

Leon Rosenstein, Antiques: The History of an Idea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).

Archivists, interested in the history and nature of collecting, will want to peruse this book on antiques by former philosophy professor and owner of an antiques business with his wife. Rosenstein contends with the concept of antiques, more complicated than one might think. He provides this definition: “An antique is a primarily handcrafted object of rarity and beauty that, by means of its associated provenance and its agedness as recognized by means of its style and material endurance, has the capacity to generate and preserve for us the image of a world now past” (p. 14). Later he provides an extended discussion of the ten criteria of what makes something antique, and archivists will discover elements that are similar to their notion of archives (including completeness, authenticity, and provenance).

Rosenstein gives us a useful review of the shifting notion of the antique over the past two thousand years, with some effort to relate antiques to civilization and human nature, such as “The antique’s form – its style and aged, enduring corporeality – enables our imagination to fancy in it the subjective spirit hibernating there. To live among the handmade is to live among the human. And particularly, to live perceptively and sensitively among the great creations of the past is to live among the historicality and universality of the human, for antiques are the materially immanent indicators of universal human historicality” (p. 37). Rosenstein’s historical analysis also suggests some connections with the development of archives, such as when he writes that the “appreciation of the antique in America during the 1890-1915 generation moved from the interest in antiques as mere curiosities and talismans with historical or cultural references . . . to an appreciation of antiques as objects having peculiar artistic and aesthetic properties as well, objects that were evocative of the past and of the world of early America and also beyond America” (pp. 142-143). This is, of course, the same era when state government archives began to be established and scientific history viewing such archives as laboratories.

Surviving the Past

2009-05-13T01:48:00.003-04:00

Wojciech Tochman, Like Eating a Stone: Surviving the Past in Bosnia, translated by Antonio Lloyd-Jones (New York: Atlas and Co., 2008).

Sarah E. Wagner, To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

War is a strange, compelling, and common human activity. It destroys individuals and community memory, but also compels us to discover new ways of remembering people and preserving societal memory. Two recent books on the recent war and genocide in Bosnia gives us a glimpse of the nature of war and its impact on the comprehension of the past (with some implications for the understanding of archival evidence).

Reporter and writer Tochman provides a personal, heart-rending account of the mass murders in Bosnia and subsequent efforts to identify the recovered bodies (or fragments of the bodies). He confronts the issues of identification, and remembrance, and the processes by which these issues are engaged. Tochman provides a first hand account of the use of DNA testing to identify remains, and he puts this into the historical context of warfare: “DNA testing is something new in the history of war. So are body bags, computers, the Internet, computerized cold stores, forklift trucks, and trays on wheels. Apart from that, it has all happened before: prison camps, barracks, selections, ghettoes, hiding places, the sheltering of victims, armbands, piles of shoes left behind by victims of mass murder, hunger, looting, late-night knocks on doors, people disappearing from their homes, blood on the walls, the burning of farmsteads, burning barns with people inside, massacres of entire villages, besieged cities, human shields, the raping of women, the killing of educated people first, columns of refugees, mass executions, mass graves, mass exhumations, international tribunals, and people disappearing completely” (p. 21). If one examines closely this list of attributes, it is easy to ascertain how many aspects relate to issues of documentation and memory.

Tochman also provides some perspective of how fleeting our interest in genocidal atrocities can be: “Thousands of news reports, feature articles, exhibitions, books, photo albums, and documentary and feature films have been produced on the war in Bosnia. But when the war ended (or, as some people think, was suspended for a while), the reporters packed up their cameras and headed off to other wars” (p. 4). This suggests that what happened in Bosnia in the 1990s will be forgotten, but another book, this one by anthropologist Sarah Wagner, suggests otherwise.

Wagner’s study focuses on the use of DNA technology, but she expands this to see “how memory and imagination intersect with biotechnology” (p. 2). As an added bonus, Wagner contends that the forensic work represents a major breakthrough in identifying victims of terror and disaster. Wagner carefully documents how the Serbs sought to eradicate any possibility of the identification of the identity of the victims by creating “secondary mass graves,” re-burials where the decaying bodies were broken apart and scattered (this is described as a “new kind of atrocity, heretofore unknown to humankind: the phenomenon of secondary mass graves” [p. 84]). She becomes interested in the idea of absence: “I begin with the basic idea that to be missing is to be absent both in time and in space. For surviving family members, conceptualizing the missing person’s absence involves mediating memories, imagination, hope, and resignation. In this heightened state of ambiguity, the missing relative’s existence is caught in a web of memory and suggestion” (p. 7). Wagner moves back and forth between the DNA testing and the efforts by relatives and friends to identify body parts through shreds of clothing and physical characteristics.

There are many references to other kinds of formal recordkeeping, such as the use of case files from the Podrinje Identification Project, the compilation of books of photographs of missing individuals and images of clothing and personal objects rescued from the mass graves of the murdered individuals, and the use of images and objects at the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial Center. At one point Wagner relates how family members protested the issuance of death certificates by the Red Cross based on information provided by Bosnian Serb leaders, a process taken up as a means of assisting the victims’ families to be able to obtain welfare assistance but objected to because “it also allowed the organization to remove individuals’ names from the overall list of missing” (p. 91). In fact, Wagner attests to how before the war most of the eventual victims had little in the way of records other than just a birth certificate and now they were being thoroughly documented with considerable personal data (clothing, dental records, identity cards, family remembrances, and so forth), a catalogue of the victims and a new source of public and family memory.

Wagner’s study provides an interesting examination of how traditional documentary sources mesh with scientific tests such as DNA and affirm individual and collective memory: “For most of the Srebrenica cases, resolving absence – both absence of knowledge and absence of physical remains – depends on the intersection between memory and the results of genetic testing” (p. 173). The anthropologist contends that the “family members’ recollections represent testimony, while DNA profiles serve as documentary proof” (p. 173). Wagner also places the use of the DNA testing and the related efforts to gather evidence about the missing into the context of government authority and rebuilding of the means of control over people living within that government (especially as the Bosnian uses of DNA technology have been used in other instances of mass deaths (such as World Trade Center, the tsunami in 2002, and Hurricane Katrina). While this author does not explore the expanding literature on the nature of power, control, and memory in the establishment and employment of archives, To Know Where He Lies certainly adds to our understanding of such issues.

Black Roots

2009-05-07T02:35:00.002-04:00

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African American Reclaimed Their Past (New York: Crown Publishers, 2009).

Historian Gates offers us this book based on his television series African American Lives, and if you watched any of these episodes you got the book. Each chapter on one of the prominent African Americans, such Oprah Winfrey or Chris Tucker, follows the same pattern. Gates tell us why the individual is extraordinary or interesting, what they know about their own family’s past (usually muddled or based on soon to be unsubstantiated claims), tracks us through the available records and the gaps, describes the reactions of the individuals, and then reports on the results (sometimes inconclusive) of the DNA tests. There is a kind of gee whiz sameness about each of the portraits, and although one can understand this since it is intended for a popular audience, it does get old.

There are interesting tidbits about archives and their importance. Right from the start, Gates acknowledges that his interest in history stems from when his grandfather in 1960 showed him scrapbooks full of clippings about local Black history in Cumberland, Maryland. Among these, he had “collected hundreds of obituaries; those scrapbooks were like an archive, decade by decade, of Cumberland’s colored dead” (p. 3). Gates also clearly describes the challenges of doing research in African American history: “Slavery – the lives and times of the human beings who were slaves – remains the great abyss in African American genealogical history. In spite of an avalanche of scholarship since the late 19060s, the lives of individual slaves – almost four million by 1860 – remain something of a historical void” (p. 6). Gates, in a number of places in the book, describes how only documentary fragments survive, sometimes intentionally, and how DNA testing and projects like the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (the compilation of records of shipping firms from 1517 to 1866) have helped to fill in some of the documentary gaps.

What does come through loud and clear is the remarkable personal satisfaction that the discovery of certain records can provide. In his chapter on Quincy Jones and his family, Gates writes, “I firmly believe that knowing about your ancestors is a grounding experience. It can bring tremendous peace, especially to African Americans, as we have had so much of our past systemically stolen from us. But, of course, the process can also open old wounds” (p. 49). In his chapter on Peter J. Gomes, Gates recounts the discovery of a 1782 deed of emancipation: “Finding a document such as this is a deeply emotional experience. My face flushed as I read it. And it is as rare as rare can be” (p. 121). I doubt we can expect this book to have anywhere near the impact Alex Haley’s Roots, book and television mini-series, had on genealogy and the demand for archival sources three decades ago, but it is a safe bet that the efforts by Gates will generate renewed attention to African American archives and their use.

After Photography

2009-05-04T17:21:00.001-04:00

Fred Ritchin, After Photography (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2009).

The nature of photography and the photograph has changed remarkably in a very brief time. The photographic image is no longer fixed in any meaningful fashion and how photography is employed is a sea change away from how it used to be. Fred Ritchin, professor of photography at New York University, offers an engaging book about the new nature of photography. His “book makes no attempt at prophecy. It is rather an attempt to acknowledge the rapidly evolving present for what it is and what it might become, while engaging one of the less violent strategies for social change still extant: media” (p. 10). As such, Ritchin ranges back and forth between the problems and promises posed by the new digital photography, providing a good sense of what archivists, librarians, and museum curators face in dealing with the new photography.

Ritchin provides a clue as to when the digital photographic era was birthed: “If I had to pick a date when the digital era came to photography, it would be 1982. It was then that National Geographic’s staff modified a horizontal photograph of the pyramids of Giza and made it vertical, suitable for the magazine’s February cover. They electronically moved a section of the photograph depicting one of the pyramids to a position partially behind another pyramid, rather than next to it. It was a banal change – after all, the original photograph was an already romanticized version of the scene that excluded the garbage, tourist buses, and souvenir hawkers – but it opened the digital door” (p. 27). This is close in time to when the new era of electronic records work also emerged, when we shifted from worrying about the output of large mainframe computers to the products of the personal computer beginning to appear on everyone’s desks at work and home.

Ritchin’s book is an interesting exploration of the challenges archivists now face in preserving something of the modern (postmodern?) photographic documentation. Photography is a dynamic process: “Increasingly, much of the photographic process will occur after the shutter is released. The photograph becomes the initial research, an image draft, as vulnerable to modification as it has always been to recontextualization” (p. 34). Ritchin comments on how publishers and the news media have been reluctant to impose understandable limits on the manipulation of images, and the challenges this poses in the multiple ways in which digital images can be displayed, interpreted, transformed, and so forth. He notes how news photographers, now reliant on the digital cameras, merely click and send immediately images of what is happening around them, no longer having the time to sort through and interpret the pictures they have taken.

Ritchin drives home his point about the malleability of the digital image at every opportunity in his book: “The digital photograph, unlike the analog, is based not on an initial static recording of continuous tones to be viewed as whole, or teased out in the darkroom, but on creating discrete and malleable records of the visible that can and will be linked, transmitted, recontextualized, and fabricated” (p. 141). Without question, the implications for archives can be immense: “Many digital photographers may be erasing pictures they don’t like, so there’s no permanent record. And the storage of the images depends upon having available software decades later in order to be able to correctly reconstruct the 0’s and 1’s stored on a disc.” (pp. 144-145). While Ritchin might have explored some of the options archivists have been exploring in maintaining digital stuff, emulation and migration, what he has presented is enough for archivists to mull over when they consider how they will deal with this new visual media. I have heard of too many archivists who have stopped working with photographic documentation after 1980 because of the kinds of digital issues described by Ritchin in his book.

The book is richly illustrated and the choices of illustrations nicely serve to underscore his main points.

Unraveling the Literary Archive

2009-05-02T09:33:00.001-04:00

Anita Helle, ed., The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).

Helle introduces this volume by stating that it is intended to reflect recent scholarship on the tragic writer Plath, mostly building around archives and memory. The essays seek “to enlarge and enrich the contexts of Plath’s writing with the archive as its informing matrix, unraveling tangled connections backward to the middle decades of the twentieth century and forward to issues raised by contemporary literary and cultural criticism” (p. 1). Helle’s use of the phrase “archival matters” is interesting, noting that it “coincides with the turn toward historiographic textual and material research; there has been a growing recognition that much of what we thought we knew – and didn’t know – about Plath has gradually come to be part of a wider conversation about culture, history, and memory for which archival material and expanded definitions of the archive provide support” (p. 2).

These essays provide interesting peeks into the nature of literary archives. Tracy Brain comments on the fact that Plath manuscripts are spread around the world, “constructed posthumously and piecemeal – even haphazardly – from materials that have been donated or sold by those who are willing to part with them; but many more materials are not there and have instead been lost or discarded or retained in private hands” (p. 19). Brain argues that this is part of the indeterminacy of the Plath writings, and the challenges posed to those studying her work. This scholar also suggests that Plath deliberately misdated and rearranged her literary manuscripts in order to create a certain impression about how her work had evolved and how it had been composed.

Other essays by these literary scholars peek into the meaning of the archive as conceived by writers such as Plath and as reconceptualized by scholars following their leads. Robin Peel’s essay on Plath’s political education builds on her early personal papers held by the Lilly Library: “This archive includes small personal diaries Plath kept as a young girl, hard-backed notebooks in which Plath made notes for her Smith courses, secretarial-type notepads on which she made journalist notes from talks given by visiting speakers, and her own copies of college textbooks, some of which are annotated very heavily in bold ink in the manner characteristic of students eager to learn” (p. 40). Kathleen Connors writes about research in the Plath materials in the Lilly and Smith Archives to gain an understanding of Plath’s interest in the visual arts (especially her diaries with sketches). Kate Moses investigates recordings of Plath reading her poetry and other writings. Anita Helle provides an analysis of photographic images of Plath and their possible connections to Plath’s writings, how the images of the places she lived and worked were shaped into the memories of the places she wrote about in her poems and essays. Lynda K. Bundtzen considers the destruction of some of Plath’s journals and other manuscripts by Ted Hughes and Plath herself, musing on her poem entitled “Burning the Letters.”

Photographic Sketches

2009-04-29T08:50:00.002-04:00

Anthony W. Lee and Elizabeth Young, On Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

Gardner’s photographs were published in 1866 in two volumes at the then enormous sale price of $150. While the publishing venture was a failure, the Gardner photographs ultimately emerged as one of the most groups of photographs depicting the American Civil War. As Lee, an art historian, and Young, a literary scholar, analyze the Sketch Book, they remind us that very little has been written about it.

Lee considers the images in the book, arguing that Gardner managed to go beyond the limitations of the then young technology to capture the “disruptive, disjointed, and retrospective experience of war” (p. 9). Lee places Gardner in the context of the nature of photography as an emerging profession, relying on taking portraits (certainly a major staple of the photographer active in the Civil War) and just beginning to see the possibilities of the landscape: “The Photographic Sketch Book represented a new venture in that Gardner, a photographer with a sense of recent trends in camera work and his place within them, wanted to visualize the war and make that visualization central to its telling. The view was the new mode and carried a professional meaning – more institutional, more weighty, more national, more legitimate – as the photographer tried to make a place for his craft” (p. 16). Gardner, as Lee reminds us, joined a legion of journalists and sketch artists, many working for magazines, all bent on reporting on and documenting the visual features of the war.

Lee’s comparison of the sketch journalists, who could be on the spot quickly recording events, with the photographers, who often, with their heavy equipment, had less range and fewer options. Gardner’s photographs are “descriptions of key sites, they are also about an effort at imaginative recovery and, even more, prodigious attempts to signal an action nowhere present” (p. 26). Gardner, and other photographers of this period, learned to work within the limitations of the technology and even to use these restrictions as partial commentaries on the subject: “Perhaps the photographer’s confrontation with death helped trigger this sensibility, but it is equally the case that it grew out of the restrictions of camera-work in the war theater. For photographs are like corpses insofar as they are representations of past or even lost things . . . and the melancholy they trigger in us is related to out inability to hear or touch or smell anymore; we can only see, very provisionally, the ghostly things within them” (p. 31).

While Lee notes how ignored Gardner’s volume was at the time of its publication, Young, the literary, describes why she believes the volume’s text deserves to be read on its own and why it was intended to be read in this way as well, although it has also been neglected as a document of the Civil War. Also, every photograph and other illustration came surrounded by words: “Illustrated newspapers converted photographs into engravings and surrounded them with words; stereoscope cards covered the reverse side with words; photographic portraits included the name of the studio and the subject, and sometimes more complex texts. . . “ (p. 58). She likens the use of words in Gardner’s book to the literary genre of the sketch featuring the “traits” of “visual partiality, digressive plot, and compositional haste” (think of Washington Irving, for example) (p. 59). Young then carries us through a close reading of the text in Gardner’s photographic book, demonstrating how his language describing the images often reflect the attitudes and biases of his day (or, at the least, comment on them). Some may think that Young is over-reading the text, but in her quest to find “new meanings constructed from words” (p. 94) we also discover new ways of thinking about the images and their depiction of past events.

This volume is the first number in the series Defining Moments in American Photography being published by the University of California Press. Here is the description of the series: “This series investigates key photographers and images in the history of American photography. It reshapes that history with attention to race, gender, and class; brings focused and accessible studies of American photography to a wide audience; places American photography at the center of American visual culture; and brings into dialogue writers from art history, American studies, cultural studies, gender studies, literary studies, and American history.” There are two other volumes published, and the information on the series can be found at http://www.ucpress.edu/books/series/dmap.php. Archivists will want to follow these publications and what they offer about our understanding of photography as record.

Two Different Letters on Presidential Libraries

2009-04-25T22:14:00.001-04:00

The call by the acting Archivist of the United States on March 24th for alternative models for presidential libraries, to be delivered in just a few weeks, generated two very different responses from professional associations. I believe these two different responses reflect something very troubling about how the archival community responds to matters concerning the National Archives and its administration of presidential records.

Frank Boles, writing for the Society of American Archivists, while providing a list of issues needing to be studied, essentially underscores the success of the presidential libraries and museums. Acknowledging that there are some disagreements about how effective these institutions have been, Boles calls for more data in order to have a “richer conversation.” He wants more information from what researchers think about these institutions, how any reorganization would affect researcher access, what are the costs involved (both from government and non-government sources) in administering the libraries and their museums, and is digitization of the materials held by the libraries a “cost-effective” option? Boles also asks a more important question, and that is whether the administration of presidential museums is really consistent with the mandate of the National Archives?

On its surface, this letter from SAA seems non-controversial, calling for a perfectly reasonable set of inquiries. It ignores, however, that there is a lot of information already out there (in the professional and scholarly literature) about these issues that many commentators have drawn upon. More importantly, this letter ignores two other important matters – why the National Archives as a matter of routine has not produced and posted such data (especially since it has routinely declared over the years the presidential libraries to be so successful) and why it asked for input on other options in such a brief period of time (not allowing for any real informed options to be put on the table)? Frank Boles’ call for the gathering of evidence about the libraries is, of course, one reflection of the inability to really offer useful suggestions.

There is another letter sent in response to this request from the acting Archivist. It is signed by sixteen organizations, ones that the SAA ought to working with in matters of government information and records policy. In this letter the organizations note their commitment to government “transparency and accountability” and complain that 21 days is not enough time to set forth other models for presidential libraries. These organizations raise specific points with concerns about processing these records removed from the FOIA framework: “NARA has a responsibility under both the letter and the spirit of all laws governing public access to presidential records to avoid any actions that limit or delay access to important records. Instead of undermining the FOIA process, NARA could significantly improve its FOIA process by adopting practices common at many agencies, such as appointing FOIA public liaisons, improving management and tracking of FOIA requests, and increasing its affirmative and proactive electronic posting of released records.” Their letter also worries that NARA has not considered “recommendations made by the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) regarding expediting the declassification of presidential records.” Most importantly, the organizations sending this letter ask NARA to extend the time necessary to present alternative approaches to presidential records: “While we are aware NARA has a responsibility to report to Congress on these issues by mid-July, we note that NARA did not produce a request for information from the public until March 24th, and did not post the request on its website for almost a full week afterwards, with a deadline for comments less than 3 weeks thereafter. We believe this is not a sufficient amount of time for all stakeholders to engage in thoughtful discussions on these issues. This report presents NARA with an opportunity to explore dramatic changes in the handling of presidential documents that will improve public access and reduce costs. These options must be discussed with the broader community of stakeholders.”

There are a few issues that concern me with SAA’s response. SAA raised no questions about the shortness of time given for providing recommendations about presidential records; it simply complied. SAA lost an opportunity to join in with a community of important professional associations and governmental watchdog groups, ones I would assume with which they share many common concerns; perhaps SAA was not asked to be part of this, but if that is the case, we have even more reason to be concerned about SAA’s ability to advocate for the good of the archival community.

The organizations sending the other letter were:

OpenTheGovernment.org
American Association of Law Libraries
American Library Association
Association of Research Libraries
California First Amendment Coalition
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)
Citizens for Sunshine
Defending Dissent Foundation
Essential Information
Government Accountability Project (GAP)
iSolon.org
National Coalition for History
National Humanities Alliance
National Security Archive
OMB Watch
Special Libraries Association

You can find copies of the letters at http://www.sla.org/pdfs/publicpolicy/041709NARA.pdf and on the SAA website (http://www.archivists.org/).

Words, Texts, Books, Manuscripts

2009-04-24T03:08:00.002-04:00

Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

I have always found the writings of Anthony Grafton to be persuasive, provocative, and practical for stimulating my own ideas about history, intellectual history, and the nature of sources used in studying the past. A review of Grafton’s recent book by G.W. Bowersock in the May 14, 2009 number of New York Review of Books is entitled “The Scholar of Scholars” and aptly features a photograph of Grafton walking down the street at Princeton intently reading a book as he goes. Those having any interest in texts and documents, certainly including archivists, will want to read Grafton’s assemblage of previously published essays.

Early on in his new introduction to these essays, Grafton indicates that a recurring theme is professional and scholarly identity. Humanists “rarely create themselves,” Grafton writes. “We learn first as students and then as practitioners of disciplines, members of communities, users of libraries, habitués of archives, apprentices, and friends – as lurkers in particular intellectual, social, and institutional corners from which we look at the wide world” (p. 7). This is a classic assessment of how scholarly and professional communities establish themselves and evolve, and anyone who has pondered contemporary debates, discussions, and disorder in their own field will enjoy reading about similar spirited dialogues from the Renaissance onward.

Grafton, in bringing together these previously published essays, likens this book (at least the first nine essays, as a “historical traveler’s reports on a strange, imaginary land that had few of the distinctive marks by which we usually identify a state” (p. 9). The Republic of Letters, when Europeans could still seek to master their “entire civilization” before they splintered into the many specialties we know today, emerges, from different angles, over and over again in his essays. Grafton reflects on these modern disciplines and professions with their focus on a “particular function” and their acquisition of a “formal license” to practice (p. 11), and one grasps how much distance has opened between the world of Paris or London several hundred years ago and what transpires in the typical conference of scholars, academics, and working practitioners supporting such tribes. Grafton makes some interesting comparisons between how members of the older Republic viewed themselves, and how today’s heirs often direct their attention to credentials: “Citizens of the Republic carried no passports, but they could recognize one another by certain marks . . . . They looked for learning, for humanity, and for generosity, and they rewarded those who possessed these qualities” (p. 20). These marks are sometimes nowhere to be found in the journals and conference sessions of today’s heavily specialized disciplines zealously guarding their barricades.

Archivists, and others interested in the discernible features of our modern information era, will also find interesting Grafton’s far-reaching discussion about information and its use. Grafton asserts that we study and reconstruct this older Republic in the “thousands of surviving letters” generated by the scholars (p. 21). “The constant writing and sending of letters was more than a system for collecting and exchanging information, “ he states. “Many citizens of the Republic saw it as a moral duty: at once the only way to show their sympathy and affection for those from whom they were separated by political and religious borders and the only way to enter into a regular relationship with the greats who glittered far away” (p. 22).

The first nine essays in this book focus on a variety of topics related to the Renaissance and the creation of the Republic of Letters: Leon Battista Alberti, the 15th century scholar; Johannes Trithemius, another Renaissance scholar and his transition from manuscript to print, and the need to catalog and organize the proliferation of print; other Renaissance historians of art and nature; Francis Bacon, the 17th century scholar reflecting on intellectual life; Johannes Kepler and the discipline of chronology (reconstructing calendars and setting historical dates); the fate of Latin as a language of scholarship; the Jesuits and scholarship; and the Jews and their early roles in European scholarship.

The remaining chapters shift to an array of more recent issues related to the fortunes of intellectual history, the role of the so-called public intellectual (one of the essays on this topic utilizes the papers of Grafton’s journalist father concerning an unpublished essay on Hannah Arendt), and the fate of print in the digital era. Some of these essays remind us how well scholars could network before the Internet. Referring to the early years of intellectual history, Grafton notes, “In the age of the Web site and the blog, it is salutary to be reminded that the U.S. mail and the mimeograph machine could sustain a national, interdisciplinary network. . . “ (p. 195).

Grafton’s essay about the future of print, one of the most balanced accounts about this transition, placed in its long-term historical context, is worth the cost of the book. Grafton indicates that the promise of a universal library or archives will not be easily achieved, a “patchwork of different interfaces and databases, some open to anyone with a computer and WiFi, others closed to those who lack access or money” (p. 309). Ultimately, Grafton believes that the various problems and challenges will be worked out, but in the meantime, with the vast variety of print and digital venues, he believes that traditional libraries and archives will continue to play an important role: “For now, and for the foreseeable future, if you want to piece together the richest possible mosaic of documents and texts and images, you will have to do it in those crowded public rooms where sunlight gleams on varnished tables, as it has for more than a century, and knowledge is still embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable manuscripts and books” (p. 324).

While one might snicker at the sentimentality of the images or sneer at the stereotypes that many scholars resort to when they describe libraries or archives (why are archives always dusty?), this is a book worth reading because it pulls us back to many basics and tests many assumptions we hold about the future of the use of sources by pointing us to look backwards.

For the Coffee Table (and a Lot More)

2009-04-18T10:18:00.002-04:00

David Okuefuna, The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Ellen B. Hirschland and Nancy Hirschland Ramage, The Cone Sisters of Baltimore: Collecting at Full Tilt (Evanston, ILL: Northeastern University Press, 2008)

Albert Kahn, a French banker, started in 1909 a project to record everyday lives in every corner of the world, employing an autochrome process (a color technology using potato starch and glass plate cameras). The end result of his efforts was the creation of the Archives of the Planer, a group of 72,000 autochromes – “what is indisputably the most important collection of early color photographs in the world” (p. 16). This volume, based on a BBC series, will be of interest to anyone interested in the history of photography. With its remarkably beautiful and arresting photos, some reminiscent of Impressionist paintings, the book draws you into its subjects and entrances you with the soft and haunting images.

I grew up looking at the Cones’ collection of art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and this book by the great-niece and great-great-niece of Etta and Claribel Cone provides not only an examination of the art collection and the impulses and objectives driving such collecting when the art was viewed as daring and unconventional but it provides a sense of a truly remarkable set of archival materials documenting their life and passion. The photographic images of the sisters are quite amazing, both posed and candid, and the description of their letters and other documents reflect lives dedicated to ensuring their place in posterity. Their very deliberate efforts to ensure that the art collection would remain intact are mirrored in the records carefully created and preserved to ensure that the process of creating the collection would be understood by later generations. Hirschland provides very personal insights into the Cones’ lives.

Both books can sit comfortably on the coffee table or be working titles in the archivist’s reference shelf.

Government Secrecy and the Archival Profession

2009-04-11T03:03:00.002-04:00

On Friday, April 10, 2009, Bruce Montgomery, Associate Professor, University of Colorado at Boulder, presented a talk at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information, on "From Richard M. Nixon to George W. Bush: Government Secrecy and the Archival Profession." Bruce P. Montgomery is Faculty Director of Archives at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the founding director of the UCB Human Rights Initiative and a founding member of the International Federation of Human Rights Centers and Archives. He has served as an analyst of classified documents for the U.S. government, and is currently a consultant for the Institute for Defense Analysis, a Pentagon-funded think tank, to help set up a digital resource center to make available electronic copies of captured al Qaeda, Taliban, and Saddam Hussein-era records. He is the author of three books, including The Bush-Cheney Administration’s Assault on Open Government, Subverting Open Government: White House Materials and Executive Branch Politics, and his most recent, Richard B. Cheney and the Rise of the Imperial Vice Presidency. Articles by Montgomery on the topic of secrecy also have appeared in many leading journals, including Presidential Studies Quarterly, Political Science Quarterly, and American Archivist.

In this talk, Montgomery contrasted the changing nature of government secrecy with the archival profession’s general lack of interest or action about it. This was the third and final lecture in the School’s Archival Agitators and Advocates lecture series.

To access the lecture go to http://dvssilver.sis.pitt.edu/CourseCast/Viewer/Default.aspx?id=a0812230-c968-4abe-933e-84f629febaee and use “lectures” and “public” respectively as user name and password.

For my assessment of Montgomery’s writings on this topic (not including his most recent publication), see “Secrecy, Archives, and the Archivist: A Review Essay (Sort Of),” American Archivist 72 (Spring/Summer 2009): 213-230 (this review considers three other recent books).

Its Gr8!

2009-04-10T04:04:00.002-04:00

David Crystal, Txting: The Gr8 Db8 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Well-known linguist David Crystal takes on the subject of texting, its practice and its implications, in this book. He starts off by rehearsing all of the sinister and other predictions about the evils of texting on our society and especially our youth. Crystal then leads the reader through a carefully constructed analysis of the peculiarities of texting as a form of language, the reasons texting has become one of the information age phenomena, who does texting, what they text about, and so forth. He includes a glossary and a useful list of texting abbreviations (useful for someone like me who has sent about three text messages in his life); a bibliography of research about texting would have helped, but it is not a damning omission.

Crystal attempts to calm down all those who see in texting the end of the world, building a case for how it is just a matter of normal linguistic evolution – in fact, that texting “began as a natural, intuitive response to a technological problem” (p. 69), becoming a success because of its convenience. Near the end of his book, Crystal adds this assessment: “I do not see how texting could be a significant factor when discussing children who have real problems with literacy. If you have difficulty with reading and writing, you are hardly going to be predisposed to use a technology that demands sophisticated abilities in reading and writing. And if you do start to text, I would expect the additional experience of writing to be a help, rather than a hindrance” (p 157).

Archivists, and others concerned with the preservation of text, will find Crystal’s book a useful addition to their library. Although he does not address anything remotely related to archival concerns, his primer on the nature of texting provokes useful reflection about why archivists ought to be concerned about preserving evidence of this communication phenomenon (just as they have been interested in dealing with the documentary implications of the telephone and electronic mail). And archivists need to be concerned with this now, as Crystal considers texting as a cultural phenomenon: “How long will it last? It is always difficult to predict the future, when it comes to technology. Perhaps it will remain as part of an increasingly sophisticated battery of communicative methods, to be used as circumstances require. Or perhaps in a generation’s time texting will seem as archaic a method of communication as the typewriter or the telegram does today, and new styles will have emerged to replace it. For the moment, texting seems here to stay, though its linguistic character will undoubtedly alter as its use spreads among the older population” (p. 175). In other words, if archivists are to preserve anything of this technological and societal trend, they need to get busy.

Housing Memory Conference

2009-04-06T01:38:00.002-04:00

Joel A. Blanco-Rivera
PhD Student, University of Pittsburgh

On March 13 and 14 I participated in the conference Housing Memory, hosted at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. The conference was aimed at graduate students and covered a wide variety of topics related to memory and its manifestation in archives, libraries and museums. All the presentations were made by graduate students, at the master and doctoral level, providing an excellent environment to learn and discuss important topics of interest by the new generation of archivists, librarians and museologists. The conference also included the presence of Dr. Geoffrey C. Bowker as the keynote speaker and a round table of faculty from information science and lead by Dr. Jennifer Carter, Assistant Professor in the Museum Studies program at the University of Toronto.

The number of topics was diverse and fascinating: an analysis of Spencer Tunick’s artwork from a museum perspective, the transformation of the print press to the web, memory struggles during transitions in South Africa and Latin America, memory and time capsules, archives and commemoration in the Philippines, documentary film and personal memory. These are just a few examples.

One of the main themes that was constantly part of the presentations and discussions was aspects related to power and control in memory construction. In his presentation about the shift in news production to the web, Bill Mann argued that indeed giant media corporations control what is reported. Trond E. Jacobsen, in his presentation about the Federal Acknowledgement Process, discussed how indigenous groups used records as evidence in their petitions to legitimize their identity as tribal nations.

The round table at the end of the conference provided a very interesting discussion and sharing of ideas between faculty and students. A discussion of particular interest was Dr. Bowker’s argument about memory and forgetting. In his keynote presentation, Bowker argued that, in the particular case of memory and trauma, forgetting should be an option. Indeed, he presented a quote stating that once justice is achieved, forgetting is the best next action. This argument was brought back during the roundtable, in which a student asked the important question of who decides that justice has been served and that it is time to forget.

The conference also highlighted the importance of multidisciplinary work in the field of information science. Not only students in the fields of library, archives and museum were part of the conference, discussions in the various panels touched upon aspects related to memory and information technologies.

A selection of papers presented in this conference will be published at the end of April in the Faculty of Information Quarterly, an open access publication from the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto.

Finding Your Sense of Self: Popular Advice on Creating Personal Records

2009-04-03T15:18:00.004-04:00

Stephanie Dowrick, Creative Journal Writing: The Art and Heart of Reflection (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2009)

Samara O’Shea, Note to Self: On Keeping a Journal and Other Dangerous Pursuits (New York: Collins Living, 2008)

Margaret Shepherd with Sharon Hogan, The Art of the Personal Letter: A Guide to Connecting Through the Written Word (New York: Broadway Books, 2008)

The sections on personal writing in good bookstores are beginning to overflow with advice manuals about the construction of journals, diaries, letters, and other document forms. Some provide interesting insights into how and why such personal records are created. Stephanie Dowrick discusses the values of journaling, privacy issues, choosing the physical journal forms, the motivations for these documents, and how to observe and describe events in one’s life. She also provides exercises for learning how to journal. Samara O’Shea, who is an avid diarist (although she prefers the notion of a journal, seeing the diary as a daily log and the journal more as an emotional log), also attempts to provide a lot of practical advice, from the premise that there is no right or wrong way to approach this task. There is no topic off limits for compiling journals, with the grand intention that a journal mostly assists you in “finding your sense of self” (p. 61). She includes many examples from her journals, as well as examples from many other famous writers, including Anne Frank, Sylvia Plath, Joyce Carol Oates, Tennessee Williams, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Pepys, Thomas Paine, and Louisa May Alcott. Shepherd’s book strives to demonstrate that letter writing is still alive in the digital age, and she provides advice in choosing a format for the letter, selecting tools for writing, personalizing letters and electronic mail. Shepherd also enumerates the ingredients of a personal letter, although most of her book is a description of the types of letters, an approach reminiscent of the letter writing manuals extending back over the last several centuries.

These self-help books provide insight into the nature of modern personal records creation and maintenance. Dowrick advises, for example, “Perhaps you feel that you must write your journal on the computer so that you can get your thoughts down fast enough, but I would suggest that you at least experiment with handwriting. For many journal writers this increases the sense of intimacy and makes a clear differentiation between the writing they do for work or for more public consumption and their creative journaling” (p. 56). Sometimes the commentary suggests the value of such personal records systems, such as when Dowrick states, “As a creative journal writer, you are always free to go beyond the mere recording of facts” (p. 131); archivists may recognize that this is true of all personal record forms, but it is interesting to see this stated so candidly. O’Shea also makes similar assessments with additional insights, such as “It’s not in the rereading where one finds solace but in the writing itself” (p. xv) or “A journal, rather, is the path of pebbles you leave behind you, so you have the security of knowing you can always return to where you’ve been” (p xviii). Shepherd likewise contributes reasons why such efforts as letter writing are important, such as “Our yearning to connect has not gone away, nor have we outgrown most of the materials for writing or the occasions for letters. We can still write many warm, engaging letters in e-mail and printed-out pages as well as with pen and ink” (p. xvi).

Some of the descriptions in these volumes come very close to capturing real examples of diaries and letters sitting in archives. O’Shea, for example, suggests, “I think we all know or know someone who knows that person – the person who keeps a daily, very meticulous diary. They end each day with a cup of tea or perhaps a scotch on the rocks. They sit in a large velvet armchair and pull out a black leather hardcover journal with their name imprinted on it – very Masterpiece Theatre. Then with a majestic black fountain pen poised over a blank page, they relax and write. They record the day’s events in the order that they happened, and they do this devotedly each night before bed” (p. 1). This is an almost perfect description of a set of diaries (28 volumes) created by historian, archivist, and documentary editor Lester J. Cappon that I have read (the diaries are located in the archives and special collections at the College of William and Mary).

There is, of course, a growing scholarship using earlier variations of the manuals and guides created by these three authors. Likewise, I believe that a contemporary reading of these new advice volumes can assist archivists understand persistent or new trends in personal recordkeeping. What is interesting with these volumes is that the authors are all women, mirroring what scholarship has told us about women being primarily responsible for polite or social correspondence. Are men mostly writing the business versions of these aids? Perhaps this is a pattern that extends back over two or more centuries.

Not Enforcing Ethics

2009-03-26T10:22:00.003-04:00

On March 20, 2009, SAA President Frank Boles issued a statement, “Enforcing Ethics,” and in straightforward language he closed the case about how we, members of this association, are to view and use the ethics code. Without any additional inquiry, Boles also indicated how SAA views the NARA situation regarding Anthony Clark, referring, only at the beginning of his statement, about the “alleged ethical shortcomings of some of our colleagues in Washington” and, quite candidly remarking, that it would not “formally investigate the situation” because of a variety of “policy decisions” emanating from “several assumptions.” I congratulate Frank Boles, and the SAA leadership, for clarifying the matter for all of us about both the ethics code and its relationship to the National Archives. He also kindly offers a suggestion about “how the Code can be used to good purpose.”

There is no reason to reiterate in much detail this statement, since anyone can read it for itself and decide what it all means; indeed, that is the point after all, that the code is aspirational and to be used how any archivist or archival institution sees fit to do with it. Boles’ reporting on the CEPC’s support of only an aspirational ethics code “but one that more clearly reflects recent scholarship and professional discourse regarding archival ethics and the profession’s goals and identity,” confirms that there is little to be gained for pushing SAA on its perspective about ethics. However, it is worth commenting on the assumptions, stated and unstated, behind the statement. Indeed, I am left wondering about the connection between the issue of the ethics code with that of just how a professional archival association ought to respond to the kind of complaints publicly made about the nation’s premier archival institution. Do the procedural and legal concerns about the ethics code really relate to the specifics of this case? Or, as I have mused about in a couple of past comments, did I make an error even invoking the ethics code? Are there approaches SAA could have used to address concerns about NARA or, for that matter, charges made by a researcher about NARA?

My intention is not to provide a detailed response to or critique of the four assumptions raised by Boles, but they are worth some reflection. Actually, as will be obvious by my comments below, I don’t understand how the ethics code bars SAA from examining or questioning the conduct of any federal agency vis-à-vis the administration of its records, especially when the agency happens to be the National Archives. In fact, the commentary about the present Council being restricted in how it uses the ethics code by the actions of previous Councils seems somewhat strained since Council has the ability to change any of its decisions (except perhaps those needing to be brought for membership actions, such as changes in bylaws). Moreover, any Council could certainly decide that the allegations and evidence made about the fundamental mission and activities of the National Archives are serious enough to warrant a public statement about them, whether or not these have anything to do with ethical issues. In other words, is every matter Council might have set before going to be derailed by the fact that nearly everything it does – approving professional standards or guidelines, for example – is aspirational (since anybody can be a member, SAA is not a certification or accreditation body, and so forth)? Does this mean that about all SAA leadership really can do is set out housekeeping rules for its activities such as publishing, running conferences, and offering workshops?

Boles cites the American Library Association and the American Historical Association as other associations that lack “an enforcement mechanism.” However, there are omissions in this assessment. The historical associations changed their mechanism because they were over-burdened with complaints, something SAA has never faced or probably would face. Even as these associations abandoned this process, some who were involved protested the decision and believe that this has been a mistake for the profession’s credibility; see Peter Charles Hoffer (a former member of the AHA professional division), Past Imperfect (New York: Public Affairs, 2004) as one example. Boles quotes from an AHA statement that what it did was not workable, but one might still wonder whether AHA’s decision is good for the profession or not. We also need to recognize that AHA made its decision after an effort to hear complaints of fifteen years duration, whereas SAA has not made any such effort. SAA has never pushed the use of its ethics code, except if you count efforts a few decades ago to market an earlier version of the code suitable for framing and display in one’s office.

I have not done an analysis of AHA’s past experiences with its professional conduct committee other than to read commentaries about it. Of course, the historical profession has been quite facile in how it convenes scholarly conferences and sessions to feature debate about what are seen to be breaches in professional and scholarly inquiry and discourse (such as the January 2002 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly reporting the results of a conference on charges of sloppy and deliberately inaccurate work by Michael Bellesiles regarding his book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture). However when we consider what AHA has been up to, we ought to realize that we could be comparing apples and oranges when we put its activities alongside that of SAA. How can we compare the complaints of a researcher about his treatment by NARA with that of complaints of plagiarism and other issues of scholarly research that will be given their day in the normal process of reviews and conferences? Certainly, as has been suggested to me, we can prepare essays for publication or papers for conference presentation about Anthony Clark’s case, but these won’t be very timely in assisting this researcher or even in providing a fair hearing if NARA chooses not to participate (which NARA is prone not to do). Why SAA cannot function as a broker to bring these two parties together, privately or publicly, really is a mystery to me. However, a reading of the evidence being presented by Clark himself on his blog suggests that, instead, some of the SAA leadership seems to have been inclined to help NARA handle the Clark complaints, suggesting that maybe there are other reasons for SAA not wanting to be involved in this case that extend beyond the utility of an aspirational code of ethics (my interpretation not Clark's). As I have commented on in earlier posts, there is a culture of a partnership between SAA and NARA that works against SAA being able to speak up when NARA stumbles (and this is at least a twenty year old problem). So, we need to look for other watchdogs to scrutinize this federal agency.

As for the ALA, it may have an aspirational code, but no one would ever suggest that this organization is bashful about speaking up about issues of misconduct. Frank Boles is correct that the ALA is not in the enforcement business, when ALA states this on its web site: “The ALA does not at this time provide mediation, financial aid, or legal aid in response to workplace disputes. Your employer has an array of sanctions that may or may not be imposed on you, including but not limited to: reassignment, passing you up for promotion, passing you up for raises, denying you tenure, passing you up for the best assignments, and ultimately dismissal. If you decide to speak out on a matter involving professional policy, it will be a matter between you and your employer.” Yet, ALA is working to develop its ethics code, stating, “The Council Committee on Professional Ethics shall augment the Code of Ethics by explanatory interpretations and additional statements, prepared by this committee or elicited from other units of ALA.” This seems in stark contrast to SAA’s recent activities in both the area of professional ethics or advocacy. Maybe I will be proved wrong by future activities undertaken by the SAA; I hope so. However, at the moment, before this statement by SAA’s president, the association offered no guidance whatsoever about the ethics code. Moreover, it has been moving in the opposite direction, tearing away at explanations and interpretations, gutting the code from what it once had been in 1992 (then one of the best professional codes in terms of details, although it was true even then that the Society was wary of supporting its use).

When it comes to the mechanics of enforcement, Frank Boles seems to employ commonsense, describing how difficult it would be to develop “rules that are fair and well understood.” Actually, I agree. What I don’t understand, however, is why SAA cannot examine evidence offered up about professional misconduct or publicly speak up when there seems to be misconduct on the part of archival programs or their leaders or staff (when this misconduct has to do with fundamental archival practice and principles). Why is this different than speaking up when government agencies restrict access to records, illegally destroy records, or seem to violate laws and public policies? SAA does not need to launch an investigation when it does this. Given the amount of evidence being presented by a private citizen and researcher, citing and reproducing records of NARA itself, it seems strange that SAA cannot call into question NARA’s conduct or, at the least, suggest that NARA correct its handling of these requests for access to it records. (It does not have to mention individuals or SAA members working at NARA, although given the small number of the latter that seems both unlikely and certainly unnecessary).

SAA does not have to convene a court of inquiry itself. However, there is absolutely nothing to prevent it from calling on Congress or the President to investigate such serious charges, and I believe the amount of evidence presented certainly merits such action. As I have written elsewhere, there is something amiss with the culture of the relationship between SAA and NARA that prevents SAA from being critical of NARA when there seems to be a need to do so. And this is a problem, given NARA’s prominent role in government information policy. When I was on SAA Council in the late 1980s I proposed that Council pass a motion that no NARA staff member could hold an elected position within SAA, indicating that there were problems of conflict of interest even then (mirroring the kind of problem Anthony Clark sees in NARA staff answering FOIA requests even when they concern records they created or that concern them). By the way, the motion was never taken seriously. We have had a legacy of conflicts of interests and lack of accountability between SAA and NARA that go back to the origins of both in the mid-1930s. And, if you don’t think there is any responsibility of SAA for NARA because one is a professional association and the other a federal agency, then we need to give up on any kind of advocacy about government activities in archives and records management and recommend that all citizen interest groups be shut down as well.

When Frank Boles turns his attention to the legal issues, he connects to the primary reason we have been hearing about the Society’s concern with the ethics code, stating “Should a federal court find that an individual was wrongfully harmed, financial penalties can be levied against both the professional organization collectively and the judges individually.” I am not a lawyer, and I have never played one on television, but I shake my head at this kind of concern. In America, litigation is as much recreation as anything. Everyone sues each other and organizations for almost anything. It is clear that SAA’s concern is legitimate, but how can you function or do anything if the fear of litigation is a determining factor? What is to prevent a group of SAA members from suing the Society because it has not developed a code that could be enforced or used (and I am not suggesting this at all)? Couldn’t the Society be sued for comments made by a workshop instructor, a conference speaker, or because of an author’s statements in an American Archivist article? A half-dozen years ago some archivists expressed the opinion that SAA could be liable for its use of a political poster on the AA cover, an illustration discussed in an essay about the management of political poster collections. So, it seems to me that SAA is always facing the possibility of litigation because of the society we live in, apart from whatever it does or does not do.

President Boles does suggest commend what ALA has done, encouraging its members “to adopt the code as part of each member’s workplace policies. In this way, library ethics voluntarily become a part of well-grounded institutional policy – and become the responsibility of each institution to enforce among its employees.” To do this, of course, you need a code with some greater specificity than what we have now. And, if this is the case, why does SAA not inquire about whether NARA has done this itself? There is an ethics resources site on the NARA website, but it addresses general federal issues and guidelines and has no reference to general professional ethics codes such as promulgated by SAA. Perhaps, there is simply no critical mass of SAA members within NARA leadership who have advocated anything like this, and this suggests another reason, perhaps, why SAA should be a little bolder in asserting itself when it comes to NARA activities (even if it does it in a way that does not cite individuals or invoke the ethics code). What are the bounds for when SAA will question NARA activity?

If the above commentary seems muddled, it is because I am struggling, as well, about just what the ethics code means and how it should be used. One conclusion I have reached is that the Society of American Archivists value is in its role as a membership organization providing a range of services that probably cannot include more serious issues of professional standards and guidelines. What it offers, and these are useful, are conferences, workshops, and publications. Just as in my memberships in AAA or AARP, as long as I am getting good value for my membership dues with discounts in all these offered with my membership then there is no reason not to be a member. When Frank Boles refers to the ethics code as a “document of persuasion that is to be studied, discussed, and improved,” it maybe that this study and discussion has to occur just as much outside SAA as within it. It is just as much the case that this persuasion can be more effective unhooked from the drag of SAA policies, politics, and processes. I know I can get help from AAA when the wheels on my car fall off, but I am not sure I can get help from SAA when the wheels of archival principles and practices blow out in obvious ways.

Where does any of this leave us in terms of Anthony Clark and NARA? If not SAA, who will seek to hold NARA accountable? It may be that we are caught in another conundrum when we seek accountability by SAA because of other disconnects between the Society and NARA. Frank Boles, at the end of his statement, muses, “In the end, the Code of Ethics is for our members to use – and perhaps place in their own work environments – rather than for the Society to enforce.” And, maybe, there’s the rub. If there are virtually no SAA members in NARA, then the ethics code really isn’t applicable in that institution. On the other hand, it seems that you could argue that SAA ought to at least work on that level and suggest to NARA that it ought to encourage its professional staff to be SAA members and endorse the SAA ethics code as an additional resource in guiding ethical conduct. I am sure, however, that there may be a dozen technical and other reasons why this is unlikely to occur.

But when I come to the end in my own statement, I worry about the one researcher, Anthony Clark, who has chosen to speak out and has ample documentation about problems with NARA providing access to government records that any citizen ought to expect to be able to examine. I still struggle with what to say to my students about what the implications of the Clark case are for their future careers. I am comfortable with saying to these students that they adopt a consumer mentality and stick with SAA as long as they get services of use to them for the amount they pay in dues. I am comfortable in referring them to other investigations and discussions about archival ethics that will be going on outside of SAA. I am comfortable in raising these difficult and contentious archival ethics concerns in my course on this topic. It is more difficult to know what to say to Anthony Clark, other than I offer apologies on behalf of my profession in our inability to provide much in the way of assistance to him about what are clearly serious problems in archival practice and general interpretations about access to government records (and to conclude that while the first may be the problematic ethical issue, the latter is more about archival policy and procedure, something that SAA ought to be able to deal with). Unfortunately, Mr. Clark, as an ordinary citizen, will need to seek an airing of his concerns and some form of justice elsewhere; other than as individuals, we are unable to assist him. Something seems wrong here.

Archival Theory

2009-03-25T01:09:00.001-04:00

John Ridener, From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory (Duluth, MN: Litwin Books, LLC, 2009).

This is essentially an extended essay exploring the establishment of archival concepts and principles, and how these have been shaped by cultural and technological factors – emphasizing archival appraisal as the key segment of archival theory. It is an excellent book for use in an introductory archives course, as it quickly slides through the past century of archival theory and constructs a useful framework for anyone to understand why theory is critical and how it has emerged, developed, and been debated. Terry Cook, in his introduction to the book, calls it an “approachable entreé to the various theories, concepts, ideas, and assumptions that have animated archivists collectively over the past century in the English-speaking world” (p. xiii). Cook also asserts that Ridener has “given us a concise entry point to that complicated discourse and many stimulating insights to the intellectual history of archiving as a societal function” (p. xvii). I fully concur.

So, what does Ridener accomplish in his book that makes me recommend it as a reading for an introductory archives course. For one thing, he makes a straightforward and convincing case for why theory is a critical component of archival knowledge, and why the conceptual part of our knowledge is constantly strained by recording technologies and disciplines, such as history, that have developed intellectual frameworks for using the evidence found in archival sources. The best part of Ridener’s analysis is focused on the late nineteenth-century Dutch manual (Muller, Feith, and Fruin), Hilary Jenkinson’s manual a generation later, and Schellenberg’s Modern Archives yet another generation after that. Although few educators require their students to read the Dutch manual, unless as part of providing some historical context for the emergence of the modern archival profession, Jenkinson and Schellenberg continue to be invoked as a means of justifying nearly every archival decision by every archivist from the smallest to the largest archival program (whether they have been read or not, or even whether they had been understood or not).

Ridener puts all three seminal manuals in their historical and societal context. In regards to the Dutch manual, he writes, “Because historians were the primary users of archives, their professional orientation to objective truth created a need for objective records in the archive. . . . The standardization of archival theory and practice would come to reinforce historians’ objective, scientific approach to their own work to mutually benefit archivists and historians alike” (p. 26). Jenkinson is also put into his historical and societal context and there is likewise great stress on the objective role of the archivist: “Archivists should not interfere with records because the records were created without the archivist’s involvement. For Jenkinson, this is the only way to ensure objective evidence in the archive” (p. 56). Schellenberg is placed clearly within his work in the early years of the U.S. National Archives, and this builds a huge gulf between that and his predecessors: “A distinguishing characteristic of Schellenberg’s theory is that his focus is clearly on contemporary records and the problems created when new records are forced to fit into old categories and processes” (pp. 77-78). As a result much of Schellenberg’s ideas revolve around the relationship between archivists and records managers.

While in my estimation the chief value of this book is in providing a cogent description of the Dutch manual and the work of Jenkinson and Schellenberg, undoubtedly Ridener’s final main chapter on “questioning archives,” examining the work of contemporary archivists in reframing archival theory (also focusing on the appraisal function), will draw considerable attention. Some will themselves question his selection of Brian Brothman, Terry Cook, Carolyn Heald, Eric Ketelaar, and Heather MacNeil as the representatives of contemporary archivists who have, principally by their work on archival appraisal, used postmodern and critical theories and the challenges of technology to construct a different archival knowledge base. Ridener terms this new archival paradigm one of questioning, because “Postmodern theory questions the reliability of archival records not to spin the archive and writing of history into chaos, but in order to begin to understand more about the assumptions archivists make about their work” (p. 124).

Examining this small cluster of leading commentators on archival theory and practice raises some fundamental issues for Ridener. For example, “One of the main guiding forces behind the changing role of the archivist is the dialectic between objectivity and subjectivity in archival theory. As cultural and social expectations of archives change over time, so too does the role archivists play in creating and maintaining the adaptable archives” (p. 132). Ridener sees a major shift in the most recent manifestation of archival theory and its application, especially in how records and their keepers are viewed: “Archival paradigms of the past have dictated that archivists assume records were created as impartial products of a business or organization’s work. The contemporary appraisal paradigm questions the infallibility of not only records, but also the records’ creators” (pp. 133-134). And in that, we have much more theorizing to do.

One of the chief assets of this brief book is that it humanizes the work of archival theorists. Too often the pioneers in codifying or describing archival theory are placed on pedestals, as if they are not meant or able to be questioned. Ridener indicates why they should be challenged, and he hints that we may be on the verge of yet another archival paradigm. Unfortunately, he does not push this along, but I believe the new generation of doctoral-educated archivists, grounded both in the fundamentals of existing knowledge and research methodologies, will be the individuals who lead in this. They not only will jettison the antiquated concepts of individuals writing a half-century or more ago, they also will begin to dissect the work of their mentors. Those of us now teaching and writing are used to the occasional rant by practitioners against what they often see as the work of people with too much time on their hands and too far from practice; what we look forward to is the careful scrutiny of the next generation, those who will lead the archival field into new intellectual directions. Ridener shows how it has worked over the past century, and his analysis will be a useful map for understanding what is to come.

Straddling Worlds

2009-03-24T18:15:00.002-04:00

Steven J. Harper, Straddling Worlds (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2007).

Peter Bess, MLIS student, University of Pittsburgh

Steven J. Harper’s, Straddling Worlds (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2007) peers into the life of Northwestern Professor and historian of American diplomacy, Richard W. Leopold. Harper, a former student of Leopold’s, delves into the life of his late professor by focusing on the struggles Leopold, a self-proclaimed non-practicing Jew, faced and overcame in the academic world of the early to mid-1900s that saw him plainly as a Jew. Harper garnishes Leopold’s story with facts about the World Wars, presidential races, Vietnam War protests, and more, all of which played a pivotal role in the shaping of his life and work.

Among the stories in this biography is how Richard Leopold took part in the committee that headed up the investigation into Professor Francis L. Loewenheim’s charges against the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in 1969. Through Harper’s narrative we see a man who tentatively accepts the responsibility of leading an investigation but who leads the investigation with integrity and conviction. This case still stands as one of the more pivotal cases of archival ethics in the history of presidential libraries.

As strong as the narrative is in this book it is carried by the dialogue between Harper and Leopold. The interview portions allow the reader to hear straight from the subject’s mouth about his life. The talk is straight forward and engrossing. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in academic life in the early 1900s, the life of Jewish men in the early 1900s, American history, or someone who just loves a great story. This is one of the few biographies I have read that was tough to put down and bittersweet to finish.

Different Perspectives on Presidential Libraries (and More Commentary on the Anthony Clark situation)

2009-03-18T07:18:00.001-04:00

Susan Jacoby, Alger Hiss and the Battle for History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

James Traub, “The Academic Freedom Agenda,” New York Times Magazine, March 15, 2009, pp. 40-43.

Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss, Citizen-in-Chief: The Second Lives of the American Presidents (New York: William Morrow, 2009).

Introduction

Anthony Clark’s recent travails in getting access to the records of the Office of Presidential Libraries at the National Archives is only evidence of one aspect of this system, partly archival in nature and purpose, that ought to trouble archivists and others interested in the archival mission in a democratic society. Anyone who has paid attention to the presidential libraries and the issues related to their history, performance, mission, and controversies ought to acknowledge that this is a highly flawed system and one that is often in conflict with what archivists usually assume to be their role in American society. Indeed, three recent peeks into these institutions reveal continuing, troubling issues that represent the historical and political context for the kinds of problems Clark has encountered.

Perspective One

Susan Jacoby’s slim, elegant study about the Alger Hiss case offers insights about the current debates about the nature and role of presidential libraries. Jacoby traces the changing attitudes about the case and Hiss’ innocence or guilt about his conviction for spying for the Soviet Union. Acknowledging early on that Hiss looks more guilty because of additional government files declassified, Jacoby does not attempt to draw a conclusion about the merits of the case against Hiss but instead strives to show how the case has been a weathervane for the shifting fortunes of right and left political viewpoints. As she writes, “The contradictory historical scripts about the Hiss case reveal much more about conflicting visions of what America ought to be than about what American Communism actually was – or about who Alger Hiss was” (p. 29).

What does the book have to do with presidential records? For one thing, it places former Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein and his book on Hiss (Perjury, published in 1978) in its context. Weinstein used effectively FOIA to gain access to a greater quantity of documentation about the case, perhaps explaining why he has tried to assist Anthony Clark in his own FOIA efforts to get access to the OPL records. Jacoby describes Weinstein’s interviewing and working with Hiss and his assessments of what the evidence suggested about the issue of whether Hiss had been a Soviet spy, Weinstein’s conclusion that the evidence did not absolve him of guilt. Subsequent opening of Soviet records after the fall of the Soviet Union seem not to have countered the conclusions offered by Weinstein in his earlier book.

Indeed, Jacoby returns, in her conclusion, to the issue of records and the evidence they offer in resolving the split viewpoints about Hiss. She does not see how any additional evidence could resolve the controversy between right and left since the Hiss case has become a “metaphor for the fundamental dispute about the essence of patriotism that has created a wall of separation between many conservatives and many liberals” (p. 218). Jacoby sees the case as a “powerful argument in favor of maximum, not minimum, civil libertarian safeguards in times of real as well as perceived danger” (p. 221). It is why the problems revealed about the activities of both the SAA and NARA in regards to Anthony Clark’s efforts to examine the OPL records are, in my view, so dangerous to the health of the archival mission, a mission that must include the importance of records for holding government officials accountable to the public.

Perspective Two

Writer James Traub’s recent description of the efforts underway to bring to Southern Methodist University the George W. Bush Presidential Library also ought to give pause to the purpose and viability of these institutions. Traub focuses on the Freedom Institute, the “policy center to be housed alongside his presidential library and museum on the campus of Southern Methodist University” and now searching for an executive director (p. 40). Traub explores the controversy about the Bush library at SMU, and the manner in which he characterizes the substance of the debate ought to give us (the public and the archival community) pause about why we should continue to support such facilities: “But George Bush is not everyone’s guy on the S.M.U. campus. Indeed, the prospect of being identified in perpetuity with the Freedom Agenda freezes the blood of some of the university’s leading academics. Everything about the planned institute reminds them of what they detested about the Bush administration. It will proselytize rather than explore: a letter sent to universities bidding for the Bush center stipulated that the institute would, among other things, ‘further the domestic and international goals of the Bush administration.’ And it will hold itself apart from S.M.U.’s own world of academic inquiry, reporting to the Bush Foundation itself rather than to the university president or provost, as academic institutes — even presidential ones — normally do” (p. 42). Is this political agenda really the container we want for preserving and administering archival records?

Traub admits that it might take time for the Bush library to develop into an institution where research and scholarship of the variety normally desired at a university are both welcome and evident. However, he doesn’t hide how long this might take: “Even [R. Gerald] Turner, S.M.U.’s president, is hedging his bets. He expects there to be an ‘adjustment period’ during which the institute may feel a little bit like George Bush’s wonderful place but that over time, ‘Bush’s views will become irrelevant.’ That may be; the Hoover Institution eventually outgrew its namesake. But since the process took half a century, and involved some very ugly battles with Stanford, that may not be the most encouraging precedent” (p. 43). That suggests what is well documented, then, about presidential libraries, namely that there are so many other political and other agendas that the archival mission is threatened or compromised. Ought archivists to be surprised that the National Archives resists Anthony Clark’s requests to have access to the OPL records? Isn’t it likely that a lot of the ugliness of these other purposes will be revealed and any role by NARA to have a legitimate stake in preserving such records for purposes such as understanding our political processes, holding government accountable in a democratic system, and supporting reputable scholarship and other research dashed on the rocks of at least the recent administration’s objectives to oppose such objectives?

Perspective Three

The Benardo and Weiss book is a clever and interesting examination of the “second lives” (their post-presidency careers) of our chief executives. They look at how these individuals earn a living, the political careers and activities they engage in after their time in the Oval Office, new outlets for public service that they discover or pursue, and the rehabilitation agendas that some pursue with great vigor. One of the activities of the ex-presidents they examine (how could they not?) is their presidential libraries.

These authors provide the background on the library system – how it developed, arguments for and against it, the costs associated with it, controversies such as influence peddling in order to raise funds to design and build the expensive facilities, and how the system has been transformed. Benardo and Weiss pull no punches. Right at the outset they present what is the real problem with the library system: “In a country bereft of emperors, monarchs, or pharaohs, America’s most powerful elected officials have embraced libraries as their personal shrines” (p. 72). Woe to those that question this. Indeed, the authors return to this topic in their general conclusion when they see as a common theme the prevailing interests of these former presidents to be that of controlling their legacy. While many scholars, including some archivists, have pointed that the formation and preservation of archives has often been tied up with issues of power and control, it is not the public good objective we strive for in most articulations of the archival mission. The manner in which Benardo and Weiss characterize the nature of these archives cheapens the better objectives that these libraries could engage with and makes many archivists and their primary professional association, the latter seemingly asleep while the more dangerous issues with these institutions pile up and the former quiet and focused on their own institutional challenges, look more like court jesters.

Conclusion

There are, of course, good people who hold different opinions about the presidential libraries. There have been good people who have tried to steer these archives and museums in the right direction. However, I believe that what we are seeing with the case of Anthony Clark ought to demonstrate that this system is not the best way for us to preserve the records of the ex-presidents and their administrations; it creates a rationale for protecting not documenting former presidents, exacerbated by the poor work of the National Archives and the uneven handling by the SAA when it needs to function more as a professional and citizen watchdog of NARA. What Clark has brought to the table is an outsider’s perspective armed with substantial evidence of problems with what we used to see as our “ministry of documents” (borrowing from Donald McCoy’s thirty-year old history of the National Archives). Anyone trying to write NARA’s history since 1968, the cut-off year of McCoy’s history, it seems, could be blocked by the archivists themselves (how ironic), perhaps motivated by protecting their own legacy. We ignore this at the peril of destroying our professional ideals. I wonder if the damage may not already be too great.

At the moment, I am not sure where to go with SAA or NARA, partly because Anthony Clark is still laying out one important part of the evidence regarding his treatment. What I do know, is that in the case of the Society, is that the membership rightly expects its leadership to be accountable to it (and there are ways to hold it accountable IF individual members opt to band together and speak up, something it has not done and is not doing). We certainly are entitled to more than weak explanations revolving around administrative procedures, comments about a vague ethics code, and lame reassurances that NARA’s leadership is new and ought to be given time to resolve its internal problems. With regards to NARA, we have many more options available to us as U.S. citizens to voice our concerns. This is something to be discussed in the future.

Scribbling

2009-03-16T09:04:00.002-04:00

Kitty Burns Florey, Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting (Brooklyn, New York: Melville House Publishing, 2009).

I remember receiving grades in grammar school for handwriting, and I also remember not caring much about my handwriting once the grading ceased. I also remember practicing my signature, looking for just the right affect (efforts seemingly completely wasted when my daughter years later remarked that my signature looks like I was having a stroke when I signed for something). Florey’s entertaining little book brings all this thoughts flooding back.

Florey, a novelist and experienced copyeditor, gives us a highly personal account of handwriting in her Script and Scribble, a book that is also nicely illustrated and designed. She reviews the history of handwriting (with a focus on tools and scripts), the development of penmanship styles (emphasizing the work and influence of Platt Rogers Spencer and A.N. Palmer), the idea of graphology (handwriting analysis and its purported value), and the challenges to writing in the digital era (with the rise of calligraphy and the uses of technology to mimic handwriting).

Script and Scribble is not a scholarly work, but it is full of interesting examples and offers insights about the nature of handwriting that will be of use to archivists. If nothing else, the book provides clues as to why individuals often still employ leather bound journals and fountain pens to record their thoughts when they are surrounded by digital technologies. “As a writer,” Florey notes, “I have to admit that I’m wedded to my computer. But as a reader, I find it difficult to describe the exact nature of the excitement I feel when I encounter a favorite writer’s signature – the real, immediate, spontaneous thing, done with a hand and a pen – or better yet, the original manuscript of some work I love” (p. 125). Florey views handwriting as a window into the mind of a writer: “Even more than a personal possession, a writer’s script, with its smears, crossings out, second thoughts, and marginal notes, seems to take the viewer directly into his or her mind” (p. 128). And she adds this kind of archival advice, given the rarity of handwritten letters, “My own advice is: if you get a letter in the mail, save it! Posterity will thank you” (p. 129). While that may be a bit of a stretch, it does capture the value Florey assigns to handwriting.

The Importance of Records

2009-03-13T09:03:00.001-04:00

The American writer, bell hooks, in her latest book, Belonging: A Culture of Place (New York: Routledge, 2009), gives us this interesting perspective on the value of the record: “In the past I have often scoffed at those folks who cannot go anywhere without a camera, a recording device, video, without some instrument to document for the future. Now that I have witnessed the deep pain and grief that can be caused by loss of memory, through illness, dementia and Alzheimer’s . . ., I can acknowledge the value of documentation for a future time. I know firsthand what a blessing it is to have a record – a way to remember that goes beyond the mind” (pp. 185-186). Nicely stated.

More About SAA, NARA, and Anthony Clark

2009-03-07T09:14:00.001-05:00

What follows is my second round of exchanges with SAA about the Anthony Clark, NARA, and the Code of Ethics. I believe what we are seeing here is an unfortunate lapse in SAA leadership. We may be at a crossroads concerning the viability of SAA as a serious professional association, if it abandons its responsibility to speak out about problems at NARA or if it continues to neglect any serious commitment to archival ethics.

Here is My Second Open Letter to Frank Boles and SAA Leadership

Several weeks ago, February 14th to be exact, I wrote to the two of you making my concerns known about issues related to researcher Anthony Clark’s treatment by the National Archives in seeking to gain access to the records of the Office of Presidential Libraries. Specifically, I cited the SAA Code of Ethics, nothing that it “requires SAA leadership to investigate claims into the unprofessional and blatantly unethical behavior of NARA and its leadership.”

In a round of emails between Frank Boles and Rand Jimerson, the matter seemed to have been referred to the Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (although some subsequent comments reported on the Archives and Archivists List suggests this may not have happened and would be considered at the SAA Council meeting held last weekend). While I found this confusing, I have waited to see what SAA would do at its Council meeting about this very important case.

In today’s “In the Loop,” sent out to all SAA members, there is a brief report of the “highlights” of the SAA Council meeting, but there is no reference to the Clark case. With this message, I am requesting as an SAA member a brief report about what, if any, action has been taken. I am writing this as a open letter to you and the professional community, sending it to you directly and also posting to the A&A list. I will report on any response I receive.

I would appreciate if I could have a timely response about Council’s deliberations and actions.

Thank you.

Here is Frank Boles’ Response to My Second Open Letter

Richard:

Prior to the convening of the SAA Council meeting on February 26 in Washington, I spoke with Anthony Clark by phone to review the history of his contact with NARA and SAA and to gain a better understanding of his concerns. On February 25 I met with Acting Archivist of the United States Adrienne Thomas and two of her staff members to discuss several topics, including the issue of Mr. Clark’s access to records of the Office of Presidential Libraries. During the course of the Council meeting, I reported to the full Council about my conversations with Mr. Clark and Ms. Thomas; the Council did not take up a discussion of the issue. On March 4 I again contacted Mr. Clark by email.

During my conversation with Ms. Thomas it was clear to me that she is aware of the background and many details associated with Mr. Clark’s requests and claims. She assured me that she and her staff intend to work quickly – and directly with Mr. Clark – to resolve the matter. People of good will may disagree about whether NARA is acting in good faith and with reasonable speed; however, given new leadership I believe NARA should be given a continued opportunity to meet Mr. Clark’s requests and allowed a reasonable period of time for a mutually satisfactory agreement to be reached.

Regarding the SAA Code of Ethics:

The SAA Council, in February 2005, adopted the current Code of Ethics (http://www.archivists.org/governance/handbook/app_ethics.asp). Prior to the adoption of this code, the Committee on Ethics and Professional Conduct (CEPC) was charged to draft a revision of the code and to seek member opinion about the draft, which was done via an article in the July/August 2004 issue ofArchival Outlook and an open forum at the 2004 Annual Meeting in Boston. As the July/August 2004 article states: “On advice of legal counsel, this draft revision eliminates commentary on each principle, as well as guidelines and procedures for interpretation of the code and mediation of disputes….. The proposed code is intended to be aspirational.” Earlier, in January 2003, the Council voted to “revoke SAA’s code of ethics enforcement procedures.” The current Code does not require SAA leaders to investigate claims of unethical behavior.

Unfortunately there is an inconsistency between the Code and the guidelines under which the CEPC operates – an artifact, I believe, of our failure to review the Council Handbook carefully and update it in light of adoption of the new Code. The guidelines for the CEPC allow it to respond to ethical complaints if directed to do so by the president. Should the president invoke this clause, however, she or he would be in violation of at least two Council actions. I will ask Council to rectify this administrative error.

Currently the CEPC is discussing revising the Code to reflect current scholarship and professional discourse regarding archival ethics and the profession’s goals and identity. In its recent annual report to the Council, the CEPC indicated that it “plans to engage in further review of the SAA Code of Ethics to make recommendations to the Council and to the SAA membership regarding revising the Code,” with some preliminary recommendations to be made by the date of the 2009 Annual Meeting in Austin. Although several SAA members have suggested over the years that the Code be revisited with an eye to creating something that could be used in resolving ethical disputes, as I understand it, the CEPC currently does not recommend such changes, which would entail significant administrative and legal obligations, expenses, and liabilities.

As always, I appreciate your willingness to raise issues that are of concern to you.

Here is My Response to Frank Boles

I am saddened by President Boles's response, for several reasons.

First, there is no "new" NARA leadership. There is an acting Archivist of the United States, pending the nomination and approval of a new AUS. All the individuals in leadership, several named by Anthony Clark in his presentation, have been there many years an are still there -- and as I have written elsewhere, the problems with NARA were present before he asked for access to the records of the Office of Presidential Libraries.

Second, I am amazed by the candid response that SAA Council did not discuss the issue at its latest meeting. The reasons seem to be based on procedural issues related to inconsistencies about how or whether the president can refer matters to the Committee on Ethics and Professional Conduct. I guess life in SAA Council meetings have changed since I was on it. Did Council members review the Clark lecture? Was anyone concerned about the broader issues represented about NARA culture and leadership? Did anyone on Council want to talk with Anthony Clark and evaluate the evidence presented by him extending far beyond his own issues of access to records? As Bruce Montgomery nicely stated, there is a "larger issue" at work here and that "SAA's mission should include making inquiries (or investigating), joining lawsuits, and otherwise taking action in the public interest when larger principles of freedom of information and the public's right to know are involved."

Third, now I realize the mistake I made in invoking the Code of Ethics in the Clark case. I invoked the code because I believe that ethical issues represent perhaps the most important professional matters we will be involved with in the future. I also invoked the code because my responsibility as an educator is to prepare future archivists to work in an increasingly complex world, and this involves teaching about ethics and related matters. However, by doing this I enabled Council to avoid the Clark case and the broader issues reflected by NARA's actions in dealing with him and in other concerns related to it's mission. I am naive. I did not consider that Council would avoid the NARA issues by acknowledging problems with its internal procedures and logistics. I did not realize that an "administrative error" would lead to Council not even discussing what are obvious serious issues (or, if you like, charges that there are serious issues) at NARA. Honestly, I am shocked by this.

I won't address the matter of whether Mr. Clark is now being treated fairly by NARA or how he feels about his discussion with Frank Boles and SAA's actions (really, lack of activity); he is in the best position to discuss this if he wants. What I now must mull over is whether SAA is the best place to discuss and seek to resolve serious professional issues. Fortunately, I have a number of months before my dues notice arrives, and this gives me the opportunity to see what happens both with the appointment of a new AUS and how NARA responds to Anthony Clark's FOIA and other requests, as well as whether SAA realizes that it cannot just mouth empty rhetoric about ethical matters and it attempts to reaffirm the importance of professional ethics (or, more practically, whether SAA understands that it is long overdue in separating itself from NARA so it can honestly speak up about what the national archives needs to be, whether it uses the word "ethical" or not). In the past, I reflected on this and still written the check; I am not so sure I will do this when faced with the moment again at the end of the summer.

I have noticed that a lot of SAA energy has been devoted to telling us about the large membership it now has. While I know that it faces tough economic decisions ahead, as every organization does these days, I assume this membership desires SAA to be a leader and that people are not just members to get discounts on meeting registrations and publications, receive a personal copy of the American Archivist or the newsletter, or other such benefits. I see a failure here to provide leadership, and I accept the fact, given my own long involvement with SAA, that this is my failure as well; the victim here, the person who should be most concerned, is a citizen like Anthony Clark. It is with people like him that all our high ideals of preserving the documentary record, ensuring government transparency and accountability, and enabling citizens to have access to essential archival sources in order to understand their past will be tested and found working or not working. Whatever the reason, we have failed him, at least for the moment.

Finding My Way Back

2009-03-06T00:18:00.002-05:00

As those who read this blog know, I have been involved in a battle about the soul of the archival community with the Society of American Archivists, where one would not necessarily expect to be fighting such a battle. I will write more about that latter, about my discouragement with SAA’s lack of will to lead the profession in holding the National Archives accountable or endorsing any concept of ethical practice as a key component of archival work other than presenting some vague platitudes that the association will not defend less it might be sued. I fear for our professional future.

I do not fear for our professional mission. Reading English professor Eric Jager’s essay, “Lost in the Archives,” published in the Chronicle Review, March 6, 2009, encourages me why the preservation of archival sources will somehow survive in our society as a public good, despite the best efforts of some of us to tarnish it. Jager, describing his research at the French national archives, provides at first a fairly conventional review of archival research: “time-consuming, eye-straining detective work, punctuated by the occasional thrill of an unanticipated revelation.” Then he recounts his efforts to examine documentation about a 1386 trial by combat, discovering records not seen by others: “In all the published literature on the 1386 affair, I had never seen any discussion of this record, and as I opened the volume, I had the delicious sense that I was lifting the lid of a box of secrets that had been hidden for many centuries.”

Jager affirms for us, even now immersed in the digital era, why travel to and laborious efforts in archives are important: “Nearly every day I found something new in the archives, whether a detail about the families or finances of the principal characters, a twist in the legal case, or another piece of information that shed a little more light on the controversial affair. Each discovery was a reminder of how much is hidden in the vast yet incomplete archive of the human past — how much has been lost for good and how much, even in the digital age, still depends on the paper, parchment, or papyrus record.” Over the past two years I have been making regular journeys to read, slowly and carefully, the diaries of a pioneering modern archivist, documentary editor, and scholarly publisher – and I feel much the way Jager does.

Despite my struggles with what some think ought to be condoned as acceptable behavior, building only a shell of a profession and weakening the societal mission, Jager reminds us of the power and value of old documents. This refreshes my hope for society’s regard for archives and archivists, even if we sometimes disrespect it ourselves.

You can read his entire article at http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=d485dj23z8vmzltmlxsrl7npgfyv5wwk.

Archival Interactions

2009-02-26T16:59:00.002-05:00

The current issue of InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies. Vol. 5, Issue 1, Article 1 (2009), http://repositories.cdlib.org/gseis/interactions/vol5/iss1/ , includes an array of essays bringing together “scholars from philosophy, American studies, folklore studies, and information studies to link archival studies to larger social and political contexts” (as well as two other essays on archival education, including one by me). These essays derive from the conference, Memoria, voz y patrimonio: The First Conference on Latino/Hispanic Film, Print and Sound Archives and Sixth Institute of the Trejo Foster Foundation for Hispanic Library Education, held at UCLA in 2003. It is an issue anyone interested in archives and its relationship to community, especially underrepresented groups, will want to read.

Here are some interesting morsels to chew over. Clara Chu, Rebecca Dean, and Patrick Keilty, in considering the future of Latina/o archival and memory practice, research, and education, notes this about the current SAA graduate education guidelines: it “makes no reference to “cultural diversity,” “race,” or “ethnicity” but rather diversity of disciplinary base (history or LIS) and diversity of institutions and institutional homes and diversity of specialties in order to provide students with a diversity of options within a common core of archival education. This broad interpretation of “diversity” provides little guidance and no institutional mandate for reconfiguring archival education in the United States that will concern itself with Latina/o archives.” Like so much in the realm of archival education, SAA provides a common denominator approach, little in the way of leadership or vision, leaving it up to individual graduate programs and educators to be innovative.

Mario Ramírez, considering issues of appraisal and documentation, writes, “For the Latino/a archivist, this role is heightened precisely because she or he is often faced with the task of documenting communities that have been rendered historically ephemeral through, among other things, racism, classism, and xenophobia. Therefore, the process of archiving for the Latino/a archivist takes on the seminal and politically charged role of re-inscribing Latino lives into existing historical narratives and of retrieving previously existent notions of self and community.” Later, he states, “For when faced with a human phenomenon that is the site of rampant syncretisms,hybridizations, and cultural and racial mixing, sometimes before it even reaches North American shores, the Latino/a archivist would do well to engage with the radically empirical nature of the Latino populace, rather than resort to a documenting model that fulfills some honorific trope of “saving community
history” that rejects and obscures narrative deviations for positive representations.” As someone who has wrestled a lot with the nature and practice of archival appraisal, I concur completely; however, when I think of the challenge of archival appraisal is mostly settles into the realm of getting archivists even to think conceptually about it, let alone do it. For Ramírez, of course, the problem is even greater, namely that the “task of the Latino/a archivist is fraught with a set of problems not fully articulated in current archival theory or practice. Discourses among archivists about the determination of historical content within archives, and about particular practices such as appraisal and collection development, rarely speak to the problems and challenges involved in the attempt to identify, preserve, and effectively archive the contributions of historically marginalized groups.” Since so few archivists actually ascribe to, at least in any meaningful fashion, archival appraisal theory, maybe we can retool and re-engineer our approaches much more readily than if they were fully invested.

Anne Gilliland and Kelvin White continue this thread with their essay on archival professional education and pedagogy, writing that “although debates over the locus of archival education and core knowledge and skill requirements have recurred globally over the past 200 years, the role and prevailing methods of archival education have never been examined in terms of how they might promote more reflexive and inclusive archival theory and practice.“ True enough. Some of us have tried to introduce other cultural and theoretical perspectives into our reading assignments and teaching, but it is often drowned out by students wanting basic practice advice and experience (see my own essay, “Teaching Unpleasant Things,” for some personal observations about such matters). They add to this another observation: “The sense that there are right and wrong knowledge and practices, that certain methodologies are more rigorous or valid, that learning should take place in particular environments using particular pedagogies, or that more developed nations can help less developed nations by teaching them to conduct themselves in similar ways all contribute to the hegemonic effect. While these views are slowly changing within what is still a Western and elite-dominated academy, the effect is arguably further exacerbated today by English-language dominated information dissemination and delivery systems such as the Internet, and trans-community and trans-national distance education that is often delivered by such means.” In other words, we have a lot of challenges in expanding our educational vista and making it more relevant to an increasingly complex society.

This is a set of essays worth some reading and reflection, especially by those teaching archivists.

Power, Records, and Love Cemetery

2009-02-23T15:36:00.002-05:00

China Galland, Love Cemetery: Unburying the Secret History of Slaves (New York: HarperOne, 2008).

This is the story of the efforts to reclaim Love Cemetery, “a small, rural, African American burial ground in East Texas” (p. 1). It is a compelling, if not a happy, story, since the end result is the lockdown of the cemetery as various groups battled after its control for the purpose of obtaining valuable oil rights. As archivists, genealogists, and other researchers know, the information on headstones and other markers may be the only record of an individual’s life. Galland spins the story of her work with a group of African-Americans to clean up this cemetery, dating back to the early 19th century, and offers as well an account of race relations and racism in contemporary America.

Galland provides a glimpse into how places like cemeteries can function as memory markers. In discussing the planning for the reconsecrating of the cemetery, she writes, “This is what I had been reaching for without knowing it: a ceremony, a public acknowledgment that we were walking on holy ground – ground made holy by the struggles of the people whose bodies had been given to this land. For many, regardless of background, a burial ground was a luminal space, a place between worlds in which we take time apart not only to honor but to communicate with our ancestors, to feed the family spirits, to receive guidance, to pour out our heart to the ground that receives all. Staying connected to one’s ancestors is a way of feeding one’s own soul and balancing the world” (pp. 125-126). In some ways, this description can be stretched to encompass archives, since they too are like cemeteries where the records and stories are buried waiting to be rediscovered and retold.

There are also references to the use of records in the research about the cemetery and the ownership of the land on which it resides. Galland describes visiting the county courthouse in Marshall, Texas, filled with people examining the large volumes of land records searching for mineral rights. It leads Galland to reflect on what the examination of such records means, and the challenges about what such records might cough up or not: “There was an inherent problem in trying to coax the story of the black experience from these records. Here the story would be told by the silences, the omissions, the gaps in the records, what was missing. The records did not say whether a title was obtained ethically. They didn’t indicate whether a transaction was proper or if it was an egregious theft. The records, I realized, were the victor’s story. They were elaborate lists of who ended up with the title, not whether they had gained the title legally or ethically. That information was not recorded” (p. 168). Galland learns that her efforts, as a white person, to gather and record more information about the cemetery look just like more of the same. Her observations mirror what others have been saying about the challenges of using archives and the relationship of these records to power structures (past and present). Later, Galland includes this self-reflection about her work with the African-American community and its cemetery: “Was my documentary instinct my craft, or was it my way of avoiding being present? Was it my way of defending myself? I knew what it was like to have people deny my experience. Was I documenting events, or was I buttressing my experience of them in order to control the narrative? . . . Looking for records in the Harrison County Courthouse had shown me how white people made the rules, kept the records, and wrote the history. There was power in being someone who knew how to use that system. I could see that. Now I was beginning to see the lens of whiteness that I was wearing, beginning to feel the glasses on my own nose, becoming aware of this distortion” (pp. 185-186). This is a reminder of the power associated with records, a power that archivists need to appreciate and understand not just in studying the nature of archives but in working with their researchers.