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.
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