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.

NARA, SAA, and Anthony Clark

2009-02-19T10:07:00.013-05:00

The issues being discussed presently about NARA's treatment of Anthony Clark and the role of SAA, its code of ethics, and its independent voice in the archival community are much more than about one case. It is about the issue of leadership in the U.S. archival community. It is about the problems of eroding leadership by NARA (especially in the last two decades) and the strange views of SAA leadership about its code of ethics (we need a code, but we will never refer to it). However, this case does suggest that agitators ought to be seen as advocates; while some view Mr. Clark as a pest, I am sure, his views about the role of NARA and his appeals to SAA suggest he may possess a stronger notion of the archival community's mission and societal role than even elected and appointed leaders in the field at NARA and SAA. I thought I would use the blog to share some of my own views about this and cite, when relevant, some of my own writings on this topic (and related ones). I do this in my blog so as to not irritate unnecessarily those on the A&A list or in other venues. You can choose to ignore this or to read it.

When I first entered the archival profession in the early 1970s, I read all I could find and I remember reading the book by H.G. Jones, The Records of a Nation, published in 1969 and addressing the need for an independent National Archives (rather than its positioning under the General Services Administration). Typical of everything that Jones wrote, it is an elegant and beautiful argument for why an independent archives was so critical both to its mission and to the archival and historical professions. Some years later I watched with interest as the movement to gain NARA's independence kicked into full gear (my history masters mentor Walter Rundell was a leader in this), but by then I wondered just what difference it really would make if the National Archives was independent. Would it have a more precise mission, would it carry it out with more authority, and so forth? Donald McCoy's 1978 book on the National Archives provided many hints that independence was not the real issue; while at one point I viewed his book as an exemplary piece of archival history -- "Donald R. McCoy's National Archives and American Archival History," Manuscripts 31 (Fall 1979): 302-08 -- I have had occasion to re-examine the book for other reasons related to understanding the National Archives and have seen it as identifying weak parts of the foundation of the archival community. Clarity of mission and stronger leadership seemed more important.

My time on SAA Council in the late 1980s, work on an NHPRC-funded project on electronic records starting in the late 1980s, and continuing work in archival circles, such as editor of the American Archivist, gave me a unique opportunity to observe both SAA and NARA and the relationship between the two. While we worked on the research project about electronic recordkeeping, we witnessed the PROFs case, NARA's strange role in it, and one of my doctoral students, David Wallace, wrote an important study (his dissertation) of that case. At my last SAA Council meeting in 1989 I witnessed leadership from NARA fumble about answering questions why it had sold marketing rights to Philip Morris for the use of the Bill of Rights, ultimately telling SAA that it did not care what SAA or the archival community thought about this (or any other) issue. When the 1992 House report on mismanagement at the National Archives appeared, I contacted SAA about the unethical activities of then AUS Don Wilson, but I was told that the ethics code was unenforceable and that in America people were assumed innocent until proved guilty (I pointed out that this while true did not deal with individuals confessing or when strong evidence materializes such as with the then startling report -- now not so startling).

I also participated in the early 1990s in a meeting of graduate archival educators at NARA to assist it in evaluating its internal training program, and the consensus was that NARA needed to open up this program and align itself with new trends and opportunities in the emergence of stronger education programs (later, it was reported that we had endorsed their program, hardly true, and the last time I have ever had an invitation to participate in anything with NARA). The one exception to this occurred a few years ago when I was a candidate for a faculty position at the University of Maryland and I was invited to a meeting with a high-ranking NARA official where I was told that they didn't want me there because I had been critical of the National Archives (true), the Maryland program was their education program (false), I neglected my masters students in favor of my doctoral students (strange, and just ask my doctoral students if they feel so favored), and that they opposed me because I was a collaborator with David Bearman who they disliked (I had not worked at that point with David for nearly a decade). Such sentiments were clearly residue from my involvement with David on the Pitt electronic records project and some of my writings about ERM that were critical of NARA, leading to some strident criticisms of me in the literature by NARA staff such as Tom Brown and the late Linda Henry -- but such debates in the professional literature I always view differently (if you dare to publish, you have to be ready to accept such responses -- and they always drive up one's citation counts anyway). I withdrew my application for unrelated reasons, but this was obviously a weird meeting (and one that makes me appreciate all the more the problems faced by Anthony Clark).

As time passed other issues related to the role of the National Archives continued to emerge. Although a considerable portion of my early career seems to have had me connected to some aspect of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the small funding arm of NARA, its role in diverting much of its funds to documentary editing projects in traditional approaches and formats seemed counter-intitutive. In the early 1990s a supposedly impartial study about the use of documentary editions was released by the NHPRC, but it mostly seemed to be a thinly veiled rationale or defense of these editions -- prompting me to write a critical review of the report, published as "Archivists and the Use of Archival Records: Or, A View from the World of Documentary Editing," Provenance 9 (1991 [1992]): 89-110. At one time in the late 1990s, the re-authorization of NHPRC seemed to distort even the balance of funds for editing and archiving projects, prompting me to write "Messrs. Washington, Jefferson, and Gates: Quarelling about the Preservation of the Documentary Heritage of the United States," First Monday 2 (August 1997). While NHPRC has played an important role over the years in many aspects of the archival community, from supporting the publication of basic manuals and various research projects, I also have come to see the annual battle about its small federal allocation to be increasingly out of proportion to the needs of the archival community for a national archival policy and national funding. Advocacy and lobbying for stronger support for the archival mission needs to move beyond this small group buried within NARA, but I digress.

Because NARA is the defacto physical and institutional representation or symbol for so many (the media, scholars such as historians, genealogists and other citizen groups, school groups) of the archival mission, it is important to watch, comment on, and lobby for change with or about NARA when it either wanders away from this mission or provides us opportunity for supporting it when the federal agency embarks in new and interesting directions. (Let me add here, that I write as both citizen/taxpayer wanting to see his interests represented and a long-time member of the archival profession). So, for example, when NARA announced its intentions to refurbish the display of the Declaration of Independence and other critical seminal documents, I thought this provided an opportunity for NARA to do some different things in representing new challenges (in this case digital documentation) to the archival mission, and I enjoyed writing about this in my "Declarations, Independence, and Text in the Information Age," First Monday 4 (June 1999). Likewise, when we witnessed the transition from the Clinton administration to the second Bush one, this prompted me to write an analysis of the role and activities of the presidential library system, published as "America's Pyramids: Presidents and Their Libraries," Government Information Quarterly 19, no. 1 (2002): 45-75 (mostly because I had become so appalled at the dominance of presidential library insiders in writing about these institutions and the complacency of the archival community about these institutions (that is, the complete lack of critical perspective about their strengths and weaknesses).

The second Bush administration, with its remarkable commitment to secrecy, has led me to watch even more closely the activities of the National Archives and how it would deal with such challenges. And I have found myself writing about a variety of issues about such matters, generally prompted by specific cases. The naming of a new Archivist of the United States in the midst of the Bush era caused me to reflect on the importance of this position -- "Why the Archivist of the United States is Important to Records Professionals and America," Records & Information Management Report 20 (October 2004): 1-14. Increasing scrutiny by journalists, scholars, and other commentators on matters of government accountability and secrecy has led me to write reviews of some of their observations, such as "Empty Temples: Challenges for Modern Government Archives and Records Management," Records & Information Management Report 22 (October 2006): 1-13 and “Secrecy, Archives, and the Archivist: A Review Essay (Sort Of),” American Archivist 72 (Spring/Summer 2009): 213-230 (obviously forthcoming). Sadly, some odd activities by NARA itself, such as its involvement in secret arrangements with some federal agencies to reclassify previously open records, also has led to some additional writings, such as "The National Archives Reclassification Scandal," Records & Information Management Report 22 (November 2006): 1-13. Some of these essays I have folded into some of my books, and others will appear in this way in the future. The point here is, in my opinion, that NARA has not performed particularly well.

My commentaries on NARA and related topics have been a very minor part of my writings about archival issues in the last two decades. Yet, I worry about the future of the profession because of archival leadership issues, a seeming neglect of ethics and accountability matters, and a sick feeling that most working archivists do not care about NARA (or even SAA for that matter). Personally, I feel that the most important future issues faced by the archival community won't be technology, but it will be accountability and ethical issues. And apparently, from time to time, SAA leadership seems to think this way as well. In 2005 SAA President Richard Pearce-Moses sent a letter to AUS Allen Weinstein expressing concern about the reclassification mess, starting the letter in this way: "Archivists share a passion and professional ethic for open access to government records. We believe that a citizen’s right to review public records is a hallmark of democratic government. This right allows citizens to hold their public leaders accountable and to protect their rights and privileges." Pearce-Moses outlined actions they wanted NARA to take, but the main point here is here we have an open reference to a sense of ethics.

I believe, given the evidence Anthony Clark has presented, that SAA, through its Ethics and Professional Conduct committee, should hear both sides -- Clark and NARA -- and issue a statement criticizing NARA for how it has treated Mr. Clark and restricted access to the records of the Office of Presidential Libraries (I say this because of the evidence Mr. Clark has presented). If "Archivists [really] share a passion and professional ethic for open access to government records" and they "believe that a citizen’s right to review public records is a hallmark of democratic government," then SAA can take no other action. The National Archives is in ruins, and I hope that the Obama Administration will name a dynamic and energetic individual to be the Archivist of the United States to restore it to what it once was and give it a hope for what it could be. SAA needs to step in and become an independent leader and a vigilant watchdog of NARA, not just a bystander expressing little opinion about NARA's troubles, poor leadership, and sometimes unethical activities.

I have served SAA in many capacities. I have published in the American Archivist from 1974 to this year, served on Council, been the AA editor, been editor of publications, and been on numerous committees and sessions. I believe that to be a strong profession we need a strong professional association, but it is getting harder for me to answer questions posed by my masters students about why they should be a member of this association. And every September when my dues notice comes, it gets a little harder for me to answer the same question.

I have lost many friends and colleagues through the years because of my stands on a number of issues, and this hurts me more than I generally let on. I am sad by the lack of support even today by many of my educator colleagues who won't take a position on such issues as SAA ethics code or the problems plaguing NARA's leadership, for reasons only known to them. I believe, strongly, that the future of the archival field depends on speaking up about such matters, not remaining silently on the sidelines and merely tending to our own gardens. I will be the first to admit if I am wrong about any of this, and I have made mistakes in the past because I am human, but I believe the silence of so many is a far greater wrong. Help me explain to my students why they should be SAA members and, for goodness sake, why they should heed the call to be archivists.

Some Books Incorporating Some of My Commentaries on Ethics and Accountability

Co-editor, with David Wallace, Archives and the Public Good: Accountability and Records in Modern Society (Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 2002).

Archives and Archivists in the Information Age (New York: Neal-Schuman, 2005).

Ethics, Accountability and Recordkeeping in a Dangerous World (London: Facet, 2006).

Organizing Personal Digital Stuff

2009-02-18T16:29:00.001-05:00

Aimee Baldridge, Organize Your Digital Life: How to Store Your Photographs, Music, Videos, & Personal Documents in a Digital World (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2009).

Organize Your Digital Life is an example of a user-friendly publication intended to assist individuals maintain their personal archives. Baldridge states that the book gives you “what you need to organize your digital life [and that these actions] are the same things you need to organize everything else: to know what the organizational tools available are, to be realistic about which ones you will use consistently, and to put them to work” (p. 7). Baldridge does not mince words with the options: “If the prospect of getting organized isn’t enough of a carrot for you, consider the stick: Your hard drive will crash. Discs will become unreadable. It’s all just a matter of time” (p. 7). She also mentions that all the non-digital stuff will deteriorate as well.

The book provides very practical advice, guiding readers through how to inventory materials, making decisions about what to digitize, presenting self-study questions to reflect on, checklists about technical issues and costs (and other matters such as key personal documents needing to be maintained), preparing for disasters, recovering lost digital media, evaluating various kinds of equipment and what and when to use such devices, referencing to preservation and technical standards, and other advice. While I recommend that those working in the nitty-gritty levels of digital records and information might want to examine with a fine-tooth comb the value of the advice offered by this author, there are indicators that Baldridge is sensitive to archival matters. For example, she provides a brief section on “archiving on discs,” mentioning the standard for optical discs. “Without reference to a standard, terms such as ‘archival’ can mean whatever a manufacturer decides is appropriate.” Acknowledging that the ones labeled archival are probably better, she provides some cautionary advice: “For archiving purposes, never use generic discs or those sold under office supply store brands” (p. 32).

A lot of what is found in this volume is just good, old-fashioned commonsense. However, such commonsense is still needed.

Professional Associations and the Public Good: Irish Style

2009-02-15T16:00:00.001-05:00

Every professional association in existence has some sort of statement about how it exists to ensure that it is fulfilling its mission by enabling it to pursue some sort of public good. Whether this is true or not hardly ever gets tested, because we all so willingly accept the rhetoric and because, as members, we want to believe it. It will be interesting to see how Anthony Clark’s comments about our National Archives will fare in the Society of American Archivists leadership, but given the long-term far too cozy relationship between this government agency and professional association I am not particularly sanguine that it will get much attention at all.

Recent experiences about professional associations often remaining silent are not new, of course, as Pat Walsh’s The Curious Case of the Mayo Librarian (Cork: Mercier Press, 2009), describing a politically charged case about the hiring of librarian in Ireland in 1930. Walsh documents the case of Letitia Dunbar Harrison, a Protestant graduate of Trinity College, who was initially denied employment for the Mayo County librarian position on the grounds that she did not have a working knowledge of the Irish language. As it turned out, the case was being about the hiring of a Protestant and a Trinity grad in a county that was predominately Catholic. As Walsh unfolds it in the book, the intensive media coverage also reflected other matters such as the then new Free State, ongoing tensions between national versus local control, and the efforts to draw on the Carnegie Trust to establish libraries throughout Ireland.

This is an excellent case study of an early controversy, a poignant one in that the central figure in the case, Harrison, has a very brief career and turns her back on the field when it was still one of the only routes for women into professional ranks. It also nearly coincides with the formation of the library profession in Ireland, occurring just two years after the establishment of the Library Association in 1928. Yet, despite this new association, it takes no public stand on the case. Walsh writes, “The most high-profile dispute involving libraries and librarianship passed by without the very organization that represented professional librarians speaking out on it. One could argue that the Library Association had ducked its first big challenge, either from a lack of unity or a lack of nerve” (p. 135). We have seen other professional associations in recent decades not speak out on critical issues, especially when concerning powerful institutions, and we have come to expect silence or statements of little more than general platitudes.

Thanks to Kate Manning for sending the Walsh book as part of my annual Irish Christmas present. I had no idea how timely it would be, and she certainly never thought I would put it to this use. This is a great read, even if current events don't add more relevance for it.

Inappropriate Behavior at NARA

2009-02-14T14:54:00.002-05:00

Here is a copy of a letter I sent to Society of American Archivists leadership. . . .

Nancy Beaumont
Executive Director, Society of American Archivists

Frank Boles
President, Society of American Archivists

Dear Nancy and Frank:

I am writing to you about what I deem to be a very serious matter concerning the behavior of the administrators of the U.S. National Archives as recently brought to light by independent researcher Anthony Clark.

Section VI of SAA’s Code of Ethics states, “Archivists strive to promote open and equitable access to their services and the records in their care without discrimination or preferential treatment, and in accordance with legal requirements, cultural sensitivities, and institutional policies. Archivists recognize their responsibility to promote the use of records as a fundamental purpose of the keeping of archives. Archivists may place restrictions on access for the protection of privacy or confidentiality of information in the records.” The Preamble to the Code states that it “establishes standards for the archival profession. It introduces new members of the profession to those standards, reminds experienced archivists of their professional responsibilities, and serves as a model for institutional policies. It also is intended to inspire public confidence in the profession.” While it acknowledges that the Code only “provides an ethical framework to guide members of the profession” and “does not provide the solution to specific problems,” I believe as a long-time SAA member (35 years) that the spirit of the Code requires SAA leadership to investigate claims into the unprofessional and blatantly unethical behavior of NARA and its leadership.

Mr. Clark recently lectured at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences and presented disturbing evidence about efforts to deny him access to the records of the Office of Presidential Libraries by a number of NARA officials. I believe he has made a very strong case about the unprofessional, unethical, and perhaps illegal behavior of NARA leadership. You can hear or watch the lecture by going to http://www.ischool.pitt.edu/colloquia/aaa/index.php.

You will see this description and can follow the instructions to get access to the lecture. You can also hear my comments about the matter.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Anthony Clark, freelance scholar
"Presidential Libraries: The Last Campaign; How Presidents Rewrite History, Run for Posterity and Enshrine their Legacies."
Abstract: Mr. Clark is completing a history of the Presidential libraries, a project taking him to every library; evaluating the experiences of visitors to these institutions; interviewing docents, guards, and library staff, including their directors and high-ranking staff at the National Archives; attending public events; working in their public research rooms; and examining the administrative and other files in and about these institutions.
link to : [ video ] To view this video please use the login: lectures and password: public
link to : [ podcast ]

I hope to see SAA take steps to investigate these issues and complaints. I believe the health and reputation of our professional community depends on SAA speaking up about this issue, especially given the steps being taken by President Obama and his administration to open up government and to appoint a new Archivist of the United States. It makes little sense for SAA for list the qualities a new Archivist should possess, if it is not willing to be vocal about investigating and speaking out about these serious allegations of activities engaged in by members of our own professional community.

Sincerely,

Richard J. Cox
Professor, Archival Studies

Along the Archival Grain

2009-02-07T09:08:00.002-05:00

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

Stoler gets right to the point in her book with these first three sentences: “This book is about the force of writing and the feel of documents, about lettered governance and written traces [of?] colonial lives. It is about commitments to paper, and the political and personal work that such inscriptions perform. No least, it is about colonial archives as sites of the expectant and conjured – about dreams of comforting futures and forebodings of future failures” (p. 1). Using the 19th century Netherlands Indies and its extensive archives, Stoler provides the anthropologist’s view of colonial archives, through the sometimes-heavy jargon of that discipline, which gives a variety of insights into the nature of archives in general. Stoler’s book represents something of what I anticipate as a great flood of books about archives from other disciplines that not only examine in detail the records themselves but also even consider what archivists have had to say about the topic. Although Stoler’s commentary drawn from the work of archivists is meager (and hardly worth more mention than this), Along the Archival Grain is a book working archivists, archival educators and scholars, and archival students need to read.

As one expects from this discipline’s vantage, it is difficult to summarize all the aspects of Stoler’s complex descriptions of records and recordkeeping. Suffice it to say, that a reading of her book provides a rich and complicated assessment of what archival sources represent. While many archivists acquire, describe, and provide access to their documents without much reflection about what the evidence and information in these sources promise, Stoler’s study reminds us that an archival document brings into play many issues of power, control, memory, forgery and fabrication, and other such aspects. Records are not just neutral testaments of evidence waiting to be mined by a researcher, but they fiction and fact, story and testimony, all rolled up into bureaucratic and societal conventions of recording and remembering. Stoler sees these that these “archives are not simply accounts of actions or records of what people thought happened. They are records of uncertainty and doubt in how people imagined they could and might make the rubrics of rule correspond to a changing imperial world” (p. 4). The records “register confused assessments, parenthetic doubts about what might count as evidence, the records of eyewitnesses with dubious credentials, dismissed rumors laced with pertinent truths, contradictory testimonies called upon and quickly discarded” (p. 23). In these records we find contests over power, efforts to find belonging and community, sentiment, explorations into faith, visions of the future, revisions of the past, and rumors shaped into facts. Stoler helps us see that an archival record is not just a flat piece of evidence waiting its rediscovery, but that it is a document full of nuance, depth, and breadth waiting its interpreter. She tries to persuade us to read against the grain of what the creators of these archives intended these records to serve, seeking to provide archivists and users of archives more insights into the nature and value of the evidence they give us. Her examination of colonial archives enables us to explore into a particularly valuable territory about the meaning of archives as documents, institutions, and memory repositories.

We also can read something of the present archival enterprise into how this older colonial archives functions (in effect, either there is much in common in all archival creation and work or, maybe even more telling, all archival effort is in a sense colonial in nature). As Stoler writes, “Kilometers of administrative archives called up massive buildings to house them. Government offices, filled with directors, assistant directors, scribes, and clerks, were made necessary by the proliferation of documents that passed, step by meticulous step, through the official ranks. Accumulations of paper and edifices of stone were both monuments to the asserted know-how of rule, artifacts of bureaucratic labor duly performed, artifices of a colonial state declared to be in efficient operation” (p. 2). This is an assessment of a 19th century colonial archives operation, but it may suggest something as well of what 21st century archivists do. It makes me wonder when the anthropologists will arrive at our doors to study our present activities. It calls up discussions and arguments with some students who are more focused on processes, credentials, practices, and artifacts than in mission and knowledge. It makes me wonder if I bring my own artifacts and artifices to the classroom and contribute to fairly mundane ways of understanding and managing archival evidence.

Scholarship such as Stoler’s pushes us to re-examine our conceptions about the purpose and nature of archival work. My own work of recent years, for example, stresses both evidence and accountability and the more complex elements of the cultural role of archives for memory and identity. How can I focus on the role of records for accountability if we understand the vagaries of records in terms of truth, power, and other purposes? It may be that the process of capturing records, rather than necessarily the veracity of the sources themselves, may be the more important role for achieving accountability. After all, how many times do we slip to the archives in order to hold someone or some organization accountable? However, the possibility of doing this may be more important than the actual need to do so. It is easier to understand, of course, how the layering of record after record achieves the means for personal identity and group memory.

This is an important book for anyone’s personal library on archives.

The Error World

2009-02-04T05:08:00.003-05:00

Simon Garfield, The Error World: An Affair with Stamps (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009) is another lively, personal account of collecting. The reference to “error” is not a suggestion that collecting is inherently wrong (although Garfield’s personal memoir of a failed marriage and excessive spending indicates that the title also is intended to indicate that collectors can get into lots of trouble), but rather that the focus of his philatelic pastime was on stamps with printing errors, some quite rare and valuable. As he relates, “I don’t collect ordinary stamps. I collect stamps with error, with absent colors, with printing faults. It doesn’t take long for my marriage guidance counselor to make the connection between what I collect – stamps with bits missing – and my family history, which has been a life with people missing” (p. 3). As is usually the case with these kinds of personal accounts, we learn a lot about the stuff being collected, the marketplace supporting it, and the psychology of collecting: “Old stamps, especially line-engraved, have the power to transport the collector to a place in their childhood and far beyond,” just one example of the kinds of personal insights offered to the reader (p. 90). Later, Garfield comments, “I did not tend to question my collecting habits. I just enjoyed them. I thought that one day I might put everything on display and have my own little museum for the appreciative. But nowadays there is no avoiding the conclusion that my collecting habits are tied up with the death of my father. . . . [Collecting stamps] is a “solace, and a way of restoring order. They may suggest an element of control in a fateful world – everything in its place, just like the old days” (p. 114). Since archives are full of historical and valuable stamps, as well as the end products of many personal collections, and, in addition, a tempting target for thieves wanting to rip-off items to sell on eBay, this is a good book to spend some time with; it is also a respite from the task of reading the often much more dry and dense scholarly and professional literature.

Historians, the Past, and Evidence

2009-02-01T12:58:00.001-05:00

Once upon a time, archivists read regularly, if not faithfully, new books on historical method and historiography. Some still do, and you can count me as part of this group. Peter Charles Hoffer, The Historian’s Paradox: The Study of History in Our Time (New York: New York University Press, 2008) is an interesting place to get back into this habit. Hoffer sets out the parameters of a relevant philosophy of history, stating that it “must accommodate the imagination of ordinary people, while not abandoning the just requirements of analytical penetration and narrative depth. It must incorporate a due sense of humility, recognizing the legitimate place of paradox, irony, and uncertainty, and have a place for faith (though not necessarily in organized religion)” (p. 4). Hoffer, who confesses to writing this book at the end of his teaching career, is obviously trying to weave in and around all the battles and conflicts that have occurred in the past few decades concerning the use and abuse of historical evidence, facts and truth, audience and purpose (no surprise, since he is the author of one of the best books about fraud in historical research, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, and Fraud in American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis and Goodman). He is trying to shift through the complicated challenge of knowing that we can never be completely certain about the past, but that we need to make the effort in order to learn about our society and ourselves.

Hoffer, using logic as his framework, steadily works through his philosophy, and he offers a number of comments that should give pause to archivists and those who use archival sources. He considers the veracity of sources and the reliability of historical constructions: “historians know that words in statements they make, just like those in the statements made by people in the past, depend not on the logic of the statement itself for their meaning but in meanings that real people in real time ascribe to the words” (p. 12). This historian also suggests the issue of who creates the archives, reflecting on ideas from Derrida and other deconstructionists/postmodernists: “most deconstructionists were highly suspicious of government. The power of the state expressed in its archives, or its armies, extended to the power to fabricate history” (p. 150). Whatever one might think of this argument, such assertions have sensitized many archivists and users of archives to the issue of power expressed in even the most benign of records.

Most importantly, Hoffer provides a sense of what, why, and how archives represent the past, driving this point home in the end of the book. He suggests how little documentation most of us leave behind: “We are the product of history and we make history. Though most of us occupy only a small place in it, leaving behind us the scant documentary record of our aspirations and achievements (and our failures too), we are the stuff of history. It is that single, necessary fact that enables us to know about the past and demands that we seek out its truths” (p. 182). After a generation or so of historians and other scholars arguing about the flaws and bias in archival records, Hoffer suggests that it is safe now to go back to these sources: “What is the philosophy of history for our time? It is that it is safe to go back into the archives, safe to return to the classroom and the lecture hall, safe to sit at the word processor or to lift the pen over the yellow pad, safe to go to the library and take out a history book or buy one on Amazon.com. It is safe to teach and write and read and listen to history. Something happened out there, long ago, and we have the ability, if we have the faith, to learn what that something is” (p. 181). As archivists, we certainly must possess this kind of faith.

Deep in the Archive

2009-01-28T10:36:00.002-05:00

Ulrich Baer. “Deep in the Archive,” Aperture, Issue No. 193 (Winter 2008): 54-9.

Allen C. Benson
Doctoral Student, University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences

Why did Ulrich Baer, a comparative literature professor at NYU, choose to publish his essay on archives in Aperture, a premier photography journal? Baer is concerned with artists who engage with the archive to mobilize what Jacques Derrida termed “Mal d’archive.” While the archivist exercises the power of the document, “imposing order on contingency,” Baer argues that contingency must not be entirely ruled out. He introduces artists who turn to the archive as both “metaphor and treasure trove,” expanding the traditional role of the archive and the photograph beyond their original purpose. He highlights the idea that artists who redirect the photograph’s and archive’s originally stated intention raise the possibility of finding new life in the archive and the photograph.

Baer begins his essay by examining parallels between the archive and the photograph. Both, he claims, “extricate their subjects from the flux of time,” entombing them before they have died; both preserve knowledge and “transmit culturally and historically specific modes of remembrance.” Baer describes the archive as a place where we classify, label, and store things we do not want to forget, or that help us understand the present, or that we believe may tell us something about the future. There is a sense of melancholy surrounding the photograph and the archive because they represent countless records, objects and images that were not collected, but were lost.

Baer brings to light a less conspicuous aspect of these phenomena, the notion that there is room in the archive and the photograph for contingency, for discovering something new and for understanding later what may not be apparent today. He turns to the subject of art and how some artists in recent years have been drawn to the archive for their inspiration because of its melancholic nature and its collections of traumatic evidence. To paraphrase Derrida, there is a feverish desire for the archive, not so much to enter and use it, but to have it. Baer echoes his own experience as an archival researcher (briefly touched upon at the end of his essay), tumbling first into the traumatic past found in the letters between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, which he abandoned in favor of the “Rilkean archives of transcendence and joy.”

These introductory remarks serve as backdrop for the heart of Baer’s essay, which examines a handful of artists who engage with, in and around the archive. He explores their modes of engagement and how different these artists are from researchers who enter through the front door with proper IDs and research questions. Baer claims they “enter like a virus and bring the archive down from within.”

Baer begins by describing a modality he calls constructed, introducing the work of artists like Zoe Leonard who offer alternative ways of remembering history by highlighting the “fetish character of memory in postmodern culture.” Writer and director of “The Watermelon Woman,” Cheryl Dunye, conceived an imaginary black Hollywood actress and blues singer named Fae Richards, asking Leonard to fabricate The Fae Richards Photo Archive to help add realism to this fake documentary. Baer suggests this offers “an alternative way of remembering and archiving experiences that have not been officially retained or chronicled, or that have been deliberately excluded from official versions of collective history.”

Baer then discusses a modality he calls unremembered and introduces the work of artist Ilán Lieberman who carefully redraws miniature photographs of missing children that were published in Mexican newspapers. Photographs like these soon become ephemeral, either because searching proves futile or the child is found. By recreating the photographs, or what Baer calls “creating a virtual archives,” Lieberman is able to “ensure the possibility of testimony and recollection in an age that creates, uses, and discards images with equal ease.”

The last modality Baer describes is the redemption modality. Baer draws attention to artists who “refashion material from existing archives to tell new or alternative stories that may contradict or substantially revise a given collection’s original intentions.” He offers as an example the archived color slides of Jewish life in the Lodz Ghetto taken from a Nazi photographer’s perspective presenting a melancholic, “dominant narrative of hopelessness and victimization.” Baer explains how this intentional avoidance of contrary views has led some historians to regard the photograph as ‘a document of destruction.’ But the photograph can be something more. Polish filmmaker Dariusz Jabłoński reframed many of these same images in his film Fotoamator (1998), focusing on picture elements that the camera accidentally captured. For example, there is a photograph showing a German official inspecting a rack of ties “sold for survival by Jews deported to the ghetto from Western Europe.” Jabłoński zooms his lens in on one staged photo to lay bare the face of a boy who was not meant to be seen.

In Baer’s closing remarks he points to Freud’s conception of memory, claiming that memory is prone to these same distortions. He briefly touches upon Michel Foucault’s analysis of how facts and events shape personal and collective memory as much as the “symbolic order available to express, record, and recall them.” This, Baer concludes, is why contemporary artists working in and around the archive place their attention on “how events are shaped by different forms and modes of representation, and by different media.”

Ways of Writing

2009-01-24T17:58:00.001-05:00

David D. Hall, Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

This is a study about how manuscript and print existed side-by-side, both providing venues for publication. Through this study we learn about how the Colonists wrote in legal cases, religious practices, economic activities, and government. While Hall’s focus is on publication, archivists will learn something of the forms of manuscript creation in the seventeenth-century, which are not just the work of printers and booksellers but also that of copyists. There are descriptions of the blank pages in printed books being used for handwritten notes and almanacs printed with blank pages to allow individuals to record their own observations. There are also commentaries about writing suggesting needs for additional research falling right in line with what we would expect archivists to be able to contribute to; for example, Hall writes, “clerks and secretaries labored on behalf of colony and county governments preparing copies of statute laws, legal forms, proclamations, and the like, but we know next to nothing of how these men were trained or their work practices” (p. 34). Occasionally, we gain a glimpse of real archives, such as when Hall considers the work of William Bradford, noting that his famous “Of Plimmouth Plantation,” an account circulating in manuscript long before it was printed, “was part of an archive that also included a letter-book and originals or copies of letters he or other officials of the colony had received or sent during his many years of service in the colony government, most of the time as governor. Some of these letters were preserved in ‘Of Plimmouth Plantation,’ which had chapters that approximated a compilation of documents” (p. 74). Hall also examines the growing use of petitions to the colonial governments to settle disputes and air grievances, considering how the governments determined to accept what petitions, and noting how reluctant the governments were in these early years to create records of debate and dissent (although such a culture developed, buttressed by the printing and scribal production of other documents from sermons to literary expressions). Although Hall is a scholar of printing history, and his focus here is to examine the balance between different modes of textual dissemination, there is enough of a view into the archival impulse to warrant a reading by those interested in the history of archives and other forms of recordkeeping.

Personal Archives

2009-01-21T09:05:00.003-05:00

Here is information from my publisher of a new book about personal archives. I thought since I spend so much commenting on other books, I would at least provide some notice about this one.

Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections and Ruminations
Author: Richard J. Cox
Price: $35.00
Published: January 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9802004-7-8
Printed on acid-free paper
In the U.S.: Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble
In Canada: Amazon.ca
In the U.K.: Amazon.co.uk
Buy directly from us

In Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections and Ruminations, Richard J. Cox argues that personal archives might be assuming a new importance in society. As the technical means for creating, maintaining, and using documents are improving and becoming more cost-effective, individuals and families are seeking to preserve their old documents, especially traditional paper forms, as a connection to a past that may seem to be in risk of being of being swallowed up in the immense digital gadgetry in our Internet Age. There is a reversal to other technologies as well, such as leather bound journals and fountain pens, by some individuals resisting or protesting the increasingly digital world they reside in. Behind these very different approaches are similar impulses, and, these divergent paths raise identical questions about the role and purpose of traditional archives dating back two centuries and more. Personal recordkeeping raises a remarkable array of issues and concerns about records and their preservation, public or collective memory, the mission of professional records managers and archivists, the nature of the role of the institutional archives, and the function of the individual citizen as their own archivist. Archivists need to develop a new partnership with the public, and the public needs to learn from the archivists the essentials of preserving documentary materials. We are on the cusp of seeing a new kind of archival future, and whether this is good or bad depends on how well archivists equip citizen archivists.

Days at the Museum

2009-01-19T17:33:00.002-05:00

Reviewed by Bernadette Callery, Assistant Professor, University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences

Danny Danziger. Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Penguin, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-14-311426-0 (pb) $16.00

Editor and historian of science George Sarton notes in his 1950 “Notes on the reviewing of learned books,” that a reviewer should provide some background on the subject of a biography, asserting that “the reader cannot be expected to take any interest in the biography of a man of whom he knows nothing.” Danny Danziger was evidently of the same mind when he compiled the collection of soundbites called Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While the work is heavily weighted to transcriptions of comments from curators, including the outgoing director Philippe de Montebello, and trustees, we also learn what inspires and sustains the work of exhibition managers, editors, security chiefs, maintenance men, waitresses and the florist who does the flowers in the Great Hall.

Danziger is not the first to notice that museums create their own ecosystems and this kind of social anthropology is what gives interest to the ever-popular “behind the scenes” tours of museums. Unfortunately, what may have been intended as candor sometimes comes across as frivolous or sentimental, to the extent that one wonders if the subjects appreciated the fact that their remarks would be immortalized in print.

Predictably, and revealing my bias, the best sections are the mini-lectures from the curators, as they respond to the sort of questions they’re often asked about their favorite items in the collections, their academic training, and how they got their jobs at the MET. Given the treasures they represent, museum people are often interesting conversationalists, but, based on this sampling, the trajectory to their jobs would appear to be a bit more haphazard than the rest of us.

One irritating aspect of the design of the work is that while Danziger provides the job title of the person interviewed in the table of contents, that information is not repeated at the head of their chapter. Instead, we’re treated to a brief comment on the appearance or personality quirk of the subject. Danziger’s implicit message to those seeking positions in the museum community is that in addition to knowing a lot about your subject, you should also cultivate an attractive eccentricity.

For more detail on what at least one group of museum staff do, as well as why they do it, consider Registrars on Record: Essays on Museum Collections Management, edited by Mary Case and published in 1988 by the American Association of Museums. This collection includes registrar Carol O’Biso’s account of her involvement in the preparation of a major exhibition of Maori cultural artifacts, which is an example of museum storytelling at its best.

War Crimes

2009-01-18T16:58:00.001-05:00

In his New York Times column last week, “Forgive and Forget?”, Paul Krugman contends that the Obama administration should pursue an investigation into “possible crimes” by the Bush administration. “Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here,” Krugman writes. “It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.” This may be difficult because this administration worked hard to make the records and information documenting its activities inaccessible, as we are now finding out about with its management (apparently deliberate) with its electronic mail.

But this is not a posting about the Bush administration. Deborah Nelson, The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth About U.S. War Crimes (New York: Basic Books, 2008) is a study drawing on a secret war crimes archives maintained by the U.S. Army, where, for five years, “men culled investigation files, surveillance reports, press accounts, court-martial records, and congressional correspondence. Each month they summarized what they’d found and sent a memo up the chain of command” (p. 1). Nine thousand pages of documents were accumulated, and most of them are now declassified and at the National Archives. As Nelson writes, the “archive collection contained hundreds of sworn statements from soldiers and veterans who committed or witnessed rapes, torture, murders, massacres, and other illegal acts. There were letters from soldiers, statistical reports, and case summaries” (p. 3). Using these files, Nelson tracks down and interviews many of the participants in and witnesses to these events, demonstrating the power of records, even decades after the events they document.

The importance of managing and opening such records is very clear, and you can sense the frustration of the author as she presents to the survivors of these events the reports and other documents, only sometimes to be told that they do not remember any of what happened. At one point she states, the “Army Staff’s office had marshaled an unparalleled body of evidence on the commission of war crimes in Vietnam, clearly devoting hundreds of man hours and reams of paper to the task. Yet we were having a hard time finding anyone who remembered it with any clarity” (p. 170). The tie to the outgoing administration should be clear, as it has worked very hard to close down its records and information and to eliminate any accountability to the citizens of this nation. Nelson does not mince any words in making this assessment, writing early in her book, “The war ended without an accounting or acknowledgment of the war crimes they witnessed. Their retelling comes at an equally important time when, having failed to address the past, we’re destined to repeat it” (p. 5). This is one reason archives and archivists are so important.

Archives Bailouts

2009-01-11T19:37:00.003-05:00

In an article by Holland Cotter, “Museums Look Inward for Their Own Bailouts, New York Times, January 11, 2009, we gain a glimpse why many current archives students are nervous about future employment possibilities. Cotter describes the financial plight of many major museums. “Major art museums in Detroit, Newark and Brooklyn are prime examples” of the challenges these museums are facing. “Forged a century ago or more from idealism and dollars, they are American classics, monuments to Yankee can-do and, in the case of Detroit and Brooklyn, can-do-better-than-Europe. As latecomers to the culture game, American museums had to buy art fast and big, and they did. Their fabulous collections are our national treasures.” And many of them have archives and employ archivists. Cotter recounts how these venerable institutions have been trying to gain new audiences and, of course, new sources of funding. Cotter concludes his argument with this plea: “Sooner rather than later, given the state of the economy, he may not have any choice. For our older, underprivileged, underloved museums, this is the silver lining of hard times. These institutions have the art, the real thing. They have the space; if not much. With luck they have scholarly expertise and curatorial imagination, which they should value like gold. Now is the time, if ever there was one, to look within and bring forth what’s there. People will come. And bigger, richer, less adventurous museums will follow.”

Before anyone tosses in the towel, however, they should read Marjorie Garber’s engrossing Patronizing the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), examining government, corporate, university, and public support for the arts as well as the arts as a business or vocation. Garber, the prolific literary scholar, traces the changing support of the arts and the attitudes of artists, curators, museum trustees, and a variety of museum and cultural benefactors. There is considerable discussion about the transformation of the arts from an amateur pastime to professional status and positioning within the university (essentially making Garber’s book another contribution to the notion of professional education in the modern university, and, thus, additionally relevant to the archival field with its growing but still slippery hold in the academy). Her facile examination of the arts as compared to the sciences makes it doubly interesting for archivists. For example, Garber reflects, “I tend to resist the idea that art is ‘good for you,’ or ‘makes you a better person,’ or ‘improves society,’ or indeed does anything in this ethical-liberal realm. Art is. If it does, if it is performative, what it performs is itself, not some act of social adhesion. Nonetheless, I have often found myself saying, to colleagues who wonder what the place of the creative or ‘making’ arts is in a university setting, that art is what the scientists – and political scientists and diplomats – are saving the world for” (p. 152). Since so many graduate archival education programs are in library and information schools, with many of these changed into Information Schools, these are words and a strategy worth reflecting on (especially since archivists have often struggled how to describe the societal worth of their mission and the documents preserved as part of it).

For sure, given these volatile financial times, the archival community needs to reflect on how it defines and communicates its mission. I am not so sanguine as Cotter that people will come to archives and other cultural institutions, especially if the doors are locked and the lights turned off. Garber’s book, written before these troubles, is a book to read and mull over.

Unholy Business

2009-01-10T13:44:00.003-05:00

Over the past two years, I have commented on a number of books about the looting of antiquities and the ethical and legal challenges and troubles in the marketplace for art, including Peter Watson, The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities, from Italy’s Tomb Raiders to the World’s Greatest Museums (New York: Public Affairs, 2006); Lawrence Rothfield, ed., Antiquities Under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection After the Iraq War (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2008); Michael J. Bazyler and Roger P. Alford, eds., Holocaust Restitution: Perspectives on the Litigation and Its Legacy (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Cynthia Saltzman, Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures 1880-World War I (New York: Viking, 2008); James Cuno, Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Don Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Christopher Hitchens, The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification (London: Verso, 2008). My hope in reading such studies is to, first, learn what role archives and records (and the professionals who manage them) play in such situations, and, second, what archivists can learn about the implications of these cases on their own collections and collecting. Generally, we don’t learn a lot about the roles of archives and archivists, but we certainly can gain an understanding about how and why archival documents are valued, traded, and acquired.

Nina Burleigh, Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed, and Forgery in the Holy Land (New York: Smithsonian Books, 2008) is a lively account of the forged James Ossuary, purported to be the first direct physical evidence of Jesus Christ (James being the brother of Jesus). Burleigh, in analyzing this case, reveals the underbelly of the market in ancient relics, the role of religion and nationalism in this market, and, of course, provides another study in the age-old art of forgery and the reasons why forgery seems ever to be with us. She ends the book with this assessment of the nature of forgery: “The forger or forgers had more personal motives than national pride or blind faith. Greed was part of it, surely, but something else was at work too. Human life is finite, while history is, if not eternal, relatively so. To create bits of the ancient past is to become, perhaps, something more than mortal. For some of those who can, it might be impossible to resist the temptation to sneak a tiny yet indelible fingerprint onto the vast canvas of yesteryear, and forge a personal link with an ancient temple priest or pharaoh, before our short time on earth comes to an end” (p. 256). Other studies of forgery have come to similar conclusions about its motivations.

There isn’t much in the book about the role of archives or records, although occasionally we catch a glimpse of how such evidence is useful. A description of the role of an expert in ancient Semitic epigraphy reveals her reliance on her own diaries: “Ada is the sort of woman who keeps detailed records of her days in small annual diaries. At the end of each year, she tucks them – filled with her tiny Hebrew script, tied with a white ribbon – into a cardboard box, and these boxes are now the piled-up story of her years. Opening a box, she easily found the diaries she needed, because they bristled with yellow Post-it notes, marking the pages she had referred to during interviews with the police and then at the court. She proceeded to leaf through each page, reading from right to left, entries highlighted with pink highlighter” (p. 4). There are allusions to the gathering of other evidence, comparisons of ancient texts and the materials used in the creation of ancient sources, and so forth. However, it is in such references to the Semitic expert’s diaries that we see the manner in which records are created and used even by those who are both fabricating antiquities and assessing their veracity.

While Burleigh examines in detail one case about how the market for antiquities creates the opportunities for forgers to operate, Sharon Waxman, Loot: The Battle Over Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World (New York: Times Books, 2008) provides a sweeping view of the race to acquire objects extracted illegally from archaeological sites and stolen from museums and private collections. Waxman asserts right from the start that this illicit trade is the result of a complex set of issues regarding national identities. While in the past European colonizers carried off artworks and archaeological artifacts to demonstrate their power or to develop theories of cultural domination, today “once-colonized nations seek to stand on their own, the countries once denuded of their past seek to assert their independent identities through the objects that tie them to it. The demand for restitution is a way to reclaim history, to assert a moral imperative over those who were once overlords. Those countries still in the shadow of more powerful empires seek to claim the symbols of antiquity and colonialism to burnish their own national mythmaking” (p. 4).

Waxman’s book is a complete dialogue about the variety of perspectives about the role of museums, the restitution of art and archaeological materials, the laws and nature of the marketplace influencing what happens with these ancient treasures, and the sometimes bizarre stories and personalities that emerge in these debates. She ranges over cases in Egypt, France, Greece, Turkey, Italy, England, and the United States, and, along the way, Waxman has some critical things to say about the role of museums and their curators and benefactors in creating an environment where the international looting is encouraged. Some of the evidence about the difficulties in the antiquities trade concerns the reluctance of both cultural institutions and governments to open their records that ought to document the provenance of the acquisition of the artifacts. Waxman states, “There is no simple way to track the source of these acquisitions or tally their provenances, no database for the public to consult. In the age of computers, this seems a strange lapse of information and one that denies the public the benefit of transparency” (p. 220).

Contemporary archivists who have become well versed in the role of power in the creation of records and the establishment and maintenance of archives will find it interesting to read about the role of power in the museum world in Waxman’s book. “So while humanism may indeed have motivated the founding notion of the museum,” Waxman reflects, “there were other forces at play in the eighteenth century, namely a notion of culture that was not so much universalist as imperialist. In this view, the creation of Western museums like the British Museum – whatever the official philosophy – was actually informed by power, by empires that felt entitled to occupy distant lands and claim their cultural patrimony along with their natural resources, to take the symbols of ancient civilizations from elsewhere and fill their own museums with trophies that confirmed their power in the world” (p. 268). The point she makes is that in the present debates about the ownership, display, and research of the remains of the ancient world, it is difficult to separate the contemporary roles of the museums from their origins. Waxman urges the museums to be up front about their past activities: “The history of plunder and appropriation must be acknowledged and aired for the public to understand the true origins of these great works of antiquity. No museum can legitimately claim to be a custodian of history if it ignores the history of its own objects for reasons of personal convenience” (p. 373). Such sentiments apply equally to archives today as museums.

Jefferson as Architect

2008-12-31T10:46:00.003-05:00

From time to time, I have lamented that you cannot find popular accounts of archives and archivists in your typical bookstore, while descriptions of museums and libraries and the professionals staffing them seem to abound. However, there is a small growing body of publications featuring facsimiles of archival documents and commentaries on their value with a broad target audience in mind.

Chuck Wills, Thomas Jefferson Architect: The Interactive Portfolio (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2008) is the most recent example of such a publication. Beautifully illustrated with modern and vintage images of Jefferson’s architecture and architectural influences and including many facsimiles of gardening notes, architectural sketches, and letters (with transcriptions provided in an appendix), Wills’s book enables the reader to gain a feel for historical documentation.

The readers of this publication also learn a little about how archival sources were created and the role they play in understanding the past. Wills notes that Jefferson’s prowess as an architect became known when Sidney Fiske Kimball and his wife, Marie Goebel Kimball, discovered a set of Jefferson architectural records at the Massachusetts Historical Society and Fiske Kimball subsequently published a book about this in 1916. Wills also comments on the very detailed architectural drawings Jefferson created and maintained. “This reflected another dimension of his personality; in modern terms, Jefferson was obsessive-compulsive,” Wills surmises. “From youth until old age he obsessively recorded in writing everything from crop yields to the daily weather to the contents of his library, wine cellar, and everything in between” (p. 25).

This same publisher also produced Margo Stipe, Frank Lloyd Wright: The Interactive Portfolio; Rare Removable Treasures, Hand-Drawn Sketches, Original Letters, and More from the Official Archives (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2004), described in this blog on February 5, 2007; both are worth being in any archivist’s library.

From Russia With Love

2008-12-29T11:30:00.002-05:00

It is rare that we get an insider’s view of negotiations for previously closed archives or the challenges of using archival materials in former totalitarian regimes. Jonathan Brent, Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia (New York: Atlas and Co., 2008) provides a wonderfully detailed portrait of Yale University Press’s project of publishing from the Soviet archives, leading to permission to publish from Stalin’s own personal archives (the first volume was published in 1995, The Secret World of American Communism). Brent chronicles his efforts since 1992 to start the Annals of Communism project, and his description is almost novel like, recreating scenes, encounters, and conversations to break down barriers for access to the Central Party Archive and other archives in Russia.

We learn about the vast archives, scattered about country, Yale’s idea that it “would sponsor teams of researchers under the direction of both an American and a Russian scholar to go into the archives and find all the materials thought relevant to a particular topic. These would then be sifted through for the most important documents. Of the thousands so chosen, perhaps a hundred would be published in any given volume. Each document would then be carefully annotated and set in its historical context, and the whole would be framed with an essay on Soviet history by a noted scholar” (p. 49). Brent contends that Yale’s project was first and foremost a scholarly one, as they could only guess sales ranging from a few hundred to 10,000 copies for various volumes; he argues that this was always a project more important than any money ultimately gained. The story is an engrossing one as additional competitors from other presses and other nations emerged, and many important documents never before seen came to light.

This book is especially useful for revealing how archivists worked under Soviet regime, often keeping documents under wraps and never talking or writing about them. Even in 1998 when Brent proposed a textbook on Soviet history using the documents, he was told that this would not be possible: “To write a textbook . . . meant to have some kind of unifying narrative with an underlying conception. A point of view. No one. . . would undertake such a daunting and dangerous task at the present time. To offer a unified interpretation of the Soviet period meant, first, that you wished to know the truth, and second, that you had the courage to tell it” (p. 213). Brent also comments on the earlier use of various archives, in one case that of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute: “Throughout the turmoil of the 1930s and 1940s, the archive was used primarily to change the picture of the past. The archivists, who were intent on protecting an accurate historical record, lost the struggle with the politicians, who wanted to manipulate it. Eventually, all the archivists were chosen by the Central Committee. Much material was kept secret, even from most of the archivists . . . “ (p. 298).

We learn about payments, rituals, rights, negotiating deals, cutting across immense cultural differences, efforts to be both supportive of the university press and archives, and the remarkably complicated issues governing access to the Russian archives. We also learn about the systematic elimination of Russia’s intelligentsia, artists, and political activities, revealing the potential power of archival sources once opened.

Brent’s book also raises considerable questions about the nature of how memory and history function in such a closed society, and even how historical sources manage to survive. Two other recently published books about Russia provide some clues about this. Helen Goscilo and Stephen M. Norris, eds., Preserving Petersburg: History, Memory, Nostalgia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008) describes how this city came to be seen as a museum to be preserved, and how it managed to survive the tumultuous events of the twentieth century. William Craft Brumfield observes that the architecture in this city “remains the clearest statement of purpose that Imperial Russia ever made: to measure, to build, to impose order at any cost” (p. 1), leading one to wonder how it survived through the Soviet era. The city has been constantly reworked, remapped, and reinvented, but it is still there. One of this volume’s essayists (Julie Buckler) also connects together the preservationist efforts with the role of archives: “Petersburg proves the counterintuitive but ancient rule that writing, a seemingly ephemeral medium, offers the most reliable material for building an enduring monument to the past. Still, all of this writing about imperial Petersburg also requires the physical resources of the city for its continued preservation in libraries, museums, and archives” (p. 40). Another recent publication provides some additional insights into the Russian archival tradition. Sean McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) provides an analysis of how the Bolsheviks, in their five years of civil war, managed to prevail, basically by looting the government and people of art, precious metals, and bank accounts, often leaving behind careful inventories of the art and other objects taken and sold. McMeekin notes how the Nazis looting of Europe is so well-known, but what happened in Russian is not well-known at all, attributing this to the fact that critical archival sources concerning Russia have only been known since 1991, whereas those related to Nazis have been known and used since 1945.

Truth, Facts, and Stories

2008-12-27T09:34:00.002-05:00

There was a time when archivists seemed to pay attention to new treatises on historical method and the nature of evidence, but, judging by the current nature of archival literature, that day has passed. Where we once used to find regularly essays on this topic, often as review essays, now seems filled with articles on archival method and practice. This shift may be the result of historians, sociologists, and other scholars beginning to write about archives or the archive in deep and meaningful ways outside of the mainstream archival literature. However, books keep appearing on the nature of historical evidence that archivists ought to read. Two new books on the use of personal narratives, or memoirs, suggest the value of such reading, and since archives are filled with diaries, journals, and memoirs these are worthy of some attention by archivists.

Jennifer Jensen Wallach, “Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact’: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008) is a focused effort to explore the value of memoirs as important historical sources, arguing that “life writing has the potential to enrich our historical understanding in ways that cannot be replicated in any other single source material” (p. 4). Wallach, a historian, explains how these sources are both historical and literary, and therein is where we can discover their usefulness, providing a different window into the past. Wallach believes that “skillfully written memoirs, which were designed to be not only historical documents but also works of art, are uniquely able to capture the felt experience of living in history” (p. 10). Such an idea connects with other recent ideas about capturing aspects of the past not always captured in traditional sources and, as a result, often ignored by historians – such as sound and other sensory experiences.

Wallach acknowledges that uncovering the past is a difficult process, and a subjective one, as are memoirs as evidence of the past. “When historians analyze the testimony of historical witnesses (regardless of the form these testaments take, whether published memoirs, private diaries, or oral history interviews),” she muses, “they must try to ascertain the truthfulness of their informants and also must evaluate the reliability of their informants; memory. Memoir is at the crossroads of memory and history, and it contains elements of both” (p. 30). And Wallach suggests that comprehending the value of memoirs depends on comparing them to other documentary sources: “The way the past is remembered is often at odds with what really happened. It is the job of the historian, or the scholar of the historical study of memoirs, to compare memoirs and other historical documents in order to compose as complete and as verifiable a depiction of a historical moment as possible” (pp. 33-34).

As Wallach stresses that memoirs are “grounded in real people, places, and things” (p. 50), she keeps her study focused on six memoirists reflecting on one historical case. She provides interesting case studies on African Americans and White Americans reflecting on the Jim Crow era – Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Willie Morris, Lillian Smith, and William Alexander Percy. In some of these cases, Wallach considers how the memoirs connect to other documentary sources; considering Percy’s memoir, Wallach writes, “it seems likely that a historian could get a better feel for what happened on Percy’s plantation by studying plantation records than by reading Percy’s self-interested accounts. Instead, the historical study of memoirs attempts to reveal the emotional experience of the individual actor” (p. 125). For archivists, administering and describing their holdings, this should suggest that what they hold is but one part of a larger documentary universe necessary for describing, and sometimes understanding, the past.

Another volume -- Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett, Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008) – brings an interdisciplinary perspective, with two sociologists (Pierce, Laslett) and a historian (Maynes), on the matter of personal narratives as historical evidence. These scholars provide a good discussion of various theoretical perspectives on the use of personal narratives, emphasizing how such narratives are useful for understanding individual agency and how individuals view themselves in social context and over time.

These authors note how often personal narratives are written in reaction to events of the time, and why they are so useful, if used carefully, for providing insights into understanding these events. “The value of personal narrative analyses lies in their potential to see people and their actions as both individual and social,” they write, “and to understand human lives as governed simultaneously according to the dynamics and temporalities of the individual life course and of collective histories” (p. 69). They also evaluate different forms of personal narratives, each offering different kinds of evidence, namely oral histories, autobiographies and memoirs, letters, dairies, and journals.

With the interdisciplinary view these authors collaborate on, their volume is especially useful in sorting out the relationship of analysts with personal narratives. They argue, “The main power that life history narrators have in the research relationship is the power to talk or write about their lives, or to remain silent; to reveal truths as they see them, or to distort or lie about them. Their interest, if they are at all inclined to tell a life story, is to have theirs be the version of history preserved, and told to a well-chosen, relatively influential, or well-connected listener or other selected audience” (p. 119). This requires careful use of these narratives in reconstructing past events and in interpreting these events. This prompts the authors to stress the challenges of personal narrative evidence: “It is by nature subjective and highly personal. We have argued that every life story is unique but also that life stories, whatever their form, can only be understood in light of their social, cultural, and historical context. Moreover, although it is invaluable for many analytic purposes, personal narrative evidence is always to some extent incomplete, open-ended, and contingent, which presents a challenge in the face of the expectations of many readers in audiences schooled in the social sciences” (p. 127). Such an assessment also could be made all archival materials in general.

Archivists working in appraising and subsequently describing documents such as diaries, journals, and memoirs will find these volumes useful in understanding how such sources are employed by various kinds of researchers. Archivists might also reflect a bit on how they describe such materials. While archivists are careful to follow descriptive standards and to be sensitive to archival principles such as provenance, they might also consider utilizing various theoretical frameworks in describing the nature and contents of these sources. This might highlight the potential value of such sources better than mere discussion of their content, especially if it could be done online with digitized portions of their texts as examples.

What Are Archives?

2008-12-21T15:45:00.002-05:00

If one wanted to read deeply into the meaning of archives, or the archive, the interested observer would delve into philosophy, cultural studies, literary studies, and other fields and their literature. Writings by archivists, while containing some speculation about such an issue, tended to focus on the pragmatic. A new book, emerging from within the archives community in the United Kingdom, proposes to rectify this.

Louise Craven, ed., What Are Archives? Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives: A Reader (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2008) is divided into four themes: continuity and change in the archival paradigm; impact of technology; impact of community archives; and archival use and users. Its contributors include librarians, archivists (from the National Archives, universities), students (computer science), and faculty (archives), originally gathered at a meeting of the Society of Archivists in 2006. The contributors address a number of extremely interesting issues, such as how archivists need to consider the intersection between paper and electronic records, a relationship raising questions about archival education and skills or the challenges to traditional archival principles and practices. There is also evidence of postmodernist perspectives, revealing that documents are more than just texts sitting in archives waiting to be used or that they are static entities (they are, rather uncertain and malleable texts).

The various contributors provide some interesting insights into the nature of archives. Andrew Prescott writes, “If we understand the limitations of the archive, we get a clearer and sharper perception of the superficiality of our own engagement of the past,” challenging the notion that gaining such understanding is merely the matter of gathering documentary materials in places called archives (p. 48). There are calls to expand principles out to personal papers, from their primary focus on organizational and administrative records. There are many comments on the impact of social computing on archival sources and work. Caroline Williams notes, “The development of user-generated finding aids using Web 2.0 social software and wikis means that a whole new generation of personal records is being created well beyond the traditional means of managing them” (p. 64). Michael Moss argues that there is “no contradiction between the static and dynamic perceptions of the document. They complement one another in a perpetual hermeneutic spiral.” The archives “is a place of ‘dreams’, of re-enactment for both the user and the archivist (curator), who together always are engaged either passively or actively in the process of refiguration that is never ending” (p. 83).

Such issues suggest that archivists must rethink their most basic assumptions about their work and mission. Andrew Flinn adds, “It is clear that involvement with both digital archives and with community or otherwise marginal or transitory campaigning groups fundamentally challenge the notion that the archivist can afford to be merely a passive recipient of these records.” Flinn continues, “many of these networks and groups will be organizing, mobilizing and perhaps actively campaigning not just in the real world and not just by relatively fixed and well-understood digital forms such as e-mail, websites and word-processed documents but also via dynamic and evolving media such as instant messaging, social networking sites, wikis, blogs and other virtual, participatory and collaborative mediums. The skills and expertise required by the archivist working with groups to capture and understand these interactions will have to be significantly enhanced”(p. 123).

The increasing reliance by archivists in using the Web to build virtual repositories for access to archival materials also suggests some issues for archivists to contend with. Andrea Johnson writes, “The problem of contextual retrieval in a digital archive environment remains relatively unexplored” (p. 147). She continues, “Whilst collecting the behaviors of digital users it became evident that areas such as use of language, the use of technology, the hierarchical arrangement of the archive and the archival expertise of the archivist play a key role in supporting archive users. These areas do not neatly transfer over into the digital environment, where the problem is further compounded by deep data structures and an innate difficulty in understanding the representational relationship between the surrogate and the primary source” (p. 153).

What Are Archives? provides a lot of stimulating reading, but it doesn’t come close to answering the question (despite a serious effort by Craven to tie together the essays and their themes). Rather, reflecting the origin of the book in a conference, it teases us with a lot of intriguing questions and reflections – and that merits anyone interested in such a question reading the book.

Digital Curation

2008-12-10T20:32:00.001-05:00

Digital curation has become a hot topic, just as digital libraries had become a decade or so ago. I witnessed this again, attending the 4th International Digital Curation Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland on December 2-3, 2008, with the theme “Radical Sharing: Transforming Science?”, my third digital curation conference in the past year and a half (still making me a novice in this area). The conference featured keynote addresses by David Porteous about the human genome project and Martin Lewis about university libraries in the UK data curation landscape, many posters and demonstrations, and presentations about various scientific and other projects utilizing or based upon digital data, and an interesting paper by Manjula Patel and Alexander Bell on strategies for the curation of CAD engineering models (winner of the best peer-reviewed paper in the conference. There was also an International Data Curation Education Action (IDEA) Working Group meeting held the day after the conference on December 4th. This day consisted of a number of presentations intended to illuminate aspects of digital curation education issues and agendas, although there were too many presentations reducing the opportunity for those attending from all over the world to discuss openly the issues (what discussion there was suggested a number of ongoing terminological and conceptual issues about what digital curation actually represents).

Archivists attending the conference were not disappointed to hear presentations. There allusions to archival theories, principles, and projects – such as diplomatics and InterPARES . As often happens, the most interesting issues tend to be non-technical. MacKenzie Smith, considering architectural #D CAD models, states, “An issue still to be resolved is the appropriate intellectual property rights for architecture collections. Since the material is all digital, standard gift agreements used by archives aren’t entirely appropriate – there is no need for exclusive copyright transfer to the archive, a royalty-free, non-exclusive license to archive, preserve, and disseminate the collection is sufficient. But since these collections often include highly sensitive business records there is an understandable reluctance by the architects to allow the material to be made publicly available. In the past, embargoing these materials for decades would have been acceptable practice, but given the effort involved in accessioning and ingesting digital collections (and preserving them for even a decade) the inability to disseminate the collection is a concern for libraries and archives. We are exploring licensing options with architects and their professional organizations (e.g. the American Institute of Architects) to determine what middle ground is acceptable to both creator and archive for the long term.” Papers on topics such as climate and weather data curation, publication of research data, and research data management all raised interesting archival issues.

Here is an example of how these individual papers concern themselves with archival issues. Martin Halbert, in a paper on the MetaArchive Cooperative, writes, “CMOs [cultural memory organizations] hold virtually innumerable archives of idiosyncratic material that are rapidly being digitized in local initiatives. This digital content has important long-term value for both research and cultural identity purposes. But CMO professionals frequently lack effective’, scalable DP infrastructures. This lack of access to effective means for long term preservation of digital content is aggravated by a lack of consensus on DP issues and professional roles and responsibilities.” “By “cultural memory organizations,” Halbert means ”small to medium-sized libraries, archives, museums, and historical associations, and not enormous national agencies like the US Library of Congress or the British Library.” Halbert is describing a cooperative providing a “model for an incorporated nonprofit organization of research libraries created as part of the U.S. National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program that has established an effective model for shared distributed digital preservation infrastructures development.” Stephen Abrams, Patricia Cruse, and John Kunze, in their paper “Preservation Is Not a Place,” also provide a glimpse into the future of archives, nothing, “Rather than relying on a conceptually monolithic system as a locus, curation outcomes will be the product of loosely-coupled, independent, distributed services.” In another presentation Greg Janée and James Frew argue that “resurrection is more likely than immortality,” continuing, “Preservation must be cheap and easy. If we are to preserve digital information on a large scale, then the burden on providers must be small, preservation infrastructure must be flexible and adaptable, and multiple levels of preservation effort must be defined to accommodate varying archive resources. Preservation may be (and may often need to be) as minimal as crawling a website, saving the harvested files, and reflecting them back to the Web. This approach by itself does not guarantee that the archived information will remain usable by contemporary applications over time, but by capturing the contextual semantics of the harvested files, we can at least preserve the possibility of resurrecting full use of the information at any point in the future, assuming sufficient desire and resources.” Such comments seem to provide a bridge between new notions of digital preservation and more traditional forms of archival work.

These conferences, with some advocating that digital curation is a new profession, also suggest that there is a lot of terminological confusion. Archival words and concepts are used, but they are not always used in a commanding or clear fashion. Perhaps this suggests that there is some sort of new discipline beginning to emerge. Some of the archivists in attendance, myself included, raised questions about such issues, but others expressed frustration with what they deemed to be nit picking and avoidance of larger and more important issues. By coincidence, when I returned from the conference the current issue of the American Archivist was waiting for me with an article by Adrian Cunningham, “Digital Curation/Digital Archiving: A View from the National Archives of Australia,” raising questions from the archival perspective about the digital curation movement. Cunningham deftly argues that while there are positive aspects of the more broadly defined digital curation arena, we also must be careful not to jettison basic archival concerns and principles. Obviously, we have some great debates and interesting collaborative efforts ahead.

Playing with Marbles

2008-12-07T12:33:00.003-05:00

The reissue of Christopher Hitchens’s book about the fate of the Parthenon (widely known as the Elgin) Marbles is also a reminder of how cultural heritage and archives intersect or mimic each other. In The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification (London: Verso, 2008), there are, at least, several issues where we can discern this relationship.

We see hints of the archival concept of provenance, as Nadine Gordimer in her introduction to the 2008 edition, writes that the Marbles belong in Athens since “they are the DNA, in art, of the people of Greece. If they also belong, as they do, to all of us who have inherited such evidence of human creativity as development, and there is no site in our world where the direct experience of seeing them is achievable for everyone, where else should they be but where they were created?” (p. viii). Gordimer also describes the Marbles as a kind of document: “The ‘Elgin’ marbles are sections, chapters in stone, excised from a marvel, narrative brutally interrupted, some isolated in the British Museum, others, incomplete in their sequence, in their rightful place in Athens” (p. ix). Robert Browning, in an essay in the volume, also underscores such issues: “The Parthenon has been there for a long time, and it will be there long after the writer and the reader of these words have moldered to dust and their very names are forgotten. The building and its sculptures were conceived and executed together. They will be better understood and appreciated if they can be seen together” (p. 15).

Hitchens also draws attention to the cost of the great symbolism represented by the Parthenon and its sculptures: “A pagan shrine, a church, a mosque, an arms dump, a monument to Nazi profanity and a target for promiscuous collectors of all kinds . . . . It is a wonder that the Parthenon still stands. But none of its vicissitudes or mutilations has altered its essential character as the great surviving testimony of the Periclean age. This makes it precious to the Greeks, but also to human civilization, however considered. Of the various depredations that the building has endured, only one can be put right – and that one imperfectly” (p. 23). This suggests why it is so common that archives, libraries, museums, and historic sites are targeted for both destruction and preservation in times of warfare and civil strife.

In another interesting analysis about just how well the British Museum has taken care of the Marbles, considering some cleaning done in the late 1930s inflicting more damage than care, Hitchens offers this: “The Museum never acknowledged publicly what had occurred, and the matter was stonewalled at Question Time in the House of Commons. But there is a tantalizing reference in the Public Record Office at Kew to a Foreign Office file labeled ‘Treatment of Elgin Marbles use of copper wire brushes to clean the marbles thus damaging the surface’. The file itself, like so many interesting entries in the PRO, has been destroyed” (p. 88). The role of archival sources for evidence and accountability is evident in this statement.

Lincoln and the Creation of Archives

2008-12-06T16:58:00.001-05:00

A veritable industry on Abraham Lincoln is in full swing once again. Fred Kaplan, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer (New York: Harper, 2008) is an interesting addition to the literature, with some comments about Lincoln’s writing that has some insights in the creation of his archival corpus. Kaplan indicates that, for Lincoln, “language mattered because he needed it to work through what seemed to him real, to separate fact from falsehood. It mattered even more because he began to feel that only through writing and speech could be understand the world. He needed language as the tool by which knowledge was acquired and communicated. Also, he took satisfaction in how language worked and in the pleasure of words and rhythms” (p. 31). Her we have some understanding of the motivation guiding Lincoln in his correspondence, speech writing, and other writing. Later, Kaplan suggests that “Lincoln had no doubt that the written word was superior to the spoken: a text provided the advantage of stale portability and unalterable futurity” (p.134). And, we certainly have seen how this has worked out as Lincoln added a number of key texts to the American documentary canon.

In his study, Kaplan captures something of Lincoln’s skills as a storyteller, considers his literary aspirations, provides some close examinations of Lincoln’s letters as literary expositions, and describes how Lincoln carried a notebook on the campaign trail, using it to manage his thoughts and speeches (the notebook was later lost). Other aspects of the importance of documents in Lincoln’s life and career are commented on. Lincoln was elected captain of the volunteer militia company in the Black Hawk war, because, “Unlike most, he could read and write and fill out forms, and he stood taller on the ground and in the saddle than anyone else” (p. 55). Lincoln wrote a text against the divinity of scriptures. “Testimony varies as to whether it was an essay or a pamphlet-length argument. Samuel Hill and some of Lincoln’s other friends, thinking it imprudent for a rising politician to publish such views, convinced him to destroy, or forced the destruction of, the manuscript” (p. 71). There is even an extended description of an 1837 legal case, about the veracity of some deeds, where it appears Lincoln manipulated evidence to win the case (pp. 94-98).

Remix

2008-11-27T12:57:00.002-05:00

Most archivists understand that intellectual property has become a real battleground for them, where they engage in a war where it is sometimes difficult to ascertain just who the enemy is and what the objective may be. Lawrence Lessig, who has produced some of the most compelling examinations of the copyright battles, writes in his most recent work, “Copyright is, in my view at least, critically important to s healthy culture. Properly balanced, it is essential to inspiring certain forms of creativity. Without it, we would have a poorer culture. With it, at least properly balanced, we create the incentives to produce great new works that otherwise would not be produced” (Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy [New York: Penguin Press, 2008], p. xvi). Since archivists certainly desire for their materials to be used effectively by scholars and citizens alike to contribute to our understanding of the past and an enrichment of our culture, it is important for them to read and reflect on the insights of commentators such as Lessig.

Lessig describes, in sufficient detail and his easily readable style, the impact of the digital technologies on popular culture, noting how the main driver has come to be access, not necessarily free, but access enabling new forms of use in ways we could not imagine a generation or two ago. Lessig believes everything will be on the Web, enabling all kinds of new and innovative remixing, as well as generating new kinds of challenges regarding intellectual property. Everyone can have greater access to more information and material than ever before, while also potentially increasing control over how this stuff can be used. Some of Lessig’s commentary will be of interest to archivists, noting that digital technologies make it possible to preserve nearly everything, although he notes that the technical costs are “trivial” while the “legal costs . . . are increasingly prohibitive” (p. 262). Archivists always should read Lessig’s work on intellectual property, and try to imagine how to relate his ides to their own work.

Where's Waldo?

2008-11-26T10:57:00.002-05:00

I was requested by the Society of American Archivists to post this announcement about this book award. It certainly seems appropriate for this blog. Having won this award three times, it certainly means something to me.

Call for Nominations: 2009 Waldo Gifford Leland Award

Have you read a great new book about archives? Have you come across an exceptional finding aid for a newly-processed archival or manuscript collection? Have you encountered a documentary publication that is head and shoulders above the rest? Has a web publication really stood out to you?

If you have, please consider nominating it for the Waldo Gifford Leland Award.

The annual Leland Award – a cash prize and certificate – encourages and rewards “writing of superior excellence and usefulness in the field of archival history, theory, and practice.” The Leland Award subcommittee of the Society of American Archivists invites you to nominate a monograph, finding aid, or documentary publication published in North America in 2008 for this year’s recognition. (Please note: periodicals are not eligible.) Established in 1959, the award honors American archival pioneer Waldo Gifford Leland, president of the Society of American Archivists in the 1940s and one of the driving forces behind the founding of the National Archives.

Nomination forms, a list of previous winners, and more information is at http://www.archivists.org/governance/handbook/section12-leland.asp. The deadline for applications is February 28, 2009.

Please help us to recognize the best in our profession!

Book It

2008-11-19T19:49:00.006-05:00

Me reading my first archives manual.

Every day, someone writes a prediction about the demise of the printed book. Books, since their inception, have generated lots of attention. And, even today in their supposed twilight years, many different views about books and their role in society appear to challenge us to rethink what they mean to us. Roger Mummert, "Handle This Book! Curators Put Rare Texts in 18-Year-Old Hands," New York Times, November 2, 2008, in the special education supplement, writes about the emergence of new courses about the history of books and printing for undergraduates. Mummert notes, "Courses on the history of the book itself have grown along with the ascendancy of electronic information. Students today often blindly grant authority to the online world. Curators want to reconnect them with original sources and teach them to question those sources" (p. 30). So, maybe there is hope for the printed book.

Most of what I discuss on this blog, about archives, are recently published books. I love books. I read them, buy them, write in them, and collect them. I surround my self with them. It seems appropriate to reflect on some varying views about the book and its value in our society. The first book described reminds us that books have long been critical for intellectual activity and for documenting it. The second book briefly reviewed provides a remarkably informative account of scholarly publishing by presenting the history of one university press. Then there are two books dealing with influence of books as seen in efforts to censor and destroy them.

Kevin J. Hayes, The Mind of a Patriot: Patrick Henry and the World of Ideas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008) is an effort to put to rest the long-standing notion (perpetuated by Jefferson’s characterization of him) that Henry was a great orator but not a particularly well-read individual. Hayes argues that Henry had a good library of a couple of volumes, that he borrowed books as needed from friends, and that he took advantage of sojourns to places like Philadelphia to make use of lending libraries. Henry read deeply, especially to improve his oratorical skills.

Hayes’s depiction of Henry also provides insights into the role of books in American society in the eighteenth century. He suggests that “books often functioned as social capital. The acts of loaning and borrowing books greatly strengthened bonds between friends – assuming, of course, that they returned the books they borrowed” (p. 7). Some might argue that access to the World Wide Web has subsumed this function, but I doubt that those who continue to buy printed books and build personal libraries would agree with such an assessment. Hayes also depicts Henry as a reflective reader, someone who made “his books a part of his mind. Once he fully internalized what the books had to tell him, their importance as material objects waned. Henry made no specific provisions for his library in his will: the collection was gradually broken up and dispersed. Only a few books now survive with evidence of his ownership” (p. 106). Today, some argue that we don’t do such reading, but rather we search, scroll, and surf looking for bits of information. However, I suspect that there are many who are building personal libraries, because they like books as material objects or because they find them immensely convenient objects to be consulted in their print form with their indexes and even with whatever idiosyncratic arrangement scheme we have employed.

Nicholas A. Basbanes, a frequent commentator on the history of books and book collecting, has recently published A World of Letters: Yale University Press, 1908-2008 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Basbane reviews the various arguments regarding the decline of university presses, but offers in the case of Yale the story (and Basbanes is good at telling stories) of one that has been successful for a long time. Basbanes had access to the publisher’s archives, interviewed many of the publisher’s staff and prominent authors, and sat in on many of the board meetings. He provides commentary on important books, award winners, surprising successes, and the various strategies that the Yale press has used to be financially solvent and to have an enduring influence on scholarship. Since Yale has been the publisher of a number of important documentary editions (Benjamin Franklin, Horace Walpole, and Russian archives are examples), there are many references to archival materials and their publication.

Books often generate outrage, provoking censorship movements, revealing much about the attitudes of a particular time. Rick Wartzman, Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Public Affairs, 2008) provides a rich accounting of the efforts in Kern County, California to ban Steinbeck’s novel. Wartzman sets the efforts to ban the book in their historical, social, political, and economic contexts. We learn about how Steinbeck gathered his data for the writing of the novel, the various forces of the farm owners and political and labor organizations, the numerous books written to counter Steinbeck’s depiction of the refugees from the Dust Bowl, the controversies besetting the making of the John Ford film version, and how the howling about the Steinbeck book compares to other controversial books (such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin). There has been a lot written about censorship and book banning, but none quite as up close and personal as Wartzman’s study. His is not a book defending or critiquing such efforts; Obscene in the Extreme studies the personalities involved and the era and seeks to understand why there was such an outcry about this particular novel, now considered a masterpiece.

Fernando Báez, director of Venezuela’s National Library, gives us a sweeping history of book destruction in his A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq, translated by Alfred MacAdam (New York: Atlas and Co., 2008). Starting with a first-hand perspective on the destruction of manuscripts, books, and museum collections in Iraq in 2003 (asking “why should this murder of memory have occurred in the place where the book was born?” [p. 3]), Báez demonstrates that this is only a recent event in the long line of horrific events inflicted on society’s cultural record over thousands of years. Báez believes that although books have been destroyed for over 5000 years, “we barely have any idea why” (p. 6), and he tries to set the record straight. Báez admits that it is “impossible to document precisely” all the destructions of “libraries, book collections, and publishing houses,” (p. 173) providing at spots summaries of trends rather than details about specific events.

There are numerous references to the destruction of archival materials as well, since books and historical manuscripts were often housed together and just as often not distinguished between by their destroyers. Báez’s partly attributes humankind’s destruction of these cultural materials to “behavior originating in the depths of personality, in a search for the restitution of an archetype of equilibrium, power, or transcendence. . . . The destructive ritual, like the constructive ritual applied to the building of temples, houses, or any work, fixes patterns that return the individual to the community, to shelter, or to the vertigo of purity” (p. 9). He enumerates reasons why books are important to society and individuals, and concludes that “books are not destroyed as physical objects but as links to memory, that is, as one of the axes of identity of a person or a community” (p. 12), while acknowledging that there is no one reason why books are destroyed (suggesting why he provides description after description of the instances in history of book destruction – it is in the reading of the litany of such events that the reader begins to understand both how important books are and why they and the repositories holding are regularly and dramatically attacked). He provides one overarching theme about “bibliocaust,” namely that the destruction of books is an “attempt to annihilate a memory considered to be a direct or indirect threat to another memory thought superior” (p. 14). In adopting this perspective, Báez eliminates the idea that book burning and library destruction is the work of ignorant and uneducated people and adeptly places this activity as part of a human impulse closely associated with the urge to save, commemorate, learn, and remember.

Without books, I never would have become an archivist and, eventually, started writing this blog.

Good Times: Convergence, Conflict, & Chaos

2008-11-14T07:48:00.002-05:00

Below are my comments presented at the plenary session at the Association of Moving Image Archivists in Savannah, Georgia on November 13th.

The Chinese novelist and poet Ha Jin recently published an interesting account of the “writer as migrant,” exploring the results of writers who seek to establish careers in countries other than their own and who write in languages not native to them. Ha Jin suggests that the “best qualification for claiming spokesmanship that a writer can have is to be an established voice in his native country – that is, before arriving abroad, to already have an audience at home. From this position, he can resume writing abroad, though he may be speaking to different people and about different things” [Ha Jin, The Writer as Migrant, The Rice University Campbell Lectures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 5.]. Later, Ha Jin places the writer as migrant in our present Digital era, where “airplanes and the Internet can keep us close in touch with our native lands. The issue of return is no longer physical, but it is an issue of how we view our past and whether we accept it as part of ourselves” [p. 72].

Why start my commentary with such literary allusions? I am doing this because Ha Jin has captured something of the world now inhabited by archivists of all varieties. Most of us grew up in an analog and textual world, and our interests in archives were shaped by the prospects of working with old documents, printed ephemera, and old film stock (and other such stuff). It may surprise some to know that the majority of individuals attracted to graduate archival education programs still come with romantic notions of what archivists do and what they work with. While some get energized with deep challenges posed by the digital documentary universe, others complain and sometimes drop out. Our task is to engage them intellectually, as well as to build new bridges to the public. If one is looking for fascinating challenges, these are good times indeed.

It is easy, however, to be blinded by the lights of the digital age. We have more outlandish and utopian predictions about the transformation of society by the digital technologies than careful study and reflection about the actual impacts (although sometimes the craziest notions come true, keeping us on our guard). Let’s consider a few such predictions, ones that usually conjure a form of technological determinism (typical of what we hear about these days, from television ads to spam mail to even our own professional literature).

The convergence of disciplines has been one prediction floating about for some years. I wrote my first skeptical essay about the idea of convergence more than a decade ago [Richard J. Cox, "Why Technology Convergence Is Not Enough for the Management of Information and Records," Records & Retrieval Report 13 (October 1997): 1-16]. Basically the idea is that the technologies will bring, even force, disciplines together in new and more powerful ways. Some want this because they see it as the only way that we will harness the technology (and the expertise about this technology) and gather the resources to make the archival mission work in the new Digital era. Others want it because they see it as a means to elevating their societal profile either by tossing off old elements they deem holding them back (records rather than information, because records suggest clerical status or bureaucratic inertia) or by embracing newer, trendier notions that place them in the lead in the modern information age (digital curators rather than archivists, cyberspecialists rather than librarians). And some desire this because they want to break the old, guild-like, professional boundaries, making the issue of expertise a more democratic or socially engineered process.

Is there anything wrong with the convergence model or platform? Not really. Given the growing complexity of all documents, it makes sense that any way we can concentrate more knowledge, especially of the technical sort, is a commendable way to proceed. However, we need to also be mindful of the ingrained legacy of centuries of doing business that work against this, as well as the superficiality of glib promises of new empowered ways of operating. There have been decades of discussion, for example, about being more interdisciplinary in universities (and interdisciplinarity is just another variation of convergence), and there is still a long way to go. Traditional disciplinary boundaries, by schools and departments, still persist, and when tenure and promotion are considered, traditional patterns of evaluation still win out. I live and work in an old LIS school, self-declared as a new I-School (Information School), where we have been engaged in the past few years trying to break down old boundaries erected between LIS, IS, and Telecommunications (a task easier defined than completed).

Within universities we do see some aspects of what could be called convergence. New research centers are regularly created, intended to bring together faculty and graduate students from a variety of departments and even individuals from outside the university (such as in corporations). “Collaboratories” have been established for team research projects, usually featuring clusters of researchers representing a variety of disciplines interested in common questions or problems. Also, we see more scholars crossing disciplinary lines in their research, borrowing from or drawing on other fields’ work and methodologies; we have seen a growing blurring of disciplinary work on the nature of the archive and the management of records – all of it perhaps representing early stages of some sort of convergence. Outside the university, we see growing numbers of international conferences, projects, and publications bringing together archivists, other records professionals, and scholars and practitioners from other disciplines [For an example of an ongoing international conference, the International Conference on the History of Records and Archives is particularly rich with its interdisciplinary perspectives; for the latest manifestation of this conference see http://www.archivists.org.au/ichora-4. For the results of a lengthy international research project, see Luciana Duranti and Randy Preston, eds., International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems (InterPARES) 2: Experiential, Interactive and Dynamic Records (Rome: Associazione Nazionale Archivistica Italiana, 2008), available at http://www.interpares.org/display_file.cfm?doc=ip2_book_complete.pdf].

The key in this convergence, for archivists, is to make sure that we do not lose our way, that is, that our mission does not get lost. I sometimes tell my students that there may not be a profession known as archives in the future, and the gnashing of teeth is audible (especially as they contemplate what they paying for the privilege of being in a graduate program designed to help them become archivists). What I am getting at, however, is that what we are called may one day change and the primary nature of our work, stressing more effort with digitally-born materials and more focus on the digitization of older analog stuff, may be very different. In fact, I tell them that the nature of what they may be doing could make it easier to promote a public mission since the digital universe opens up so many possibilities of personal archival work or threatens the traditional sense of preservation in a number of profound ways. If these students bring engrained traditional notions about archival work, this is not always a message for them to hear.

Convergence, in all its variety of representations, has the potential to bring conflict. Not everyone likes to change, and, many have come into the archival community looking for the peace and solitude of a monastery. If this ever existed, it certainly does not now. In order to function as an effective archivist, we have to be much more of an activist and advocate, and this means we have to be out in the open, explaining and arguing for our cause. Let me focus on two examples.

There can be little argument that the new digital technologies empower people in new ways, far beyond what most of us over 50 at least ever imagined. Armed with a modestly priced laptop the average person can create virtual archives, publish books, and access more information, consolidating all of the roles from information consumer to information creator, from reader to publisher, from archival researcher to archival custodian. Archivists have been accustomed to thinking about the life cycle of records, and while some have generated the notion of the records continuum to take into account the new technologies (the continuum model tossing aside the notion that records move through stages of activity and inactivity until an ultimate decision is made about whether they have archival value or not), mostly we have clung to fairly passive notions of how and why records are created, used, and destroyed or archived.

Without lapsing into becoming a technological determinist (and in the face of many of the most spectacular new technologies, this is difficult), it is important to mull over the implications of these technologies for our future. Building on ideas promulgated by Rick Prelinger, it is clear that we have to develop better ideas about how to work with the public, what Prelinger calls equipping citizen archivists. What this entails is the development of a new attitude in helping the public, moving from a focus on acquiring documentary sources to preserving these sources by providing guidance and assistance to individuals in how to maintain personal and family archives. In effect, established archives become repositories of last resort (although given the tremendous amount of older documentary materials out there, I doubt serious institutional collecting will end). This approach takes into account the fact that many of the new digital documents, Web sites and blogs are examples, are not really as collectible as their predecessors (scrapbooks and diaries) [I have expanded on the idea of citizen archivists in my Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections and Ruminations (Duluth, MN: Litwin Books, 2009)].

Some of what we are seeing happen is due to what has been labeled Web 2.0, the use of the Web to allow and promote social networking through approaches such as wikis, blogs, and so forth. Add to this Web 3.0, and we see even different roles for archivists and their allies in the future. As Web 3.0 has been described, its goal is “to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion” [ John Markoff, “Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense,” New York Times, November 12, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/business/12web.html?_r=1&oref=slogin, accessed October 25, 2008]. Obviously, archivists ought to be involved in such activities, enhancing how they work with the users of archival sources in an online environment. Whether researchers cease to come to physical spaces known as archives (or libraries or museums) may not be the issue; the issue is that how researchers interact with archival sources will be more varied and complex than anything we have experienced before. The continued evolution, and growing power, of the Web will have dramatic impacts on how archivists and librarians function and what their future will be.

One of the primary issues archivists need to deal with in the Digital era is the notion that everything can be saved. The belief in this is pervasive, from individuals developing software, such as MyLifeBits, to record everything, to leaders (and many followers) in the library, information, and computer sciences fields who regularly state such a belief. The idea that everything can be saved may be the mantra of the digital true believer. Not only does this idea and its supporters ignore the other technical issues of retrieval, the ability to retrieve and retain important contextual meaning, and the costs of maintenance, the reason for or logic behind saving everything is usually avoided. It is interesting that many information professionals who have embraced the notion of adding value to the sources they administer are also so quick to embrace such utopian notions as utilizing the technology to save everything.

The archival community can make a contribution here, if it wills itself to look beyond the false promises of saving everything, in digital form and otherwise. While archival appraisal practice is weak (or at least weaker than it should be), the theoretical and methodological literature is quite interesting and useful. Over the course of more than a half-century, archivists have articulated appraisal schemes using values of records, more precise definitions of records, macro approaches considering the reasons for recordkeeping, functional analysis, sampling models, intrinsic values of records (or, records as artifacts or the symbolic value of documents), documentation strategies, and reappraisal methodologies. Archivists (at least those engaged in this function) have accumulated a high level of expertise about the means of identifying the evidence and information found in documents of all sorts, even if their application in the digital realm has been limited and their efforts to work with other fields (such as preservation administrators) have been just as limited. What archivists need now to do is to develop new versions of the appraisal approaches to be applied effectively to the digital documentary universe and, just as importantly, evaluate some of the approaches for dealing with this universe, such as the Internet Archive (really a sampling method).

From my vantage, appraisal is the core, critical function of archival work. For more than a hundred years, individuals in the modern archival community have discussed the challenges posed by the immense scope of the documentary universe. Yet, I am sure we will all agree that the scope of the present documentary universe is far more complex and larger than anything we have considered before (or ever could have imagined). And, when we consider such shifting identities, different missions or greatly re-engineered methodologies, it is when we wonder just how much chaos we can really handle or how much confusion we might bring upon ourselves. Our sister profession, records management, has spent considerable effort and resources the past two decades constantly reinventing itself into some other form of information profession and often with little noticeable success. This has even led to some of its leaders out rightly rejecting any aspect of archives and the archival mission. This is a tragic part of our professional history, but it also suggests the need to move on by developing forward-looking visions that envision the developing of new partnerships and new knowledge.

Also, I have in the last few years given up thinking that technology is the major challenge facing archivists in their work. Now I see the main challenge as being an expansion of the archival mission from just a cultural role to one encompassing ethics and accountability matters. Records and recordkeeping systems, especially as they move deeper into the digital realm, pose greater problems with intellectual property, preservation, privacy, and so forth. The cultural mandate remains (and always will be the main attraction for many), but it is also the case that corporate, government, and academic archives will generate more and more instances where archivists are called upon both to help records creators and users guarantee access to documents and to assist the organizations defend themselves (sometimes in unethical or illegal ways resulting in individual archivists needing to consider their own ethical and moral foundations) [I have explored such matters in my books, one co-edited with David Wallace, Archives and the Public Good: Accountability and Records in Modern Society (Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 2002) and one solely authored by myself, Ethics, Accountability and Recordkeeping in a Dangerous World (London: Facet, 2006)].

When we reflect on such issues as these, it is always important to remember that at any given time the archival profession is full of novice, up and coming, experienced, and senior leaders. Their reactions to new and complex challenges will range from annoyance to excitement, from ignoring to embracing, from trepidation to creative experimentation. What we need to key in on is the preparation of a new generation of archivists, professionals who have the knowledge of the history of recordkeeping systems, traditional archival principles (traditional in the sense that they are based on older recordkeeping systems and forms), and new and emerging digital information systems (including a solid working understanding of new digital document forms).

How do we prepare this new generation of archivists? Our graduate archival education programs are, at best, a mixed bag. Between 1980 and 2000, we witnessed an amazing growth in the number of regular, tenure-stream or tenured faculty, including a number (but probably not enough) of programs supporting multiple faculty members. Are they able to offer a comprehensive enough curriculum for Digital Era archivists? It is, at present, a mixed situation. These programs range from workshops teaching short-term skills and attitudes to research-focused and forward-looking theoretical orientations to the field. These programs have nearly all shifted to LIS schools and, while there, some of these schools have made a shift to I-Schools. It is in these programs, however, that we have the best chance to inspire new perspectives, build new leadership, and develop new principles for what looms ahead in both our profession and our broader culture. These opportunities have been enhanced in the rebirth of LIS schools as I-Schools, now addressing concerns such as the curation and preservation of primary and secondary sources that are born-digital, the life cycle/continuum concept of records, the preservation imperative, cultural and humanistic perspectives, public and institutional memory, and the evolving notion of records in the digital era), and the implications of new portable digital technologies on issues such as the creation, maintenance, and use of records and information sources deemed to possess long-term archival value) [Ron Larsen, the dean of my own school, co-wrote a paper with me on archives in the I-School curriculum, presented at the 2008 I-School conference at UCLA, now being revised for publication].

So, we have a lot of opportunities and challenges ahead of us. Patricia Zimmerman’s contribution to a recent volume of essays on home movies describes how “home movies constitute an imaginary archives that is never completed, always fragmentary, vast, infinite.” She also adds that, “In the popular imagination, archives often are framed as the depositories of old, dead cultural artifacts. But archives are never inert, as they are always in the process of addition of new arenas and unknown objects. The archive, then is, is not simply a depository, which implies stasis, but is, rather, a retrieval machine defined by its revision, expansion, addition, and change” [Karen L Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmerman, eds., Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 18, 19]. Such concerns upset some, but these reflect the new reality we are dealing with, and, more importantly, suggest some wonderful new opportunities. In what is left of my own career, I hope I can focus on the new opportunities and inspire others to do the same.

Thinking About the Future

2008-11-12T08:44:00.004-05:00

Nan Mooney, (Not) Keeping Up With Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008) is not a book about archives, but it is a book that archivists (as well as librarians, museum curators, and university professors) should read, since we are all part of this class. Mooney presents a carefully research, if depressing, analysis of the weakening financial and social status of professionals, especially those who are in the creative sector or who are committed to contributing to the public good. She describes low salaries, disappearing pension and retirement plans, weakening medical benefits (if any at all), and other similarly depressing concerns (and one reads in disbelief realizing this book appeared before the collapse of Wall Street!). However, Mooney also argues that the well-educated and talented pool of such professionals should turn their abilities to trying to reform society and resolve some of these issues; this makes for an entertaining and thought-provoking reading. She concludes the book in this way: "If there's one thing we must keep in mind about our current economic situation it is this: We are not failures and we are not alone. We have it within us -- every single one of us -- to fight back if we so choose. Don't just tentatively poke at the boundaries of how life might be. Bust through them with all the power you can muster." Then this: "Be active. Be vocal. Be creative. Be radical. This is your life. Make it matter" (p. 216).

I will restrain myself from commenting on all the various ways archivists might want to contemplate the issues Mooney raises and the actions she raises -- that, is, after all, for each individual to contemplate. I know for myself, however, that writing this blog is part of my own activities in this resisting and changing the negative influences in our society on the important mission of archivists. I hope that by regularly providing commentaries on how archives are perceived that archivists will reconsider how they seek to carryout their efforts to meet their mission. Failing that, however, I admit I have turned to landscape painting as a creative outlet, even though my limited abilities will not allow me to give up my day job!

Maine Coastal Sunset 2008

Purcell's Eloquent Eggs: A Preservationist's Viewpoint

2008-11-06T01:19:00.008-05:00

Allen C. Benson
Doctoral Student, University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences

Eloquent Eggs & Disintegrating Dice is the subject of the current exhibit at Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh. The exhibit, which runs from September 25-November 29, 2008, consists of works by internationally acclaimed Rosamond Purcell, an American photographer working in fine art and documentary photography.

Dedicated to photography as art, Silver Eye Center for Photography is one of Pittsburgh’s best-known galleries displaying a wide variety of styles and formats ranging from classic black & white gelatin-silver prints to experimental color inkjet prints. Amanda Bloomfield, Silver Eye’s Public Relations Coordinator shown in Figure 1, discusses preservation and security issues from the gallery’s perspective. She explains that using hidden screws to fasten picture frames to the wall instead of hanging prints with wire stabilizes the prints and adds a measure of security.

Figure 1 Amanda Bloomfield of Sliver Eye Center for Photography, explaining how picture frames are secured to the wall. (Black & white, gelatin-silver print, 2008, Allen C. Benson.)

Eloquent Eggs & Disintegrating Dice comprises 45 archival inkjet color prints exploring two themes: (1) images of birds, bird nests, feathers and eggs found in the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology in Camarillo, California, and (2) images of magician Rick Jay’s disintegrating dice. The six color prints of dice included in this show present archivists with a paradoxical view of their worst nightmare: vibrantly colored images of cellulose nitrate breakdown, beautifully framed and hung in a gallery setting, intriguing historical records and evidence of decay. One photograph in particular called “Dice in Bottle” has a background story that reads like a mystery novel. Rick Jay, author of Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck (Figure 2), describes how twenty-four small bone dice were found buried in silt near London Bridge, encapsulated in a feeding trough from a late-fifteenth-century birdcage. Jay explains how these dice are evidence of illicit dicing. X-ray photographs have shown that eleven of the dice are injected with mercury to favor rolling fours and fives and two others are fixed to roll the ace and deuce. The remaining six are misspotted “high men” and “low men,” the former being marked with only the numbers four, five, and six repeated and the later with only one, two, or three spots repeated. Jay surmises that the culprit who made his living with these dice probably slung them into the Thames while fleeing from the police.

Figure 2 Book cover: Dice: Deception Fate & Rotten Luck.

The color plates in the book are small in comparison to the original, large format prints hanging in the exhibit, but still they capture the surreal nature of what is taking place during the various stages of disintegration. The cellulose nitrate used in making Jay’s dice is the same material used in the early manufacture of motion-picture film and photographic negatives. Proper storage and handling of cellulose nitrate-based film is an often-discussed topic among preservationists who are trying to extend the life and usefulness of their film collections. Jay describes the process of decomposition as follows: “The crystallization begins on the corners and then spreads to the edges. Nitric acid is released in a process called outgassing. The dice cleave, crumble, and then implode.” Archivists may view realia at this stage of disintegration as justification for immediate de-accessioning and removal from the collection, but Purcell found in their melted, discolored, dusty appearance an element of visual intrigue and beauty, a subject of artistic expression.

In Figure 3, direct, mid-afternoon sunlight is beginning to stream in through the display window and can be seen in the lower right-hand corner of the photograph. Bloomfield explains that natural light entering the gallery is a concern and is controlled by two sets of blinds on the front display windows. One set is opaque and another set is partially transparent. She knows that systems like this are dependent on humans paying close attention to environmental conditions, making judgments and taking appropriate actions. It is mid-afternoon as she watches carefully the angle of the natural light as it shifts and begins streaming into the gallery’s display window.

Figure 3 Amanda Bloomfield describing Purcell’s interest in photographing birds.
(Black & white, gelatin-silver print, 2008, Allen C. Benson.)

Another preservation concern shared by galleries and artists is the framing process. Bloomfield said that some exhibitors use UV protected glass when framing images, but in this particular exhibit Purcell chose not to. The Gallery’s Executive Director, Linda Benedict-Jones, curated the collection and it is only being shown at Silver Eye Center for Photography. The fact that this show is a one-time event rather than a traveling show may explain Purcell’s decision to use standard glass rather than UV protected. The frames used in the exhibit were built by a local framer, LaFond Galleries, and features a frame system that floats the glass away from the surface of the print. The prints themselves are printed using archival quality pigment inks on archival, fine art, watercolor paper.

Whether or not you can visit the Silver Eye Center for Photography to see this show in person, Ricky Jay’s book with Rosamond Purcell’s’ photographs is a must have for it provides an expanded selection of images intermixed with Jay’s dicey history. The book is constructed around 12 short essays including poetry and historical anecdotes. Jay, a magician and historian of magic, traces the existence of dice from “the dirt excavated at Pompeii and Herculaneum,” to the Creoles of New Orleans. He includes a section “When a Die Dies” that describes some of the chemistry behind his collection of self-destructing plastic dice. Jay explains, “In 1868 John Wesley Hyatt formed a substance from a homogeneous colloidal dispersion of nitric acid, sulphuric acid, cotton fibers, and champhor.” According to Jay, this was the material of choice for making dice up until the middle of the twentieth century when it was replaced with “less flammable cellulose acetate.” Published by The Quantuck Lane Press (First Edition, 2003), this small, thin volume can easily be read in the time it takes a commuter to travel from home to office. Anyone wishing to learn more about the Silver Eye Center for Photography, shown in Figure 4, can either visit their website at http://www.silvereye.org/ or call them at 412-431-5777.

Figure 4 Silver Eye Center for Photography (2008). East Carson Street, South Side, Pittsburgh. Black & white gelatin-silver print. Allen C. Benson.

Looking at Archives From the Other Side

2008-11-03T09:55:00.003-05:00

Archivists have tended to examine the use of their materials from their own vantage point, but now there are many researchers from many different disciplinary perspectives writing about the use of these documentary materials. Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan, eds., Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008) brings together a group of accounts about experiences in using archival sources. The editors contend that these various essays reflect the “change from reading an archive not just as a source but also as a subject” (p. vii). These essays also demonstrate the “ways in which cultural theorists extend the definition of archive beyond print records or ephemera” (p. ix). We see something of the serendipitous nature of research in archives, no matter what research method is being used. Each of the essays is a brief recollection about the experiences of doing research on a range of topics, from women writers to family archives, with each author emphasizing their personal experiences in the research.

These essays place traditional archives into a larger universe of other sources, as well as provide a sense of the emotional aspects of archival research. In W. Ralph Eubanks essay about the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, we learn that there were many other sources needed to tell the complete story. Eubanks writes, “In the course of three years, the archives served as only one component of my journey to find out how my parents ended up in the Sovereignty Commission files. But had it not been for the archives, I would not have been drawn back into the very soul of Mississippi: its people and places. It was through rediscovering the people and places I knew and loved as a boy that my research and writing began to come together” (p. 113). Another essayist, Malea Powell, reflects on what the physical structures of archives suggest about archives: “Though the Newberry and other buildings like it are textual spaces designed to intimidate. I believe they do so as a way to negate their own temporality and impermanence. . . . [T]hese large Gilded Age buildings like the Newberry manage the physical place upon which the imperial society they represent has engaged in empire into a space of argument for the value of Western culture” (p. 120). These essays turn the archival world inside out, and they provide a different way of seeing what archivists do and what archives represent.

The Printed Picture

2008-10-31T10:37:00.003-04:00

Archives are full of photographic and other visual materials. Richard Benson, The Printed Picture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008) will be a welcome addition to archivists’ reference library. Benson states simply that his book is “about pictures and the ways in which they are printed” (p. 2), contending that their form is the dominant way in which we understand pictures. Benson introduces the book by announcing that it “examines how pictures look – by reproducing a lot of them – but carries out that examination by describing the manner in which they were made. To my mind, the making dictated the form and whatever meaning there might be flows from these steps, and from the cultural context in which the picture is viewed” (p. 2).

The book is beautifully and copiously illustrated, and many of the examples are “commonplace” images. Benson describes in detail each printing process – relief printing, intaglio and planographic printing, and so forth – and many of the examples provided are images archivists commonly work with (maps, posters, typewritten documents, daguerreotypes, stereo cards, and carte de visites). There is a lot of interesting information in this volume that archivists will be able to use, with the extra-added bonus of having a book they might want to display in their living rooms.

Wheelin' and Dealin'

2008-10-29T08:23:00.003-04:00

All fields dealing with cultural heritage materials – from books to manuscripts to art objects – have to contend with the consequences of their economic value. Security is an immense obligation, as stolen artifacts and objects can disappear quickly into the marketplace and into the hands of private collectors. While we have had a growing literature on security and the trade in such materials, we have had little explanation about how the economic value of these objects is determined.

Although Don Thompson’s The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) is not about the trade in cultural heritage, specifically archival documents, it will be of interest to anyone interested in how financial values come to be assigned to unique artistic and documentary materials. Thompson, an economist, followed the contemporary art market over a year and his “book looks at the economics and psychology of art, dealers, and auctions. It explores money, lust, and the self-aggrandizement of possession, all important elements of the world of contemporary art” (p. 7). Thompson provides a detailed accounting of the inner workings of artists, dealers, museums, private collectors, art critics, and auction houses. He considers how certain contemporary art becomes prominent, noting that the “art trade is the least transparent and least regulated major commercial activity in the world” (p. 29), a statement written before the current financial markets meltdown.

Thompson delves into the inner reasons driving the contemporary art market, and here those who work with the generally less visible, out of the headlines, archival collecting will find much that is familiar, although operating on a less spectacular scale. For example, Thompson attributes one of the reasons for the flourishing art trade as having to do with the “worldwide expansion of museums as donors seek immortality and cities seek respectability and increased tourism” (p. 54). Archivists need only think of the intense competition that often takes place for the next presidential library and museum. Thompson also does an excellent job in capturing the sometimes weird and eccentric personalities of the artists, dealers, and curators, and the archives world also is full of similar players.

If one wants an introduction to the economics of collecting, this is a good place to start.

Preservation Education: The Curriculum

2008-10-24T08:02:00.001-04:00

Preservation Education Curriculum: An Introduction to Preservation. Andover, MA: Northeast Document Conservation Center, 2008.

Reviewed by Bernadette G. Callery

It is no surprise that the Preservation Education Curriculum, the recent publication of the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC), is thorough, well-designed and up-to-date, given that the organization has been in the business of providing preservation information through publications, workshops and conservation services since 1973. The curriculum was designed by an advisory committee composed of all the usual suspects in preservation education and field tested through an IMLS grant between NEDCC and Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science to develop “a preservation curriculum for 21st century librarians.” The publication is also available in an online form at http://www.nedcc.org/curriculum/lesson.introduction.php. Corrections and updates will be made to the online version.

What is surprising is the range of topics covered in this curriculum – a far cry from the basic information on recommended environmental conditions for collection storage and the diagrams of simple repair techniques that often characterize introductory preservation texts and courses. Organized into thirteen chapters or class sessions, the curriculum begins with a discussion of the context for the cultural record, and then moves quickly into a discussion of the structure and deterioration of paper-based and multimedia materials. The authors clearly take a holistic view of preservation education, devoting one class to an evaluation of the building’s design and the functioning of its environmental systems and another to the design and implementation of collection surveys. Later chapters deal with preservation reformatting, the long-term issues of creating sustainable digital collections, immediately followed by, somewhat inauspiciously, disaster planning. While much of the chapter on treatment options deals with paper-based collections, it is clear that the “special collections” responsibilities of librarians and archivists are not limited to paper-based materials. Although the curriculum does not focus on preservation management, there is an expectation throughout the work that individual librarians and archivists must necessarily contribute to the discussions and decisions surrounding collection care, through management of the storage facilities, item-level treatments and education of the users of the collection, even if they are not officially preservation administrators.

Each topical lesson consists of an overview, an outline of the content, learning objectives, a detailed lesson plan, with suggested timings, and resources for the teacher. These resources are lightly annotated and are supplemented with additional material in a section called “Taking it further: beyond the primary lesson” which concludes each week’s lesson plan, with additional readings and activities. One of the particular strengths of the curriculum is the collection of suggested assignments and term projects organized by class topic. Good enough on their own, these suggestions will certainly stimulate further ideas. There is an odd occasional repetition of resources, as if there were a tension between the course serving as a complete package and the expectation that individual chapters would be used as stand-alones.

Overall, the Preservation Education Curriculum is a well-organized introduction to the significant concepts and preservation issues of both paper-based and digital collections. I certainly plan to use elements of the curriculum to supplement syllabi for upcoming courses on the history of the book and digital preservation.

Virtual Archives

2008-10-22T11:18:00.002-04:00

Johannes Fabian, Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008) is an interesting reflection on how placing documents in a virtual archive on the World Wide Web transforms these documents (and this discipline). Fabian recounts how the expectation for ethnographers today is to make their field notes and other documents more readily available, expanding the notion of how we have traditionally viewed the work of the ethnographer. He describes writing up a late ethnography, thirty years after the event, and its placement in a virtual archive. Fabian also distinguishes ethnographic texts from the kinds of documents found in traditional archives. He is interested in being able to present these texts in a fashion that is far more readily retrievable than ever before: “Ethnographers who have conducted research, recorded speech, labored over representing recorded sound graphically and translating their transcripts into another language remember too much to think of the documents they produced as being simply there to be deposited (and disappear) in archives” (p. 120). Placing them on the Web avoids their disappearance, but it also transforms in some fundamental ways what these documents represent. Doing this, as the title of the book suggests, moves the work of ethnographers from writing monographs to providing commentary on texts and notes (and allowing others to provide additional commentary).

In this volume, Fabian provides personal first-hand accounts of his working with older materials from past fieldwork experiences. For example, he describes the sense of rebuilding an account from long ago: “There is something intensely personal about experiencing presence through a document of past events. Listening to voices and sounds fills one with the pleasure of recognition; it feels good to be able to understand the language, and one cannot wait to exercise old skills of transcribing and translating. It does not take long, however, before delight becomes mixed with pain, enthusiasm with strain, and play turns into work, perhaps not necessarily but whenever we want to re-present what we see experienced” (pp. 112-113). This captures something of the sensibility of any archival research or research based on extensive reading and reflection. Compiling copious notes from the manuscript, documentary archive or the printed archive ultimately leads one to the need to organize, re-organize, interpret, and re-interpret that can be exhilarating and exhausting. Fabian’s work ought to assist archivists, among others, to reflect on how documents on the Web are different from documents in other venues (in print or in physical archives).

We Are Gentlemen of Japan

2008-10-17T06:28:00.002-04:00

Christine M.E. Guth. Longfellow’s Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting and Japan. Seattle, London: University of Washington Press, 2004. ISBN: 0-295-98401-5

Reviewed by Bernadette Callery, Assistant Professor, University of Pittsburgh School of Information Studies

Any archivist who has puzzled over the hidden relevance of an individual’s life chronicled in a scrapbook collection will relish the information that Christine Guth wrings from the four scrapbooks and “half a boatload” of Japanese souvenirs brought back from Japan by Charley Longfellow, the son of the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Guth, an independent scholar who has written on the appropriation and reinterpretation of Japanese art and culture by the rest of the world, presents an extended reflection on how this particular “globe trotter” used the reality of foreign travel as a metaphor for self exploration. By 1871, when Longfellow made his first visit to Japan, travel in Japan was both convenient and relatively safe, as evidenced by the fact that the British travel agent Thomas Cook began offering group tours to Japan in 1872. The artistic impact of easy access to Japan, both through actual travel and the surrogates of photographs and curios, was substantial, both in America and Europe. Well-known examples of Japonisme include Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado, first produced at the Savoy in 1885, and the book illustrations of Walter Crane. Guth argues that much of the American fascination with the arts of Japan was due to the national need to redefine American culture, by seeking out cultures that were more artistic, and, by comparison with post-Civil War America, more innocent and uncorrupted by the modern world. The notion of world travel was also seen as an opportunity to explore exotic civilizations, and on reflection, more completely define one’s own identity and role when returning home. The acquisition of photographs and curios helped to record as well as authenticate the experience of travel and was an indication of a more sophisticated cultural taste.

Longfellow’s record of what became a two year residence in Japan in 1871-1873, which involved building and furnishing a house in Tokyo, includes photos as well as costumes, paintings, bronzes and lacquer work, much of which was displayed in his rooms in the family home at Cambridge. A vigorous young man at the time of his travels in Japan, Longfellow indulged himself by collecting both objects and photographs, including photos of himself dressed as a samurai and as a Kabuki actor. Guth is particularly interested in clothing as a form of communication and self-identification and discusses the conventions of these self-portraits among other foreign travelers. What justifies the book’s title is that the surprising fact that Longfellow had himself tattooed while in Japan, both on his initial visit and again in 1885. Elaborate designs covered much of his chest, back and arms, with the design on his back a giant carp ascending a waterfall. Guth sees tattoos as a form of clothing, recognizing that both are a form of expressing one’s identity and provides extensive background on the fashion for tattoos of artisans and manual laborers in nineteenth century Japan. Discussing the distinctive tattoos of carpenters and firemen, she notes that the tattoos “were like badges or uniforms that conferred status and membership [in the professions] while at the same time demonstrating individuality” and that “using the body to make a personal aesthetic statement reflected time-honored practice in Japan.” (p. 147). More than the acquisition of costumes, furnishings, and other decorative objects, Longfellow’s tattoos indicated an unusual desire to participate in exotic cultural experience of Japan.

Guth’s work reminds us of the impact private collections can make in contributing to the development of national taste. The presence of “Charley’s Japan Room” in the Longfellow House, a place of pilgrimage to the literary and artistic elite of New England, had more than local influence. The enthusiasm spread for all things Japanese spread, as Guth, because “Japan lent itself particularly well to American representational needs, since the wide array of goods it produced could be readily adapted to different environments and economic circumstances.” (p. 173) This rediscovery and close examination of Charles Longfellow’s photographs and scrapbooks establishes him as a pioneer collector of Japanese curios and brings to life and engaging and attentive traveler.

We look forward to the product of Guth’s latest research, begun while a 2006-2007 Stanford Humanities Center Fellow, a discussion of the “reception, appropriation and transformation,” of the Hokusai woodcut, “Under the Wave off Kanagawa” but popularly known as “The Great Wave,” and how it has become a global icon.

Who Owns Anything?

2008-10-13T20:30:00.003-04:00

With conflict raging in the Middle East, the concerns about the destruction or looting of antiquities make the newspapers and other news outlets on a nearly daily basis; a lot of what is being considered is archival in nature, encompassing ancient texts and documents. James Cuno, Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) offers one perspective on the issues concerning the preservation of our ancient heritage. Cuno, the President and Director of the Art Institute of Chicago, makes an argument that while we certainly should not condone the destruction of archaeological sites and the marketing of objects without provenance documentation, the situation is more complicated than what it seems. Cuno believes that it is difficult to connect ancient heritage to modern nation states and that restricting the acquisition of ancient objects and documents undermines society’s ability to understand its common heritage. He stresses that the focus on ethical and legal issues is more complicated than what seems at first to be pretty obvious concerns.

Cuno, early in his interesting book, states, “The real argument over the acquisition of undocumented (unprovenanced) antiquities is not what it appears to be. It is not really between art museums and archaeologists, about the protection of the archaeological record from looting and illicit trafficking in antiquities. It is between museums and modern nation-states and their nationalist claims ion that heritage” (p. xviii). The point that Cuno makes is that it is difficult to connect the ancient cultures creating objects with the modern nations of today and that trying to make such a connection gets us wrapped up in difficult and complex “nationalist retentionist cultural property laws” (p. xxxv). Cuno also argues that most of these laws are not only overly restrictive but often difficult (perhaps impossible) to interpret or enforce (drawing on a variety of cases in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, South America, and North America.

The author, not surprisingly, given his position, is an advocate for the notion of “encyclopedic art museums.” These museums are “based on in the polymathic ideal of the Enlightenment museum; it is good for us, for our species, to experience the full diversity of human cultural industry in order to better understand our place in the world, as of but one culture and our time among many” (p. 123). These museums enable the display of artifacts from across cultures and eras, allowing greater understanding of the world’s past and our common origins. Cuno believes these kinds of museums are critical because, “Antiquity cannot be owned. It is our common heritage as represented by and in antiquities and ancient texts and architecture” (p. 20). Cuno presents what seems to be a compelling argument. He is highly critical of archaeologists for arguing about looting and the problems with the international market, suggesting that they go along with this “because they are dependent on nation-states to do their work. Nation-states hold the goods – antiquities and archaeological sites as national cultural property and cultural patrimony – and they control access to them” (p. 154).

Cuno’s book and its argument is compelling, but it is also unsettling. Why it is unsettling can be found in the collection of essays in Neil Brodie, Morag M. Kersel, Christian Luke, and Kahryn Walker Tubb, eds., Archaeology, Cultural Heritage, and the Antiquities Trade (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2006). As Brodie notes in the introduction to this volume, the “antiquities trade transforms monetary, aesthetic, legal, personal, and social values” (p. 19). The essays provide case studies about the damage done to archaeological sites, the loss of evidence about archaeological artifacts recovered because of the focus on these objects as “arts,” and the problems caused by museum curators and private collectors willing to look away from the problems in how the artifacts might have been acquired. Neil Brodie, in another essay in the volume, notes, “It is impossible for an outsider to penetrate the inner workings of the antiquities trade, and antiquities dealers are not inclined to help” (p. 222). It is difficult to try to follow Cuno’s assessment in light of the kinds of case studies presented in the Brodie, et al, edited book.

One comment made by Cuno does mystify me. In his book, Cuno writes, “We live in an age of globalization characterized by the potential of almost all of us to participate in and contribute to it” (p. 160). What mystifies me is why Cuno does not expand on the possibilities of using the World Wide Web to allow museums, libraries, and archives to exchange detailed scholarly information about their collections without having to deal with the actual objects.

Of course, somehow archivists have managed to avoid the kinds of ethical, legal, and other problems plaguing museums. There are indications that this is changing, as the proposed protocols for dealing with Native American collections may set off a firestorm within the American archival community. Archivists need to get ready to contend with such challenges, and reading books such as this will help them.

Convergence Dreams

2008-10-04T20:26:00.002-04:00

Convergence, driven by new information technologies, was a major topic a dozen or so years ago, and then it disappeared. It is re-emerging as the technologies mature and new opportunities present themselves. Diane M. Zorich, Günter Waibel and Ricky Erway, Beyond the Silos of the LAMs: Collaboration Among Libraries, Archives and Museums (Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc., 2008) provides a window into how convergence is being discussed again. This is a report on efforts begun by RLG Programs “to explore the nature of library, archive and museum (LAM) collaborations, to help LAMs collaborate on common services and thus yield greater productivity within their institutions, and to assist them in creating research environments better aligned with user expectations—or, to reference this report’s title, to move beyond the often-mentioned silos of LAM resources which divide content into piecemeal offerings” (p. 8).

The report builds on the experiences of five RLG Programs partner sites were selected to participate in the workshops: the University of Edinburgh, Princeton University, the Smithsonian Institution, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Yale University. It carefully considers how collaboration happens, from initial contact to cooperative activities to coordinated ventures. Collaboration, a “process of shared creation,” is the next stage until convergence occurs, a “state in which collaboration around a specific function or idea has become so extensive, engrained and assumed that it is no longer recognized by others as a collaborative undertaking. Instead, it has matured to the level of infrastructure and becomes, like our water or transportation networks, a critical system that we rely upon without considering the collaborative efforts and compromises that made it possible.” In other words, the report provides a nice model for considering how collaboration and convergence across these disciplines can occur.

The report also reveals where there are particular promises in the Digital Era for such convergence. Here is one example: “The ubiquity of online access inspires a vision of a single search across all collections, without regard for where the assets are housed or what institutional unit oversees them” (p. 13). Here is another: “Users add their knowledge to information resources through mechanisms such as social tagging or community annotation” (p. 14).

Interesting report.

Memoir and Archives

2008-10-02T03:21:00.002-04:00

Here is another collection of essays on writing memoirs, and it is a good one. Patricia Hampl and Elaine Tyler May, eds., Tell Me True: Memoir, History, and Writing a Life (St. Paul, MN: Borealis Books, 2008) sets out to play with the differences between historical writing and memoir and the relationship between memory and memoir. Right at the outset of the book, acknowledging that there seems to be a “wide divide” between memoir and history, the editors argue that the “record always retains blank spaces – whether the record emerges from archival sources or from personal memory” (p. 3). This comment sets the tone for the various commentators in this volume.

Many of the authors, drawing on their experiences as both historians and memoirists, make interesting observations that concern the archival record. June Cross writes, “Personal memories spring from the imagined and real connection among places, people, and things. This is where history and memoir diverge. Textbook history is arrived at by consensus, dulled at the edges. It is drawn from careful inspection of documents and limited by the records one can find. The grand sweep of history feels linear, even though it is messy and fraught with competing ideas and conflicting circles of influence. But for the memoirist, history and memory conflate to form a story we want to tell about ourselves, and that narrative arc changes as we grow older, as the world turns” (p. 63). Elaine Tyler May, in her own essay in the volume, contends, “History and memoir are both interpretive arts. Both genres se carefully selected fragments of the past – memories, documents, events – to tell a story” (p. 85). May also considers the limitations of archival sources. Reflecting on her pouring through birth, death, property, and business records, she writes, “But these records had no stories, no real people, no emotion. Just numbers and bits of data. I imagined myself making charts with categories and checking off little boxes for hours on end. I would die of boredom before I could write one word of history – and what could I write without stories?” (p. 88).

Being Diplomatic

2008-09-27T10:24:00.002-04:00

Let me state at the outset that I did not read all 800 plus pages of Luciana Duranti and Randy Preston, eds., International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems (InterPARES) 2: Experiential, Interactive and Dynamic Records (Rome: Associazione Nazionale Archivistica Italiana, 2008), available at http://www.interpares.org/display_file.cfm?doc=ip2_book_complete.pdf, a publication reporting on the second phase of this research project carried out in 2002-2006. I read portions, skipping around to topics that interested me or issues that caught my attention. Let me also state that I doubt many others will plow through this complex and lengthy document.

Most people working within the archival community know something about the InterPARES project, since there has been a large literature emanating from this project and a huge number of conference papers and panels devoted to it over the more than a decade that this project has been underway. Most working professionals also know that a critical aspect of this project is the theoretical framework of diplomatics as the core of archival science. As another matter of disclosure, I should say that while acknowledging the important contributions of diplomatics to archival theory, I am also a skeptic of many aspects of it and its utility for archival practice in the digital era.

Given the well-known reliance on diplomatics by this project, there are some interesting twists in this publication. Early on, for example, the following is stated: “InterPARES 2 sought to avoid the problems incurred in the course of InterPARES 1 that resulted from that project’s preestablished epistemological perspective on the concept of record. Thus, the InterPARES 2 researchers decided not to define at the outset the concept of record, instead leaving it completely open to any possibility as presented by the research findings and, consistent with this stance, to accompany the deductive approach with an inductive one.” In individual reports, there are also references to new and emerging documentary forms, such as the use of the Web by performance artists.

From time to time researchers refer to other earlier reports and projects presenting a broader view of the record, such as the MIT Appraisal Project. “On the one hand, the MIT project, which focused on the nature of scientific activity and the scientific record,” it is stated, “defines the scientific record as including experimental designs, documentation of instrumentation, experimental data records and analyses of experimental results; all entities that are in close alignment with the way the term record is interpreted in most archival contexts. On the other hand, the project also includes in its definition of the scientific record the publication of results in technical reports, conference proceedings and journal articles; all of which, because they are publications, are not considered by most archivists to be records—except in very specific and limited contexts (such as where the offprint of an author’s journal article is retained by the author as an evidentiary record of the act of publishing the article).” There seems to be a resistance to documentary materials that do not fit into the diplomatics definition of a record, perfectly acceptable if this project is about testing the utility of diplomatics in the modern digital age rather than a broader effort to archive electronic records. More to the point, however, is the fact that archivists need to be able to work with an increasing array of digital documents no matter how they meet some prescribed set of record elements.

The report focuses on electronic or digital records, broadly defined, examines cases in artistic, scientific, and government domains, including twenty-seven cases (twenty-three completed and reported on in this publication). These cases focus in interesting areas such as performance art, moving images, music, archaeology, cybercartography, astronomy, taxation, Supreme Court and land records, the use of GIS technology by archaeologists, the use of digital technologies by photographers, the functionality of government Web sites, and the development of data portals and repositories in the sciences. No one could ever disagree that this was an ambitious project in its scope, but answering the question of its success in resolving issues related to archival materials in digital form will take a lot more time. At this point, the project’s success seems to be in providing a rich body of literature on diplomatics and certain new kinds of documentary forms, all material which can be drawn by working archivists and for use in teaching (although faculty have a lot of work to do to recompose this into something that students can assess without getting lost – although that is always a responsibility of the faculty).

Anyone approaching this report quickly senses that it is too long and too unwieldy to read and absorb in any meaningful way. It is highly repetitive, essentially a pasting together of a group of long reports in each major domain, with each report repeating the same details about the purpose of InterPARES, the conclusions of the first phase of this project, and so forth. Why not write a slimmer volume reporting on the process, products, and results of this interesting project? Although there is much material on the Web related to this project, cited in this published report, doing this makes the reader question why more of the material could not have been removed, kept on the Web, and cited – creating a more normal and more reasonably priced book that could be used in classrooms and by practitioners. The scale of this book makes it very difficult to navigate around in, a problem made even harder by the lack of an index. In my opinion, books published without an index are incomplete. The lack of an index in a book of this scale is unacceptable.

Having said this, it is still a useful volume for seeing in detail a complicated, long-term, international research project. The assembling of research teams encompassing “a scholar of the activity under investigation, a technology specialist, an archival expert and a graduate research assistant,” along with many other participants is represented in its fullest. Different research methodologies employed are also described, such as
Web-based questionnaire surveys, literature reviews, researcher surveys, interviews, and “tool-building and experimentation.” Providing such detail could enable the project to be replicated in other settings (although it is difficult to imagine it ever being replicated on this scale), and it also opens the possibility for the project to be critiqued for its methodologies and approaches (as well as its results); I expect we will see some of this kind of analysis in the future (although that is not my intent here), and I hope it energizes not just discussion about digital archiving but about archival theory (especially the utility of diplomatics for new recordkeeping systems, something some critics of InterPARES remain unconvinced about).

Such scrutiny is certainly justified since the project used graduate research assistants in the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia to do a “diplomatic analysis of each type of digital entity identified in each case study,” opening the question about whether this was a project about the archiving of electronic records systems or about the viability of diplomatics as a core of archival theory or science. These analyses were “largely restricted to the testing of each type of digital object against the five necessary characteristics of a record to determine if each object could be considered a record, or whether an object was more appropriately identified as, for example, data, documents or publications. Non-records generally require a simpler preservation model because they exist autonomously from other documents and their purpose is, typically, limited to dissemination of information. Briefly, to be considered a record, a digital object must: possess a fixed form and stable content affixed to a stable medium; participate in an action; possess an archival bond, which is the relationship that links each record to the previous and subsequent record of the same action; involve at least three persons: the author, addressee and writer . . .; and possess an identifiable context (i.e., the framework in which the action in which the record participates takes place), including juridical-administrative, provenancial, procedural, documentary and technological contexts.”

The report focuses on electronic or digital records, broadly defined, examines cases in artistic, scientific, and government domains, including twenty-seven cases (twenty-three completed and reported on in this publication). These cases focus in interesting areas such as performance art, moving images, music, archaeology, cybercartography, astronomy, taxation, Supreme Court and land records, the use of GIS technology by archaeologists, the use of digital technologies by photographers, the functionality of government Web sites, and the development of data portals and repositories in the sciences. No one could ever disagree that this was an ambitious project in its scope, but answering the question of its success in resolving issues related to archival materials in digital form will take a lot more time. At this point, the project’s success seems to be in providing a rich body of literature on diplomatics and certain new kinds of documentary forms, all material which can be drawn by working archivists and for use in teaching (although faculty have a lot of work to do to recompose this into something that students can assess without getting lost – although that is always a responsibility of the faculty).

Anyone approaching this report quickly senses that it is too long and too unwieldy to read and absorb in any meaningful way. It is highly repetitive, essentially a pasting together of a group of long reports in each major domain, with each report repeating the same details about the purpose of InterPARES, the conclusions of the first phase of this project, and so forth. Why not write a slimmer volume reporting on the process, products, and results of this interesting project? Although there is much material on the Web related to this project, cited in this published report, doing this makes the reader question why more of the material could not have been removed, kept on the Web, and cited – creating a more normal and more reasonably priced book that could be used in classrooms and by practitioners. The scale of this book makes it very difficult to navigate around in, a problem made even harder by the lack of an index. In my opinion, books published without an index are incomplete. The lack of an index in a book of this scale is unacceptable.

Having said this, it is still a useful volume for seeing in detail a complicated, long-term, international research project. The assembling of research teams encompassing “a scholar of the activity under investigation, a technology specialist, an archival expert and a graduate research assistant,” along with many other participants is represented in its fullest. Different research methodologies employed are also described, such as
Web-based questionnaire surveys, literature reviews, researcher surveys, interviews, and “tool-building and experimentation.” Providing such detail could enable the project to be replicated in other settings (although it is difficult to imagine it ever being replicated on this scale), and it also opens the possibility for the project to be critiqued for its methodologies and approaches (as well as its results); I expect we will see some of this kind of analysis in the future (although that is not my intent here), and I hope it energizes not just discussion about digital archiving but about archival theory (especially the utility of diplomatics for new recordkeeping systems, something some critics of InterPARES remain unconvinced about).

Such scrutiny is certainly justified since the project used graduate research assistants in the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia to do a “diplomatic analysis of each type of digital entity identified in each case study,” opening the question about whether this was a project about the archiving of electronic records systems or about the viability of diplomatics as a core of archival theory or science. These analyses were “largely restricted to the testing of each type of digital object against the five necessary characteristics of a record to determine if each object could be considered a record, or whether an object was more appropriately identified as, for example, data, documents or publications. Non-records generally require a simpler preservation model because they exist autonomously from other documents and their purpose is, typically, limited to dissemination of information. Briefly, to be considered a record, a digital object must: possess a fixed form and stable content affixed to a stable medium; participate in an action; possess an archival bond, which is the relationship that links each record to the previous and subsequent record of the same action; involve at least three persons: the author, addressee and writer . . .; and possess an identifiable context (i.e., the framework in which the action in which the record participates takes place), including juridical-administrative, provenancial, procedural, documentary and technological contexts.”

This is, of course, acceptance of such a definition that many might question, and it suggests that a conclusion was reached long before the project ever began (go back and read Luciana Duranti’s series of articles on diplomatics in Archivaria or the book-length version of these essays); the individual studies in this volume suggest so many other workable definitions of digital objects extending beyond the parameters of the diplomatics tradition to mute the issue of whether these items meet the definition of records by this tradition and cloud the concerns about how to preserve these materials in the long-term. This final report recommends that “all documents the creator treats as records,” “that is, all documents that the creator relies upon in the usual and ordinary course of affairs, associates with other records and refers to as the records of its affairs” be preserved. The report authors conclude, “this is more consistent with the inclusive definition of the term ‘record’ used in statutes. It is the creator’s judgment of what constitutes the record to be kept for action and reference, and the preserver has then to assess the feasibility of preserving it over the long term.” Using diplomatics, the authors identify a “new category of records: potential records. Records have traditionally been identified as such retrospectively; that is, after having been completed and issued with a fixed form and stable content; but, with dynamic systems, there is the possibility of identifying ‘prospective’ records.” However, there is an awful lot of material to wade through to find this, and one wonders whether years and lots of money were really required to discover this or, if in fact, this is really a discovery at all, as others, both within and outside of the archival community, have written about objects for a long time (but given that the project seems to have been so inwardly focused on its own theoretical framework and avoided reading other archival literature by people it disagreed with, perhaps we should not be surprised by this).

This is an important publication, but I am not convinced that a more streamlined volume, with all the detailed reports online, would not have been a better publication. As it is, I suspect most will read Luciana Duranti and Kenneth Thibodeau, “The Concept of Record in Interactive, Experiential and Dynamic Environments: the View of InterPARES,” Archival Science 6, no. 1 (2006): 13–68, and let it go at that. However, then so much other interesting stuff is missed. This is important work. It deserves to be presented in a better way, and it needs to be read, analyzed, and debated. It represents the largest international research project ever done, and one probably never to be outdone.

Letters of the Art Raiders

2008-09-17T03:15:00.002-04:00

I have long been fascinated by the cultural and political activities of the American Progressives, operating in an era not only when there was supreme confidence in reforming and managing society but when these efforts translated into the founding of great institutions (libraries, museums, archives, universities) and disciplines (history, political science, economics, anthropology) necessary for staffing these institutions. Cynthia Saltzman, Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures 1880-World War I (New York: Viking, 2008) interested me because it analyzed the imperialistic collecting that laid the foundation for great institutional and personal art collections that we enjoy and marvel at today.

What we learn in reading her book is that the dealers, collectors, and others involved in amassing these collections left behind their story in rich archival holdings that have not been fully told. Peering at the museums of today, Saltzman muses that the “stillness and beauty of the museum galleries reveal of the rough and tumble involved in the very worldly pursuit of pictures.” She then argues, “That aspect of the story unfolds in written records. Letters and cables, penned and typed out a century ago by dealers, experts, and collectors reveal the tangle of motivations and circumstances behind each art purchase. Large leather sales books document the canvases that went in and out of galleries and the details of every transaction – dates, prices, sellers, buyers, investors, and middlemen. . . . These documents unveil the combination of ego, idealism, and ambition that fired America’s Old Master collecting, and they suggest the complexity of the process by which a nation acquires its culture and art” (p. 7).

In Saltzman’s capable hands, we can read interesting stories about the chase after particular paintings, the wheeling and dealing engaged in by an intriguing array of characters, and how people who believe they can shape society to their own ends often leave behind wonderful documentation about their exploits.

Scrapbook History

2008-09-14T11:34:00.002-04:00

There is a new book coming out in early November on the history of American scrapbooks, authored by Jessica Helfand and published by Yale University Press. In today’s New York Times Magazine there is an essay by Rob Walker on the book and reflecting about the nature of scrapbooks. Walker, in “Shared Memories,” provides some interesting observations about the nature of scrapbooking.

Walker suggests that scrapbookers of 50 and 100 years ago were not probably thinking about future audiences. Now, however, “scrapbooking is a multibillion-dollar affair, with specialty publications and businesses serving a huge market of self-documentarians. By and large, their work has little aesthetic resemblance to what Helfand has compiled. And while contemporary ‘scrappers’ may not be thinking about future historians, a good number are thinking about an audience — and it isn’t just the grandkids.” Helfand apparently connects scrapbooks to the commonplace book tradition and sees their creators on “voyages of self-discovery” and working in privacy. While there were commercial suppliers for scrapbooks a century ago, now, with the advent of Web-based tools, the enterprise is far more public, or at least Walker makes the point that there has been a major transition from private or personal use to a public process.

Given how many scrapbooks reside in archives today, and how many digital versions may never come to an archives (unless new kinds of digital repositories are created and sustained), Helfand’s book will be one to add to the libraries of professional archivists. I look forward to reading it.

Restoring Order

2008-09-13T10:19:00.002-04:00

For a very long time, archivists have referred to and used the concept of provenance or respect des fonds with great confidence, acknowledging its origins in nineteenth century France. Archivists have linked this to that nation’s first truly public archives and the establishment of the Ecole des Chartes, the first formal training ground for archivists. This perspective has more to do with legend and myth than reality, as we learn in Lara Jennifer Moore’s Restoring Order: The Ecole des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870 (Duluth, MN: Litwin Books, LLC, 2008). This author notes that these theoretical classification and control schemes have achieved a “kind of sacred status in the archival community,” leading archivists especially to not explore the “political context” in which these principles “first emerged” (pp. 108-109).

Moore at first follows the familiar story of how the new French government initially started to destroy the archives of the old regime, but then realized that it needed these records for a variety of purposes. They nationalized thousands of private archives and libraries and opened these to the public. However, as Moore carefully describes, there is a lot more to this story: “Perhaps because scholars tend to see the French Revolution as the defining moment in the history of archives and libraries, they have as yet given relatively little attention to nineteenth-century developments” (p. 13). Moore’s book, based on her dissertation at Stanford, has rectified this. Unfortunately, her premature death in 2003 has robbed us of the talents of a historian interested in the development of modern archives.

Restoring Order follows the efforts of the Ecole des Chartes, from it’s founding in 1821 to about 1870, in developing systems for organizing and providing access to archives and libraries. Moore is very adept at considering the political influences on this institution, debunking any sense that this school was some sort of neutral player in establishing the means to educate new professional librarians and archivists. Moore says her study “is in part an attempt to encourage archivists and librarians to consider their collections in historical and political terms, it is also an effort to encourage historians – and particularly historians of France – to consider the archival and bibliographical practices that have shaped the collections on which they rely” (p. 22). Since my focus is on the archives portion of her study, I should state upfront that this book is a true model for archival history.

Moore delves into a number of interesting events and issues in tracing the role of the school and its training of librarians and archivists in the half-century that is her focus. She shows how the mission and approach of the Ecole des Chartes shifted a number of times in response to changing governments and political trends, debunking any idea that somehow the origins of the modern archival profession was immune from such influences. And Moore explains why. In considering their work in classification, inventorying, inspection, and centralization, Moore argues “archives . . . were linked with the controlled production of national history, which was seen as essential to political unity and stability” (p. 195). What will especially interest archivists is Moore’s depiction of the debates between archivists and librarians and their role in French history, leading to the creation of very distinct professional identities by the 1860s; we see similar debates in other nations, such as the United States, at later times.

This is an important and immensely readable study of an important phase in the development of modern archives.

Archives and the Cold War in Latin America

2008-09-11T14:08:00.002-04:00

Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser (eds.), In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008)

Reviewed by
Joel A. Blanco, PhD student, Archival Studies
University of Pittsburgh

Scholarship about the Cold War has mainly focused on the clashes between the United States and the Soviet Union and between capitalism and communism. However, recent scholarly work has been pointing out the necessity of looking beyond and studying the social, political, economical and cultural struggles of the people in the countries that experienced the effects of this period. This includes, for example, an analysis of the Cold War in Latin American. In that regard, In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War, a collection of essays from scholars from North America, Latin America and Europe, is an excellent source.

The main goal of the book is to contribute as ‘an intellectual “rapprochement” with the Cold War in Latin America’ (p.7). This different approach is presented through three main sections: 1) ‘New Approaches, Debates, and Sources,’ 2) ‘Latin America between the Superpowers: International realpolitik, the ideology of the State, and the “Latin Americanization” of the Conflict,’ and 3) ‘Everyday contests over culture and representation in the Latin American Cold War.’

Constantly present throughout the book, and explicitly stated in the essays from the first section and the concluding essay by Daniela Spenser, is the fact that this different approach to study the Cold War is significantly related to the availability of new documentation from U.S. declassified records, truth commissions, the discovery of hidden archives in Latin America, and access to archives of post-Communist countries and Cuba. This availability of records not only helps scholars to expand the study of the Cold War from varies perspectives, but as Spenser explains, it also contributes to read ‘“old” and “new” sources alike with fresh eyes’ (p. 383).

From an archival perspective, the most important contribution comes from Thomas S. Blanton’s essay “Recovering the Memory of the Cold War: Forensic History and Latin America.” Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, provides an excellent account of how the recently available documentation have been important not only for scholarly research, but perhaps most importantly, for memory construction, historical justice efforts, and accountability. In Blanton words, ‘the ongoing recovery of archives and memory in Latin America makes possible new landmarks in the universal jurisdiction of history,’ and therefore, ‘Cold War history can perhaps learn the most from Latin Americans, their truth commissions, their exhumations, and their resurrected files’ (p. 68).

Although Blanton’s work is the only one that focuses entirely on archives and records, these themes are also address in other essays. For example, Eric Zolov’s “¡Cuba sí, Yanquis no! The Sacking of the Instituto Cultural México-Norteamericano in Morelia, Michoacan, 1961” describes how protesters destroyed cultural resources like archival records and film collections from the institute as a symbolic act against the U.S. invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. And Seth Fein, in his essay “Producing the Cold War in Mexico: the public limits of covert communications,” brings an interesting issue related to archival custody when he explains that to obtain access to films from one of Mexico’s leading newsreels in the 1950s he did not find them in the film archives from Mexico, but rather through Freedom of Information Act requests to the U.S. Department of State (the newsreels were part of a U.S. funded program).

From this book, archivists and records professionals can learn about the importance of archives and records in the study of the Cold War, and the struggles for historical justice and accountability. Furthermore, the approach of the book to give special emphasis to social, political and cultural conflicts can also be applied to study how these same conflicts affects records creation and destruction, and how they shape the archive.

Truth Commissions and Archives

2008-09-06T03:05:00.002-04:00

The growing number of truth commissions around the world, whatever success they may have in a particular society, are generating massive amounts of archival materials. Greg Grandin and Thomas Miller Klubock, eds., Truth Commissions: State Terror, History, and Memory, issue 97 of the Radical History Review (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) provides an interesting view of how this works. The editors indicate that the essays in this volume are considering the “internal contradictions and tensions in truth commissions’ historiographical projects, raising a number questions about the role of historical narratives in legitimizing state rule” (p. 2) The various authors cover truth commissions in South Africa, Chile, and Guatemala; there are also some calls for a U.S. Truth Commission, for its role in the subjugation of Native Americans, African American slavery, the infringement of the civil rights of African Americans, and atrocities in Vietnam and other nations. The focus here is not on archives per se, but this publication supplements the growing literature on truth commissions and provides a context for those interested in the documentation they accumulate and how archivists might approach working with these groups to document their activity. As archivists consider aspects of late twentieth and early twenty-first century society they need to document, truth commissions will be high on their list.

The Big Archive

2008-08-31T19:26:00.002-04:00

Artists, in their work, comment on all aspects of life, and they have not ignored archives. Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008) documents such commentary. Spieker’s book “looks at the way in which the bureaucratic archive shaped art practice in the twentieth century, from Dadaist montage to late-twentieth century installation” (p. 1). Spieker analyzes art commenting on the archivist’s role, how archives are ordered, how early professional archivists viewed records as a life form, the differences between archives and registries, and the use by artists of archival artifacts or symbols (such as card indexes, typewriters, and file folders). One gains an interesting perspective on how government and other organizations were viewing records and their management, especially as the artists provided commentary on archival principles such as provenance.

We can get a better sense of how Spieker deals with his subject when we examine more closely what he has to say about specific schools of art. In considering Surrealists, for example, Spieker argues, “Early Surrealist practice took very seriously the idea of the unconscious as an archive of files without an address, as demonstrated by the numerous calls made by the Surrealist leadership to collect, record, and classify the data of the unconscious” (p. 92). He also has this to say about the Surrealists: “Where traditional archives safeguard the preservation of historical facts, the archive of Surrealism collects events that, to the extent that they are unconscious, function as interruptions of historical process. The Surrealists wanted to establish an archive not of history but of its importance, not of narrative but of its other” (p. 96). Looking at another art movement, Soviet futurists, Spieker explains that they sought to “destroy the bourgeois art museum and replace it with a ‘new museum,’” considering the “relationship between archives and museums, using the term ‘archive’ as derogatory shorthand for a revisionist attitude toward the past” (p. 105).

If you have a sense, when reading such excerpts, that Spieker provides us with some understanding of how parts of society see archives at a particular era, then you have a good sense of the book. Sometimes Spieker quotes from observers that reveal a view of archives that no archivist would claim, such as these comment by artist Ilya Kabakov: “Archives contain paperwork that no longer circulates in the bureaucracy, paperwork that has lapsed and become garbage” (p. ix). Indeed, archivists will find in this book terms they do not commonly use – such as “archivizing” and “archivization” – descriptors more often found in the texts of scholars applying hip critical theory and other approaches to their subject. However, such issues are more than balanced by, first, the images of artistic interpretations of art that look, in a sometimes uncanny fashion, the repositories archivists work in, and, second, the use of the archival literature written by archival theorists such as Jenkinson, Schellenberg, Posner, and Muller, Feith, and Fruin.

Reinventing Knowledge

2008-08-25T18:03:00.002-04:00

We are very accustomed to hearing or reading the self-congratulating messages that we presently live in THE Information Age. Ian F. McNeely with Lisa Wolverton, Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008) provides an easy to read historical analysis of that claim identifying the library, monastery, university, Republic of Letters, disciplines, and the laboratory as the major means for generating and using new knowledge. While the authors focus on the Western tradition, they also trace the influence of that tradition in non-Western cultures. And near the beginning they suggest that doing this kind of analysis corrects our view of new digital information systems: “We risk committing a serious error by thinking that cheap information made universally available through electronic media fulfills the requirements of a democratic society for organized knowledge. Past generations had to win knowledge by using their wits, and never took what they knew for granted. Recalling their labor and travail is, if anything, more important than ever if we are to distinguish what is truly novel about the ‘information age’ from what is transient hype” (p. xx). Towards the end of the book, McNeely and Wolverton firmly state that “Promoters of the vaunted ‘information age’ often forget that knowledge has always been about connecting people, not collecting information” (p. 271). And if one walks away from reading the book with nothing other than this idea, the time will have been well spent.

There is not much that one will find that is surprising in this volume. They start with an examination of the origins of the ancient library, while also considering the emergence of writing systems, the notion of the museum, and the focus on approaches (such as collation, translation, and synthesis) to scholarship, and the early proponents and shapers of the library. The authors then move through the role of the monastery (the “first institution of knowledge specifically adapted to the absence of civilization, to the wilderness” [p. 51]), the establishment of the university in the twelfth century, the Republic of Letters (the “international community of learning stitched together initially by handwritten letters in the mail and later by printed books and journals” [p. 122]), the beginning of disciplines in the eighteenth century, and, finally, the laboratory with the rise of science in the late nineteenth century. It is the laboratory, they argue, that “will continue to dominate the life of learning,” “reshaping the basic missions of other institutions, pushing some toward obsolescence, giving others a new lease on life” (p. 253). It is pulling all this together, in a coherent interpretative framework, which makes the book particularly useful.

Although there is nothing in this volume specifically focusing on the archive, the authors often allude to preservation as a critical function. In stating the book’s purpose, the authors say that “it traces the production, preservation, and transmission of everything deemed worth knowing in what has become the ‘Western’ tradition” (p. xiv). When comparing the role of the monasteries and later scholars producing manuscript and printed texts, McNeely and Wolverton indicates that the monasteries “first originated to preserve the past, the second [the Republic of Letters] to shape the future; the first literally cloisters knowledge from the profane world, the second embraces and seeks to reform that world” (p. 141). Archivists reading this volume might feel slighted, but it would be a good idea for them to reflect on just what role they have played in shaping new knowledge (except perhaps for knowledge about the past). Libraries and museums, institutions McNeely and Wolverton do mention, possess a critical archival function, but that does not shine through in this book.

Old Media, New Media

2008-08-23T10:40:00.002-04:00

As Lisa Gitelman states in a number of places in her book, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), she is fighting against the notion that media tends to move along an “inevitable path”; it is not always progressive, confident, converging, or harmonious (among a variety of characteristics). The reception and history of media is more complex than that, even to the point as not always having a clear meaning. The strength of her analysis is to remind us, archivists, librarians, and other information experts, that the historical and social context of media is extremely important: “The introduction of new media . . . is never critically revolutionary: new media are less points of epistemic rupture than they are socially embedded sites for the ongoing negotiation of meaning as such” (p. 6). So, she argues, it is useful to look at old media in order to understand new media.

This is an interesting book for archivists. Gitelman’s case studies include recorded sound in the 1878-1910 period, now part of the documentary heritage archivists work to preserve, and the emergence of the World Wide Web, part of the digital heritage archivists are still stymied about to preserve in some meaningful, usable way. Through her discussions, Gitelman plays with the meaning of document, record, text, bibliography, manuscript, evidence, page, archive, and inscriptions – all in ways that step in, out, and around conventional ways archivists have considered such terms. In both case studies, Gitelman examines the full historical and technological contexts supporting these technologies. For example, she states, “sound reproduction became defined by and against an existing field of metaphors, attitudes, assumptions, and practices. Varied constructions of mimesis and music formed important contexts for the uses and users of the new medium” (p .68). She considers the digital networks and texts as arriving “amid an existing textual economy, a world and workplace powerfully self-constructed according to the logic of contemporary media: print publication, broadcasting, Hollywood, and the record labels, but also punch cards, printouts, and paperwork. Experiences with digital networks have helped to construct a coincident yet contravening logic for digital texts, partly in response to material features of the new medium, and partly in response to the hugely varied contexts of their ongoing reception and development” (p. 95).

For the archivist and others interested in the nature of recording technologies, this is an interesting scholarly study providing a richer way of examining of old, new, and emerging information technologies.

Curiosity and Correspondence in Early America

2008-08-19T21:13:00.002-04:00

Susan Scott Parrish, in her American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American and Culture by University of North Carolina Press, 2006)”argues that, because America was a great material curiosity for the Old World and its immigrants to the New, America’s unique matrix of contested knowledge making – its polycentric curiosity – was crucially formative of modern European ways of knowing” (p. 7). Parrish depicts the gathering of natural history specimens and the exchange of information about natural history, primarily through the creation of an elaborate correspondence network (the reason why this book ought to be of interest to archivists; in addition to letters, travel narratives, publications, reports, and other documents are circulated in this network). “Colonial subjects in America were not mere collectors for the knowledge makers of the metropole. European correspondents depended upon locals for their kinds of expertise: identifying a novel specimen, understanding its properties or behavior, reporting on or depicting the specimen in its live and natural context, or seeing the interdependence of plants and animals” (p. 8). Parrish provides descriptions of the nature and content of letters: “These were likely to be one-to-three page hodgepodge descriptions of whatever the American correspondent had observed since his or her last letter. They often accompanied or gave notice of shipped specimens. The metropolitan correspondents wrote back with the latest scientific news, with effusive thanks for the specimen gift, with more requests, and often sent back English flora or exotic flora recently arrive in London” (p. 18), And so forth.

The use of correspondence as a main pillar of the natural history network is another reminder about how earlier information societies functioned long before the advent of the computer and what we now consider to be THE information society. While Parrish’s book is not just a study of the correspondence, read by archivists it can provide another means that they understand something more about why and how such correspondence was created and often maintained (and in some instances even published in scientific and other journals). It is a book similar to others by scholars such as David Cressy and Robert Darnton demonstrating how information and communication networks were created and sustained, leaving behind heaps of archival documentation. As time wore on, the use of correspondence became more sophisticated. As Parrish examines the development of transatlantic friendships, often between people who never met face-to-face, she observes, “Letters possessed not only evidentiary but also diagnostic force. They would not only reflect but reveal what otherwise remained hidden. Letters were to be the proper modern instrument for probing human nature” (p. 137).