![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
archival insights for potential donors
Just collecting some ideas about what I'd share with anyone (in the US, at least) who is considering contacting an archive about donating family papers.
+ The vast majority of archival workers are incredibly respectful of your stuff and your attachment to your stuff. We can't always give you a ton of emotional support ourselves, but we understand and support your feelings. And none of us would ever judge anyone who got weepy over things or even changed their minds about what to hand over. Your stuff is precious! It's deeply connected to people you love/miss/have complicated feelings about! That's okay!
+ We are always grateful that people want to give us their stuff. Even if we can't be the ones to take care of it, it's an honor to be asked.
+ Sometimes, we might tell you we don't have a use for particular materials (or even a whole collection). However inelegantly this might be phrased, we are not saying your stuff doesn't have value. We are simply saying it does not have research value specific to our community of researchers. This is something I really think archivists should be better at articulating. I try to be very clear about it. We just have a limited amount of space, money, and time to spend, so we have to prioritize things that we think the kinds of researchers we get would find especially useful.
+ If you do end up interacting with an archive, ask them (if they don't provide it on their own) for a run-down on the types of things they collect. That way you can sit down with what you've got and see what will be of most use to the archive.
+ For audiovisual stuff, especially photographs, we often have a lot of them already. However precious they are to you, they might not be of any use to us unless:
~ they're extremely well-labeled (names, dates, locations)
~ they include rare (especially local) locations or events. say, for instance, if you have a lot of really great pictures from a defunct local theme park, that might be very helpful! or if you have good ones from the 1932 [fill in local festival here].
~ there is someone in your family who is a significant local historical figure (if your grandpa was the mayor, then, yeah, we'll want some candids of your grandpa's family)
~ if the subjects of the pictures belong to a minority demographic. For example: if your family was a Bengali one that moved to a small town in Mississippi in the 1970s? Your donations are going to be much more valuable than if you're a regular white Christian family in the same place at the same time. Or if your aunt's papers reflect her participation in the queer community during whatever era and maybe include pictures of Pride marches or something, that's also got great research value!
Basically, the rule of thumb is, the rarer the experience the papers (especially photographs) are reflecting, the more research value they'll have. This isn't always true, but it's a good rule of thumb. It's not that we don't want collections reflecting the dominant experience, it's just that we have a bunch of them already.
[This reflects my public library experience: when you try to donate your encyclopedia set to the public library, we will not take them. This is not because we don't value encyclopedias! It's because everyone tries to donate their encyclopedia set to the library. We have a million of them already!]
+ Know before you contact them what kinds of things you have. The better idea you have of what you have, the better the whole process will be. Pretty much don't ever contact an archive and be like, "My grandma died, do you want any of her stuff?" Instead take the time to get to know what you have so that when you contact the archive, you can say, "My grandma was a Holocaust survivor, and I have documents reflecting her immigration to the United States." That saves you and the archives time and lets them give you a clear answer much more quickly!
+ Be very clear about any restrictions you might want to impose. If there's a file of letters with sensitive content that you don't want anyone to see until Uncle Whoever dies, you can say, "Please keep this restricted for [length of time]."
+ Also be clear about how you want the archive to handle anything they may decide is not of use to them. Do you want it back? Thrown away? There will be a place on the deed of gift to indicate this, but think about it before you even contact the archive!
+ You're probably going to need to do your own redacting of identifying personal information. Larger institutions may be able to do that for you, but most of them are not going to have the time to go through every paper you provide and black out social security numbers. If there's something you don't want researchers to see, remove it or cross it out or whatever. If you do it yourself, everything will go soooo much more smoothly.
+ Processing, preserving, and cataloging collections takes a ton of time and human effort. There will likely be a significant amount of time between the time you sign the deed of gift to hand over your stuff and the time when it is available to the public. We don't like it either! We wish it weren't so! But it is.
+ Multiple that by 10 when it comes to digitization. Making things available online is so expensive and time-consuming! We want to do it, we just don't always have the resources! So your collection (or materials within it) may not ever be digitized or it may take them a long time to be. We hate that too!
+ This may not be a think that you want to hear, but frankly: the more work you do on your end to get your things organized, the more quickly the archives can make it accessible to the public. Every archive I've ever heard of has a processing backlog. If you come in with things in neatly-labeled folders, you make our lives a million times easier, and your work will often result in your collection moving up on the priority list and being processed much faster.
+ However, if you are not in a place where you can do that kind of organizing (whether because of emotions, time, whatever), that is also okay! Just know that...it might be a while before you can pull up the archive's catalog and find your collection listed therein.
I know I have other archivists on my flist. What am I missing?
+ The vast majority of archival workers are incredibly respectful of your stuff and your attachment to your stuff. We can't always give you a ton of emotional support ourselves, but we understand and support your feelings. And none of us would ever judge anyone who got weepy over things or even changed their minds about what to hand over. Your stuff is precious! It's deeply connected to people you love/miss/have complicated feelings about! That's okay!
+ We are always grateful that people want to give us their stuff. Even if we can't be the ones to take care of it, it's an honor to be asked.
+ Sometimes, we might tell you we don't have a use for particular materials (or even a whole collection). However inelegantly this might be phrased, we are not saying your stuff doesn't have value. We are simply saying it does not have research value specific to our community of researchers. This is something I really think archivists should be better at articulating. I try to be very clear about it. We just have a limited amount of space, money, and time to spend, so we have to prioritize things that we think the kinds of researchers we get would find especially useful.
+ If you do end up interacting with an archive, ask them (if they don't provide it on their own) for a run-down on the types of things they collect. That way you can sit down with what you've got and see what will be of most use to the archive.
+ For audiovisual stuff, especially photographs, we often have a lot of them already. However precious they are to you, they might not be of any use to us unless:
~ they're extremely well-labeled (names, dates, locations)
~ they include rare (especially local) locations or events. say, for instance, if you have a lot of really great pictures from a defunct local theme park, that might be very helpful! or if you have good ones from the 1932 [fill in local festival here].
~ there is someone in your family who is a significant local historical figure (if your grandpa was the mayor, then, yeah, we'll want some candids of your grandpa's family)
~ if the subjects of the pictures belong to a minority demographic. For example: if your family was a Bengali one that moved to a small town in Mississippi in the 1970s? Your donations are going to be much more valuable than if you're a regular white Christian family in the same place at the same time. Or if your aunt's papers reflect her participation in the queer community during whatever era and maybe include pictures of Pride marches or something, that's also got great research value!
Basically, the rule of thumb is, the rarer the experience the papers (especially photographs) are reflecting, the more research value they'll have. This isn't always true, but it's a good rule of thumb. It's not that we don't want collections reflecting the dominant experience, it's just that we have a bunch of them already.
[This reflects my public library experience: when you try to donate your encyclopedia set to the public library, we will not take them. This is not because we don't value encyclopedias! It's because everyone tries to donate their encyclopedia set to the library. We have a million of them already!]
+ Know before you contact them what kinds of things you have. The better idea you have of what you have, the better the whole process will be. Pretty much don't ever contact an archive and be like, "My grandma died, do you want any of her stuff?" Instead take the time to get to know what you have so that when you contact the archive, you can say, "My grandma was a Holocaust survivor, and I have documents reflecting her immigration to the United States." That saves you and the archives time and lets them give you a clear answer much more quickly!
+ Be very clear about any restrictions you might want to impose. If there's a file of letters with sensitive content that you don't want anyone to see until Uncle Whoever dies, you can say, "Please keep this restricted for [length of time]."
+ Also be clear about how you want the archive to handle anything they may decide is not of use to them. Do you want it back? Thrown away? There will be a place on the deed of gift to indicate this, but think about it before you even contact the archive!
+ You're probably going to need to do your own redacting of identifying personal information. Larger institutions may be able to do that for you, but most of them are not going to have the time to go through every paper you provide and black out social security numbers. If there's something you don't want researchers to see, remove it or cross it out or whatever. If you do it yourself, everything will go soooo much more smoothly.
+ Processing, preserving, and cataloging collections takes a ton of time and human effort. There will likely be a significant amount of time between the time you sign the deed of gift to hand over your stuff and the time when it is available to the public. We don't like it either! We wish it weren't so! But it is.
+ Multiple that by 10 when it comes to digitization. Making things available online is so expensive and time-consuming! We want to do it, we just don't always have the resources! So your collection (or materials within it) may not ever be digitized or it may take them a long time to be. We hate that too!
+ This may not be a think that you want to hear, but frankly: the more work you do on your end to get your things organized, the more quickly the archives can make it accessible to the public. Every archive I've ever heard of has a processing backlog. If you come in with things in neatly-labeled folders, you make our lives a million times easier, and your work will often result in your collection moving up on the priority list and being processed much faster.
+ However, if you are not in a place where you can do that kind of organizing (whether because of emotions, time, whatever), that is also okay! Just know that...it might be a while before you can pull up the archive's catalog and find your collection listed therein.
I know I have other archivists on my flist. What am I missing?
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
Other things are identical though! The bit about the encyclopaedias in libraries made me laugh, because it's soooo true! XD I mostly have experience in suburban libraries (particularly, "popular" ones, which are the ones that begin by a community initiative--and did you know they were inspired by the lending libraries started by Franklin's Junto club, so the first ever popular library, founded in the 1860s has his name?), and many people want to use them as a dumping ground for the books they don't want, because they assume that these libraries will be grateful for anything. The truth is that sometimes the books are useless (like the super outdated encyclopaedias or textbooks, or ruined and moldy books, and so on), and the libraries end up selling them as paper bulk, or donating them to recycling NGOs, or if they can't use the books but they are still useful in some way, they end up donating them to rural schools/libraries.
This is something I really think archivists should be better at articulating. I try to be very clear about it. We just have a limited amount of space, money, and time to spend, so we have to prioritize things that we think the kinds of researchers we get would find especially useful.
I agree, and I feel that most archives would benefit from having a donations policy, and add it to wherever they have information for users/researchers/general public. Many libraries do this, but technically it's faster and easier, because they can just write "we don't accept moldy books, outdated textbooks and reference books", or whatever they don't need/want, but archives are a bit of a grey area and even with a policy in place, many times it's still a case per case situation!
+ If you do end up interacting with an archive, ask them (if they don't provide it on their own) for a run-down on the types of things they collect. That way you can sit down with what you've got and see what will be of most use to the archive.
This is more on the archive side than the donor's, but a donations policy can also include a note saying "we don't take this or that kind of thing, but xxx might be able to point you the right way"--and then you have a list of nearby/relevant archives or libraries or historical associations or any other place that might be relevant and where the donor's stuff might fit in better. This is informative and also spreads the word about other archives that people might not know about!
Basically, the rule of thumb is, the rarer the experience the papers (especially photographs) are reflecting, the more research value they'll have. This isn't always true, but it's a good rule of thumb.
This makes me think of how appraisal in archives is still so tied to dominant views and experiences, so it makes me happy to read your views! I really hope it will be the rule of thumb everywhere one day! Sadly, a lot of what is still archived belongs to the dominant views, either because they could afford to document their lives in the first place, or because their stuff was considered more important. But luckily, there is definitely a lot of pushback against this, particularly related to what you said about minority demographics and the need to preserve their experiences (for example, more focus on preserving oral history, etc.)
(Have you ever read anything linking archives and affect theory, particularly Marika Cifor's stuff? I wouldn't be surprised if you had, because it sounds like your kind of thing, and it's very relevant to the precious and emotional quality of personal archives, but if not, check it out if you can, because I think you'll love it!)
I agree with you about the whole "know what kinds of things you have" for donors, not only because it makes everyone's job easier, but also because it can add an extra layer of meaning to the stuff they are donating. Particularly for minorities, who are more often than not, left out of the official narratives, so sometimes amateur/community researchers, archivists and historians are pure gold in helping to preserve these stories! Also, it's a way of reclaiming history, because we all need to remember that history belongs to all of us, not just to academia and the dominant parts of society, and so getting people involved like this is such a good thing! Taking time to know what you have is useful, but also super empowering and builds a bridge between communities and archives. A lot of communities don't have archives, or access to them, or trust in that their stories will be respected, and I always think of amateur archivists like Allan Bérubé, who did such priceless work for the queer community precisely because he recognised this social and political decision to ignore some communities, and knew that no one would be able to chronicle the queer experience better than queer people themselves! So what you're saying about donors doing more work on their end can actually be super positive, because hopefully it's going to make people trust archives more, and to feel that their voices are being heard and respected, and the work they did chronicling their donation is worthy and useful, because it's going to become part of the archive too. I think there's a sort of emotional justice there, you know, in making communities realise the importance of preserving their story and in them seeing them that it's worthy of being preserved. Again, it comes back to changing the dominant discourse in what counts as worthy of being preserved, but getting people involved in the way you're talking about sounds like a step in the right direction!
Anyway this was super messy and all over the place, I'm afraid, and doesn't add much to your insights and ideas, but I just got really into the topic, haha! XD
no subject
Yes, that makes sense!
(particularly, "popular" ones, which are the ones that begin by a community initiative--and did you know they were inspired by the lending libraries started by Franklin's Junto club, so the first ever popular library, founded in the 1860s has his name?
This delights me! I really took public libraries for granted when I was growing up because just about every US town has one, but as I've gotten older I see how rare and extraordinary they are. My brother-in-law's family didn't even know that lending libraries for the general public could be a thing. The only libraries they know are connected to schools/universities, and you can't check anything out.
I feel that most archives would benefit from having a donations policy, and add it to wherever they have information for users/researchers/general public.
Agreed!!!
This is more on the archive side than the donor's, but a donations policy can also include a note saying "we don't take this or that kind of thing, but xxx might be able to point you the right way"--and then you have a list of nearby/relevant archives or libraries or historical associations or any other place that might be relevant and where the donor's stuff might fit in better. This is informative and also spreads the word about other archives that people might not know about!
Yup!
! Sadly, a lot of what is still archived belongs to the dominant views, either because they could afford to document their lives in the first place, or because their stuff was considered more important.
Absolutely. And there's so much stuff that has been lost because past archivists didn't value the non-dominant narratives. It's so sad.
Have you ever read anything linking archives and affect theory, particularly Marika Cifor's stuff?
I have not! But I will check it out!
no subject
no subject
Oooh, thank you! I will check it out!
no subject
YES!
A lot of communities don't have archives, or access to them, or trust in that their stories will be respected, and I always think of amateur archivists like Allan Bérubé, who did such priceless work for the queer community precisely because he recognised this social and political decision to ignore some communities, and knew that no one would be able to chronicle the queer experience better than queer people themselves!
Yes, yes! And I've found that in many, many communities, these elders exist. There was a guy in Louisville who extensively documented the queer community in an amateur (but excellent) way and only years later did he entrust them to the archives.
. I think there's a sort of emotional justice there, you know, in making communities realise the importance of preserving their story and in them seeing them that it's worthy of being preserved.
Indeed!
I enjoyed your thoughts immensely!
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject