Let's go to a conference

Just got back from the Society of Southwest Archivist’s conference in Austin, Texas.  [http://southwestarchivists.org/]  Got out just before the heavy rains that caused massive flooding in San Antonio.  No rain here in the Rolling Plains.  It looks like August or September – all dried up.

It was my first time at this conference and it was great.  The organization is small enough not to be overwhelming.  I heard someone say about 290 people were registered.  The SSA covers six states – Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Arizona – although anyone from anywhere can join.  And as I mentioned it was in Austin, which is a great city with the best restaurants and music scene anywhere.  This conference was so good I actually went to all the sessions – not my usual modus operandi.  I guess I shouldn’t admit that.

The first session I went to made me wish that I was back in school.  It was a case study of a re-created disaster management experience – part of a course in the Informational Technology Department at the University of Texas at Austin.  The first test addressed water damage.  They gathered all sorts of both objects and paper and drowned them in a sink. Then they tried different methods of salvage and preservation. Next they got another set of stuff and with the help of the fire department set things on fire and again practiced disaster rescue techniques. What a great training tool and such fun. Since I’ve had to deal with wet paper and burned paper that would have been helpful experience. Maybe I’ll practice at home.

Another tidbit that I learned was about a program called Archive-It.  (http://www.archive-it.org/)  This program is a web harvester and is used to archive websites by taking snapshots of web pages at set intervals.  University libraries and archives use the program to preserve their institutions web pages. Now that so much of information is born digital, documentation of course catalogs or department news or whatever can easily be lost.  With this program you can set it to crawl specific web pages at whatever interval you want and it will take a snapshot of the page say once a month or once a semester or whenever.  Archives responsible for preservation of their institutions’ digitally born history should really look into this. I’m telling my institutions about it.  Of course it costs money, but the presenters felt that its usability made it well worth the cost.

The highlight of the conference for me was a case study of a new collection at the library of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. Beth Dodd, Architecture and Planning Library Curator, talked about an unbelievably rich collection of photographs, drawings, and unpublished notes and reports on the architecture of the Maya by George and Gerrie Andrews.  I’m so jealous.  I’d love to work on something like that.  Why? Well, I happen to have a PhD in archaeology although my specialty is Maya ceramics not architecture.  I used to work in Belize and I’ve seen some of the sites documented in this collection, but not all.  How many certified archivists with a background in Maya studies could there be? It would be such fun, especially to see pictures taken in the fifties and sixties. Maybe I should go volunteer to work on that collection. As an added bonus, it is Austin.

See: [http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utaaa/00060/aaa-00060.html] for the Andrews Maya Architecture collection

Provenance, original order, and maps

Most of the libraries that I work for inherited their archives.  As you clean out your filing cabinet, what better place for the papers you’re reluctant to get rid of yourself than the library.  (See previous blogpost on donating collections.)  In one case, the archive was started by one of the history professors at the university.  He accepted donations from citizens around Abilene and then had his students going through the boxes of material he accepted.  There was no plan and very little understanding of archival principles or methods. The result was a bit of a mess.  Collections were dismantled and once a collection has been dismantled it is almost impossible to put it back together again.  Why would you want to keep collection intact? Because where that paper originated is an important part of its history. Knowledge of that adds to understanding and may enhance its significance and clarify its meaning to a researcher. That map, for instance, wasn’t created in a vacuum.  It relates to other papers and needs those other materials to tell its story.  More on that map later.

At this point I should explain in case you’re not an archivist.  There are two overarching principles that guide the processing of archival collections - provenance and original order.  Provenance means that the integrity of a collection must be maintained.  In order words, you don’t mix collections together or separate parts without maintaining a link to the original.  If someone gives the archives photographs, for example, you don’t put them immediately in your photograph collection.  Certainly you can house like things together –maps, for instance – but you need to indicate in some manner to what collection those maps or photographs belong and they don’t belong to a generalized map collection.  In other words the history of that map or photograph would be lost if collections were intermingled.  As I said before, but it bears repeating -that history gives you context and gives you important information about the creator of the collection, what they thought was important, and what was important in the time and place that they lived.

The second principle is original order.  Part of the job of an archivist is to determine how the collection is organized if it is.  Like provenance, this can tell you what was important to the creator of that collection and tell you something about that person.  As an archivist you try to maintain that original order as closely as possible.  Original order gives the archivist an organizational roadmap to follow making it easier for description of the collection and facilitating searches by researchers.

Sometimes you get lucky when you look at material that is separated from its original collection.  Here comes another story.  Maps. The librarian in charge of the archives at one institution found maps that had been removed from their original collection.  The maps were hand drawn and looked like a battlefield possibly in Europe.  They were in a drawer with other somewhat similar maps.  One had the name of a collection, which happened to be a collection that I was working on at the time.  The collection had been rescued from the trash and primarily dealt with water issues in and around Abilene.  According to papers in the collection, its creator  had learned his engineering and drawing skill in World War I in France.  Hmm!  One of the history professors at a nearby institution is a map expert, especially of the world wars.  He came over and immediately identified the map as being of a battlefield in France in World War I.  Apparently the breastworks and trenches are still there.  Comparing that information with the other maps in the drawer and the military information in the files of the collection we were able to re-connect the map to its original collection and explain why an institution in West Texas had a hand drawn map of a World War I battlefield in France.  Cool! Being a detective can be fun.  There are two morals to this story – maintain provenance in a collection and collaboration works.

Donating Aunt Matilda's papers

 So you want to give your family papers to an archive.  What do you need to do? Usually it’s best to contact an archive before you are ready to put everything in a dumpster so they can determine if it is an appropriate collection for them. I suspect that most people don’t know that archives and museums have mission statements that define the focus of the collecting activities of the institution.  Further, they have specific collecting policies that dictate what they will not only accept, but actively solicit.  Ideally archivists do what is called appraisals before accepting collections. The term means in part making a determination as to the importance and relevance of a collection for the mission of their particular archive. That determination is totally unrelated to monetary value.  Determination of possible monetary value, especially for income tax purposes, (As you know, donors can receive income tax deductions for some donations) is the job of a certified paper appraiser not an archivist.  I can make an educated guess as to research potential of a collection, gauge public interest, and the appropriateness of a collection for a specific institution, but monetary value – no idea and really very little interest.

If you want to donate Aunt Matilda’s papers, you need to find an archive that might be interested in her letters and things. One resource is the local institutions.  They can steer you to the most appropriate facility.  For example, if Aunt Matilda was an army nurse during Vietnam maybe the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech is the best repository for her papers. They actively solicit papers related to the Vietnam era as well as those related to ranching in West Texas.  Hardin-Simmons accepts papers related to the history and people of the region around Abilene.  Abilene Christian University is interested in papers related to the Restoration Movement and Churches of Christ.  You get the idea.

Next question is what do you save if you are charged with cleaning out Aunt Matilda’s attic? It’ s hard to throw things away. (Although some people do it way too easily and important information can be lost.) I’ve worked on quite a few collections salvaged from the dumpster.  Back to what to save and what to throw away.  Some decisions are hard.  Others are easy.  Consider all those National Geographic magazines.  The pictures are so wonderful and the information so interesting that you or Aunt Matilda saved them for years.  But so does everybody else including the National Geographic Society itself.  The Society has even published a CD called the “Complete National Geographic” which has all of the print editions of the magazines since it’s inception in 1888.  So it’s ok to re-cycle yours at the recycling center.  Don’t give it to a library or archives because archivists and librarians can’t be hoarders either.  There’s not enough space or money to preserve all of the paper we have produced even if you just count that from the United States. Examples of what archives generally don’t hoard – more than two or three duplicates; published material available elsewhere; moldy crumbling paper (they might make copies of it if the information is worth it); books that aren’t rare or first editions; perhaps some individual financial material or medical information that raises privacy issues might not belong in an archive.  What is important for an archive to preserve is primary documentation.  That means papers, like letters or notes that have not been published elsewhere.  Of course, every collection is different.  Ask your local archivist or librarian.  They can help.

Cowboys, cattle, cotton, and oil

Well, the Russians have found me.  At least Google’s little map of hits to blogs indicates three hits from that region.  I’m told, as I’m sure you know, that it’s probably a bot probably looking for someone to spam. Can you imagine a Russian being interested in a blog about archives in West Texas? Fortunately Google takes care of all unwanted hits. Yah Google! 

But just in case those Russians are interested in West Texas and archives, here is additional information.  A couple of blogs ago I used the term “lone arranger.”  I suppose that speaks for itself, but in case it doesn’t, a lone arranger is usually the only archivist at an institution.  There are many of us around the country and fortunately we have a great list serve. But me I take it a step further. I am not only the only archivist in my five institutions, but I have been the only archivist within a 100-mile radius.  (I understand that recently another archivist has started work in a museum in a nearby town that is only 35 miles from Abilene so I’m not as alone.) That aloneness goes with the territory I guess.  Except for Abilene, this part of Texas is pretty scarcely populated.  To give you an example, the population of the town in which I live and the one next to it is a hundred people in total. That counts the 12 miles in between the two.  (Note: I use the term “town” very loosely.)  Did I mention that I live 40 miles from Abilene and 15 miles from a gas station or grocery store? Needless to say there are more cows than people.  This was Comanche territory and the land of the southern herd of the American bison.  The area wasn’t truly settled until after the Civil War when the bison were annihilated and the Comanche on the reservation at Ft. Sill.  Abilene wasn’t even established by the Texas and Pacific Railroad until 1881.  That means collections in the local archives for the most part date after the 1880s and focus on the history of this part of Texas – cowboys, cattle, cotton, and oil.  That could explain the Russians.  Maybe it reminds them of Siberia – only lots, lots warmer.  And cowboys, cattle, cotton, and oil are interesting and fun! Just check out the oral histories on the wtda.alc.org.

Ordering archival supplies

       Last week I had to order supplies to finish re-housing a collection.  You’d think this would be a simple task, but for some reason it’s a task that takes an inordinate amount of time.  You can’t just order file boxes or storage boxes.  Oh no, you have to find the right box for all of those odd sized  papers and items.  For example, what size box is best for a soda can used as part of an award?  It can be complicated.  Besides housing odd-sized things there are so many choices of types of boxes – shallow lids or not. drop front boxes or not, and on and on.  Supplies are ordered from archival supply companies. There are several and all are available on line. (www.hollingermetaledge.com; www.gaylord.com; www.universityproducts.com; www.lightimpressionsdirect.com ) Hollinger used to be the premier company for archival supplies and they advertise that they are the oldest, but since Metal Edge bought them I’ve experienced difficulty in getting supplies delivered in a timely manner.  Gaylord is my choice these days and they give discounts for institutions, especially if you will be ordering a large number of boxes and supplies.

        Would you believe that even ordering regular storage boxes involves lots of choices?  After much research I've found that one of the Gaylord storage boxes is strongest.  For some reason the traditional blue Hollinger box has gotten very flimsy. See below for what I mean.  Unless you are using it for objects that put no pressure on the sides and are light weight I don’t recommend it.  Get the heavier box.  It will last longer and is about the same price.

Flimsy e-flute box

Stronger acid-free box

          By the way, late May and early June are terrible times to order archival supplies. It is the end of the budget year for many institutions, so everyone is putting in an order to spend any leftover money. It can take forever to get supplies. Almost any other time is quicker. Do shop around though both within a web site and between companies.  (That’s one of the reasons ordering takes so long.)  Prices and box size and type do vary even within the same company.  Don’t forget to consider shipping fees. They do add up.  Also pay attention when you are ordering odd sized boxes for newspapers or textiles or whatever.   The price listed is usually for one box, but you may be required to order three or more boxes. Prices also vary based on box color or coating.  Black and tan boxes are usually more expensive, for example.  E-flute can be cheaper.  (See the box on the left.) E-flute is light blue and looks like cardboard – two thin layers with corrugated layer in the middle. It is fine for light weight objects like textiles or small items requiring small boxes.  Next to e-flute, blue grey boxes are often the cheapest and the only difference is color.  Water resistant boxes (dura-coated or safe-cote boxes) to keep out moisture are probably not necessary unless you are in a very humid environment or store in the basement where you shouldn’t have archives anyway.  I don’t know if they are better at keeping dust out or not.  Nothing can keep West Texas dirt out in my opinion. Good luck!