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.