Archives Found

I’ve been slowly catching up with the rest of the world with regards to watching the John Adams HBO miniseries. While I’m only up to the third episode (Don’t Tread on Me), I’ve become somewhat fascinated by the choices that were made by the producers and directors in the name of storytelling, and I’ve been doing some poking around online to see what others  think about the series. In particular, check out Boston 1775’s “Quizzing John Adams” posts for some interesting thoughts and links.  
Last year I had a chance to see John Adams: Unbound at the Boston Public Library, and while the exhibit was interesting, I was completely fascinated by the digitized materials. Being able to look at both the transcript and the handwritten notations of Adams throughout his personal library seemed so, well, personal to me. His one-sided arguments with various thinkers of the time could be a valuable resource to researchers looking to uncover his motives in one area or another.

You can check out the digitized Adams Family Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, including a new online discussion of documents relating to specific episodes of the miniseries. Due to the hard work of one of my grad school classmates, Jeremy Dibbell, you can now compare your library to that of John Adams on LibraryThing, and you can view a digital version of John Adams’ personal copy of the Declaration of Independence here.

While these important projects were funded generously over the years by a number of foundation grants, I think that they can in some ways serve as a model for smaller but still important collections in other institutions. The level of access to this information that is now provided to researchers using these documents is wildly above the level of access that many repositories have for even their most important collections. Through dogged publicity, grant writing, and support, these institutions have managed to create a model that is much more useful and interconnected than previous incarnations of accessibility. Even though I’m late to the party on this one, kudos to all involved in these projects.

While clearly I’ve been pretty busy with other things lately, I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to talk about the MayDay initiative. Started in 2006 by then-SAA president Richard Pearce-Moses and several others, MayDay is a way to call attention to the challenges of protecting historical collections. Some of the ways to participate in MayDay: update your disaster plan, educate administrators and users regarding the dangers that collections face, do a preservation survey to assess conditions and hazards. SAA has helpfully compiled many other suggestions here. Check them out– and even if you’ve missed MayDay this year, no reason why you can’t implement these ideas in the coming months.

How to increase your visitor stream? Well, after the National Portrait Gallery hung Stephen Colbert’s portrait by the bathrooms for an announced six-week “exhibition,”fans and visitors flocked to the portrait. So last Monday, Stephen stopped by to check in with his portrait– and the National Portrait Gallery announced due to the popularity of the “exhibit,” that it will continue hanging there until April 1st.

Check out the relevant episodes of The Colbert Report here at Comedy Central, and the Smithsonian’s extension announcement here. There are several YouTube videos that capture user pilgrimages to the portrait here and here, and reactions from Smithsonian employees and others (from The Smithsonian Channel) here.

This seems to be a banner season for archives and photographs. Suddenly, it seems like wherever I turn, I run into more articles about donations and recent findings.

First it was the snapshots that quite possibly show Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg some 144 years ago, on the day of delivering his famous address. This op-ed intrigued me greatly, for one of the biggest problems with this type of photo is the actual identification of the subjects within the frame. While the author can make no certain claim, the feeling evoked by the article is one of participating in a particularly historic and interesting moment. And this? Poetry:

Looking at Lincoln in these two photographs — all but his hat nearly lost in the emulsion of the film itself — I find myself wondering what it would have been like if photography had been a rudimentary discovery and had been with us, say, as long as the printing press. What would the photographic record show if it reached back, say 500 years, instead of 180?

One answer is that it would show us this same structure over and over again: a fiercely concentrated knot of people hanging on the words of someone at the center of the crowd. And around them? People standing in looser and looser concentrations, until finally — far enough from the epicenter — their attention turns away from history and focuses on the abiding interest of almost anything else. And this is somehow the inherent bias of the camera. It always directs us toward the center of attention, never away to the periphery, even though that is where our attention eventually wanders.

Full article: History and the Problem of Following the Camera’s Gaze

Related Newsweek article: Flickr Helps the Library of Congress

If you haven’t read about the Library of Congress and their Flickr project, you haven’t been paying attention. LoC recently posted a small (very, very small) digitized portion of their image collection on Flickr’s new public image area, The Commons. Using Web 2.0 and social tagging, the LoC has brought their collections to an audience that may not have otherwise encountered these images. More in Wired, and on the LoC blog.

Lastly, the Robert Capa and Gerda Taro photos, seemingly lost to history and then rediscovered and eventually acquired by the International Center for Photography. I’m really interested in seeing the rest of the reclaimed negatives– and finding out if any other evidence surrounding “The Falling Soldier” was found.

NYT article: The Capa Cache

Bill Lamin,  grandson of Pvt. Harry Lamin, has been posting his grandfather’s war letters in “real time” on a blog, simulating the experience that the family had while waiting for updates from Harry during WWI.  I happened to read an article about this on the BBC website (this Telegraph article has more details).

This blog effort is a great example of the fascination and interest that real documents and letters hold for people. What an interesting way to promote the need for preservation of the past. Even though this wasn’t set up by an archive (that I could find, anyway), I think that it would be an interesting way to set up some kind of interactive exhibit, outreach website, or display. Promoting the concept that history was once the present, and that these documents connect us to the past– I can get behind that.

Link to WWi: Experiences of an English Soldier

Link to War Diary of the 9th Battalion of York & Lancaster Regiment

I’ve always enjoyed reading about the different digitization work that various repositories undertake– I think that this outreach article is a great way to reach donors that might be so inclined to give of time, money, expertise, or whatever else is needed.

It’s Banned Book Week again, and I wanted to say something about that. Actually, Jessamyn West said it better, so here it is:

Banning books is bad. Challenging books is an exercise in free speech and a totally appropriate way of giving community feedback on library selection policies. Lumping challenged and banned books together confuses two different issues, to my mind.

Anyway, I think that she’s exactly right. Taking something completely away (banning) not only deprives others of the book, it also takes away the possibility that they might read it and decide for themselves whether or not the material is of interest. Challenging something, on the other hand, is a form of protest that does not take away the rights of other people– it registers the displeasure of the challenger in a constructive way but does not remove the ability for others to look for themselves and come to their own conclusions. While I may not agree with the challenger’s views, I think that a book challenge done in a responsible, respectful fashion is a great way to begin a conversation about library selection policies, intended audience, and community needs.

In another vein, as noted by The Onion: Nation’s Teens Disappointed By Banned Books

C-Span’s new series Presidential Libraries: History Uncovered has been quietly running on Friday nights at 8pm EST this fall in anticipation of the upcoming presidential race. So far I’ve only managed to catch 1.5 hours of one show (Truman), but I really enjoyed watching old footage of Truman’s first press conferences and ads. Even more, I enjoyed seeing a supervisory archivist (Sam Rushay) and Truman Library director Michael Devine discussing the collections and answering questions from live callers. I think that as anyone who has worked for NARA, or has even done research at a NARA-run Presidential Library could tell you, it’s quite unusual that either patrons or visitors would be able to interact with either the processing staff or the library director, so this show covers some ground that would not generally be available otherwise.

While the timing of the show (Friday night?!) leaves something to be desired, this is a great opportunity to showcase these collections and to demonstrate how the past connects with the present. It looks like previously aired episodes (as well as clips from previously unseen materials used on the show) can be downloaded from the C-Span site and watched in RealPlayer. The episodes are going in the order of Presidential term, and this week is John F. Kennedy. Stay tuned– I’ll definitely be watching.

A quick article on CNN caught my eye: the auction of documents relating to South Carolina between 1861-1863, including letters written by Robert E. Lee.

However, I found myself with more questions than answers. Here are a few:

-What is the provenance of these documents? Obviously there’s a somewhat shaky trail leading to Thomas Wilcox (the seller driving around with the letters in the back of his SUV), but to whom were bulk of the Lee letters (and other correspondence) addressed? Was this a treasure trove of documents entrusted to someone and passed down through the family as such, or an artificially assembled collection by a souvenir hunter? The article mentioned that the letters were in the family, but nothing else.

-A lawsuit is mentioned, but no citation. I wonder if South Carolina attempted to reclaim the documents by the use of replevin on the premise that these documents belonged to the Confederacy, and what the grounds were for dismissal?

-What repositories might have been interested in these records? Washington and Lee University seems like an obvious choice to me (and from the information online it appears that they have a gap in their Lee Papers between 1859-1962), perhaps the University of South Carolina or other institutions might have been interested as well. Was there any action on the part of these institutions or others to try to get these papers? Whether forming a consortium to share the costs and the documents, finding an interested patron to purchase and donate them, or negotiating some sort of deal with the holder of the documents, it seems (from my decidedly limited view after reading this article) that maybe something could have been done to keep the documents publicly available. [I’m not faulting either of the named institutions; not only am I aware of the costs of this type of thing, but I have no idea whether they were even approached in this matter.]

It’s a shame that the papers will now be dispersed and perhaps lost to history forever. In this type of situation, I hope that some transparency and media attention will bring focus on the private acquisition of presumably public documents, though I wish that the article had mentioned this a little more bluntly. What can we do as archivists, as historians, as citizens to advocate for less private holding of significant records?

I’m going to try to track down more information about this particular case.

While some (Maureen Dowd) contend that archivists are “the macho heroes of Washington,” (Times Select membership required), others have no idea. That has spawned an SAA-sponsored contest to come up with an “elevator speech” that eloquently addresses the question: what is an archivist, anyway? Good luck folks, and I’ll be posting my ideas here after the contest closes!