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archival insights for potential donors
Jan. 26th, 2023 12:11 pmJust 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?
