Compromises in Preservation : The ideal vs the real world

            Sometimes what you should do to preserve collections runs head long into the reality of little money, time and staff.  (That goes for personal home collections as well.)   Ideal or not compromises must be made in the processing of collections.  The first compromise, of course, is the housing environment for the collections.  Most small institutions and homes do not have adequate controls of temperature and humidity.  None of the institutions where I have worked do.  They try to keep a stable environment, but as I’ve mentioned before that is difficult here in West Texas.

            The second area that often requires compromises is the use of archival housing material, such as inert photographic sleeves.  Ideally before a collection is processed an appraisal would have been done and a processing plan written.  Those two activities should consider the cost of archival housing materials before any processing actually occurs.  Unfortunately appraisals and budget plans don’t always happen.  So what happens when you are half way through a project and you have limited resources? You compromise.  We had to do that on this latest project of photographs.  The budget was limited both in term of staff time and housing supplies.  A brief description of the condition of some of the photographs is in order here.  Some had been used for displays so there was old acidic glue on the back.  Some had adhesive or masking tape.  Some were sticky where there had been tape.  The collection consists of negatives, slides, and prints both black and white and color.  A small percentage was being sent for digitization while the rest was to be returned to the institution.

            Supplies on hand included some inert sleeves and a ream of bond paper.  The decision was made to use the sleeves for as many of the damaged photographs as possible.  That included any photograph that had old glue, was sticky, or had evidence of acidic or chemical damage.  Torn or fragile photographs were also sleeved.  Where possible all negatives were sleeved in archival material.  When the sleeves were all used the second line of defense was to separate the photographs using bond paper.  The hope was that this would deter the migration of acid from the damaged photographs to ones that were in decent condition at least until proper sleeves could be purchased.  The damaged ones were housed together in the back of a file as far away from the others as possible and still maintain order.  Other facilities might have other approaches, but this was what was determined to be the best that we could do in this case. 

            For me the most important lessons are the importance of appraisals and processing plans and accepting that sometimes you have to do the best that you can given the limitations of money, time, and staff.  That goes for preserving a personal collection as well.

Thoughts on Provenance

            Well, no report on the conference I was to attend.  Didn’t get to go.  Got sick thanks to germs passed around at a family party. I’m still bummed because I was really looking forward to going.  There’s another conference in New Orleans that I may attend.  Will keep you posted.

            Since I could do nothing these last 10 days, but cough, I’ve spent the time thinking (that is when I wasn’t watching a marathon of Indiana Jones movies).  It occurred to me that although the importance of maintaining provenance and collection integrity is obvious to me it doesn’t appear to be obvious to many repositories.  Granted most of the dismantling of collections was done in the past, at least at the libraries where I work, but it doesn’t seem even today that many library programs emphasize an understanding of provenance as part of their curriculum.  So much information is lost when the history of a collection is lost due to dismantling.  Perhaps an example will help clarify.  As I’ve talked about before I have been working on a photograph collection of one of the universities.  I noted that the photographs had all been literally dumped together.  Not only was much of the original order lost, but also any history of the photographs or the photographer.  What is known is that the photographs were taken to record the events and people of the university.  What is not known now is which department initiated which group of photographs.  Some were for the yearbook.  (Obviously some of the portraits were taken for that purpose.)  Some others were for the campus newspaper.  The public relations department maintained photographic archives and used the photographs for various publications. Portraits, especially of board of trustee members, were part of their collection it seems.  The alumni association also had photographs of various events and people.  Some of the photographs were probably from different campus organizations and social clubs apparently given by individuals or the club itself. In other words where the photographs originated in most instances is based on conjecture.  Most of that information is lost.

            All we really know is that a particular photograph was generated by some department or individual connected to the university.  Just think how much more meaningful it would be to know that a set of photographs were taken as part of a fund raising project or for a newspaper article about an important event or person at the university.  The metadata (information records) about that photograph would be so much richer because more of the context of the photograph would be known.  Why a photograph was taken and for whom can be as important as what it depicts because it provides much of the history not just of a particular photo but also of the institution and how it functioned at a certain period of time.  In other words, maintaining provenance is important even for a bunch of photographs.