As an archivist (and come to think of it, as a person), outreach is something that I am passionate about. When I hear stories like the one below, my first instinct is: how can I help? How can I make this better?
The story, from NPR: Saving Folk History, One Recording at a Time
”Judy Hyman plays fiddle in a band called The Horse Flies. In her living room in Ithaca, N.Y., there’s a pine-wood dresser right next to the couch. It’s not for shirts and sweaters — this used dresser holds hundreds of precious cassette tapes, an archive of rare recordings that spans more than three decades. She recorded many of them herself; the rest were gifts from other musicians and collectors…”
“…A few years ago, Alden began to wonder what he was going to do with his collection of field recordings. He considered giving his collection to the Library of Congress, or to a university. However, Alden says he worried that they’d be hard for musicians like him to access, and that they’d gather dust lying on a metal shelf. Besides, what librarian in his or her right mind would let someone into the stacks with a banjo or a fiddle to learn a rare ballad or breakdown?
If the people who are really interested and want to play it or hear it, have difficulty assessing it, what good is that?” Alden asks. Alden talked to a few of his friends, like Hyman, and together they came up with an idea: Why not preserve their old recordings themselves? They call their ad hoc group The Field Recorders’ Collective. They decided to use the Internet to bring this little-heard music to a new audience. Every year, they remaster and release 10 to 15 old recordings. Using their home computers to edit audio, the collective then packages every CD in a simple cardboard sleeve. Liner notes are available online, with photos…”
From the “about us” section of the Field Recorders’ Collective site:
“Further, these recordings have never before been generally made available to the old time and traditional music community. In so doing, the Field Recorders’ Collective hopes to “democratize” these collections and see them form a public archive. This is opposed to seeing them disappear in the “black hole” of university and government archives which are, at best, difficult to gain entrance to or at worse, only for those with credentials for accessing them. “
There are a few issues at hand here, but in my mind this is primarily a problem of perception. I understand the idea that there are people who don’t want to surrender their collections to places that don’t really seem to care about them (either the collection or the collector). The aforementioned “black holes” do exist– there are few active collecting repositories that I can think of that don’t have a backlog of unprocessed materials. Are there archives with onerous researcher restrictions? Well, yes, but I don’t believe that’s true for the majority of university archives, nor many government repositories. I’ve been on the researcher side of the desk at the Library of Congress, and while the first visit required some paperwork, subsequent trips have been fairly seamless.
How to combat some of these negative perceptions? On an institutional level, have a clearly defined collection scope and mission statement. In order to cut down on the “black holes,” we shouldn’t be collecting anything that doesn’t fit the needs of the institution. Further, I think there’s a larger argument to be made here for minimal processing, robust indexing and cataloging, and some form of digital access– whether that’s an EAD-encoded finding aid, full digitization of text/audio/video, or somewhere in-between. Finally, deaccessioning of collections that don’t fit the scope– whether donated to a another institution or giving them back to the family– is important but rarely done. In many cases, referral of a donation to a more appropriate repository is ultimately the best thing for almost any collection, which would likely be used more often if housed with similar materials. Have you recently examined your research policies from the other side of the desk? How do your procedures stack up against those from similar institutions?
Coming back to the story above, this collection of rare recordings is currently stored in a wooden dresser drawer in someone’s living room, which is not an ideal environment for magnetic tape. While the Field Recorders’ Collective may release 10-15 recordings per year, the vast majority of the music is even less accessible to the public than if it had been donated to an institution. I’m glad that there’s a group out there that cares about this music and wants to distribute it, but what will happen to the tapes if the Collective is not able to finish re-releasing all of them? Even if they are able to release all of the music eventually, what happens to the original recordings?
Think about this: how do you challenge the idea that archives are not a place where materials are accessible to the public? Who uses your collection, and who would you like to use it more often? How do you effectively reach out to collections that fit your scope? What do you do with donors or collections that would be a better fit elsewhere? Food for thought.
