writing archives crafting order a critiq

Writing Archives / Crafting Order

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Writing Archives / Crafting Order A Critique on the Longstanding Archival Practices of Arrangement and Description

Bertram Lyons BA, English, Earlham College

MA Candidate, University of Kansas Museum Studies Program/American Studies Program

211 East 10th Street

Lawrence, KS 66044 901-508-6631

[email protected]


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TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction pp 3—8 II. Overview & Situation pp 9—12 III. Defining Records & Archives pp 13—17 IV. Archivists & Archival Institutions pp 18—27 V. Archival Practices – Arrangement & Description pp 28—38 VI. Crafting Archives – Organizing, Discerning, & Arranging pp 39—42 VII. The Neutral & Natural Archival Narrative pp 43—52 VIII. Controlling Archives – Indexing, Documenting & Finding pp 53—55 IX. The Preservation & Access Archival Narrative pp 56—62 X. Practicing Archives – Contingencies & Ambiguities pp 63—66 XI. Conclusion – Writing Archives pp 67—72 XII. References pp 73—75 XIII. Further Readings pp 76—78 Appendix A. Carlyle Smith Project – Daily Journal Entries pp 79—106 Appendix B. Alan Lomax Project – Daily Journal Entries pp 107—145


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“I wish to stimulate your imaginations rather than persuade you by argument, open a discussion rather than define one, get us asking questions rather than finding answers.” Verne Harris, 2007 “…the archivist is no passive instrument of Jenkinsonian archival mythology, no neutral—or neutered!—guardian of historical truth.” Terry Cook, 2003 “And it is really the art of storytelling perhaps that archivists need to be concerned with…” Richard J. Cox, 2007 I. INTRODUCTION

Archives play an integral role in how we understand and interpret the past. They offer

evidence of past events, or as archival theorist Geoffrey Yeo suggests, they are “persistent

representations of occurrents created by participants or observers of those occurrents or by their

proxies.”1 These traces from the past, once purposive, acquire historical and interpretive

potential as time advances without them. Archivists espouse concepts such as ‘authenticity,’

‘integrity,’ and ‘legitimacy’ to reflect the authority of their collections. As a nascent field,

archivists since the French Revolution, mainly European but eventually those from the United

States, honed their practices to attain, as best they could, a semblance of ‘value neutrality,’

‘objectivity,’ and ‘impartiality,’ all the while maintaining distinctions between public records,

historical manuscripts, and personal papers. In the later years of the 20th century, dialectical

arguments exposed the hegemonic nature of archival collections. The doors of many archives

were forced open, and collecting pluralized. Proponents of pure ‘value neutrality’ and

‘objectivity’ in archival practice diminished. Some proponents remain, but most recognize the

necessity of selection in archival collecting and the near impossibility of total inclusivity. Still

many archivists argue for an organic naturalness in the structure and composition of groups of

records from any given agent. In this paper, my intentions are not to solve the continuing and

1 Geoffrey Yeo, “Concepts of Record (2): Prototypes and Boundary Objects,” 143. This definition is of similar structure, although more generally applicable, to that of Trevor Livelton’s definition of public records as documents made or created and preserved in the activity of governance by the sovereign or its agents (Livelton, 1996).


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colorful debates about the nature of archives, the exclusiveness of collecting, the relevance of

records, or the neutrality of the profession. I intend, instead, to tell stories. I intend to ask

questions about the process of crafting the archive.

Shelved in dim dry rooms in orderly metal-edged boxes, collections do not appear out of

thin air. There are stories to their arrival; there are stories to their arrangement. They are

described in story, always predicated by choice—predicated by human choice. In contemporary

archival practice, the term ‘processing’ is used to delineate “the arrangement, description, and

housing of archival materials for storage and use by patrons.”2 Processing is the story of crafting

archives. During processing, the archivist attempts to attain physical and intellectual control over

the collection. Here lie the boundary areas between archival theory and the archivist’s intuition,

between diplomatics and the complexity of human interactions. And here is where my narrative

resides. For in this instant, the present meets, interprets, and speaks for the past. The archivist

makes decisions, informed decisions, but decisions nonetheless, about the future arrangement

and description of the records now in her care. These non-current records-turned-archives meet

the perceived end of their intended activity and the imposed beginning of their persistence. They

are examined, named, arranged, and described—with the intention of use by patrons.3

As one might expect, there is a plethora of precise value, content, and data standards for

structuring an appropriate archival description or for choosing the correct words.4 These guiding

mechanisms are of great value to archivists and users of archives. Electronic access to archival

2 Richard Pearce-Moses, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, http://www.archivists.org/glossary/term_details.asp?DefinitionKey=431 (accessed 2009-04-07). 3 Where some have written of the story-telling that is present in archival descriptions, little has been said of archival arrangement as a creative process. I will focus my attention on archival arrangement, with archival description in the background. For example, see Heather Beattie, Richard J. Cox (2006), and Verne Harris in my bibliography. 4 For example, see the following widely used standards: Library of Congress Subject Headings, MARC (Machine Readable Catalog), EAD (Encoded Archival Description), DACS (Describing Archives a Content Standard), RAD (Rules for Archival Description), AACR and AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloging Rules), APPM (Archives, Personal Papers, and Manuscripts), and ISAD(G) (General International Standard Archival Description).


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collections would not be as effective or robust without professional standardization and

interoperability. My intention is not to criticize these useful developments. Rather I hope to

generate reminders that although you can take the variety out of the options from which an

archivist may choose her words, you cannot take the choice out of the archivist. The more you

squeeze a fluid, non-rigid object into a rigid frame, the more you alter the object’s original

physical dimensions.

At her desk on the third floor of some climate-controlled building, with her Society of

American Archivists copy of Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) at the ready, our

archivist, perusing an overflowing folder entitled (in almost illegible script) “miscellaneous”

from the newly acquired William Kelleher Storey Collection, in the process of attaining

‘intellectual control’ of the folder (read: trying to understand what it is that is in her hand and

how it relates to William Storey’s life and the rest of his papers), will begin in her mind to craft a

story of the contents of that folder, a story that will lead to a larger narrative about the

relationship between that folder and other Storey folders, until eventually the entire collection is

infected (or infused) with the imaginative power of our archivist’s mind. These choices

accumulate for the archivist, and a line of questioning arises for us. Just how organic is the

relationship between documents, their creator(s), and other documents created or collected by the

same creator(s)? Would the processing of a collection by one archivist yield the same

arrangement and description of the collection if a different archivist had processed the same

collection? Would the arrangement and description of the same collection by these different

archivists even be similar? How varied might they be? If potential disparities exist, what effect

might this have on users of the archive? What effect might this have on how we understand and

interpret the past?


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As a museum studies graduate student at the University of Kansas, and as a professional

archivist with the Alan Lomax Archive in New York, I am interested in the history of archival

discourse and the nature of archival practice. I am a proponent of ‘best practices’ and I recognize

the technological necessity of standardized formats and vocabularies for sharing information

with diffuse audiences. Yet I also have processed collections. I have told stories. I have struggled

with the impossibility of getting a “boundary object” to fit into its appropriate category, and of

resurrecting the ‘original order’ of a collection.5 I have felt the dissatisfaction of having to say it

is close enough and then move on to the next document or folder. This paper will not be a

harangue on the nature of truth in archival collections, or the potential for archives to capture

clearly the range of human activity and experience. I am not going to question what we collect

and how we go about choosing what we will collect. Nor will I examine the complexities of

reaching out from the archive to make its collections available to all who would want to have

access. The scope of this paper is to illuminate the ambiguities, the complexities, the practices,

the standards and the layers of interpretation related to processing archival collections—writing

archives and creating order.

To situate archival processing as an activity and as a part of professional and academic

discourse, I will survey the surrounding literature. The Society of American Archivists, the

International Council on Archives, and many regional professional organizations, such as the

Midwest Archives Conference, support contemporary dialogue on archives, their contents, and

their use and maintenance. Through the disciplines and interdisciplines of history, cultural

studies, archival theory, media studies, sociology, and others, I will review current scholarly and

theoretical discourse on the nature of archives and their contents. Tracing the history of the

archival term “arrangement,” and to some extent “description,” as well as theoretical concepts 5 Geoffrey Yeo, “Concepts of Record (2): Prototypes and Boundary Objects,” 131.


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that inform these terms, I will discuss a variety of perspectives and claims related to what they do

and do not mean, how they should and should not be carried out, and many points in between.

When possible I will look outside of U.S. practice to incorporate a plurality of perspectives.

Ultimately this literature review will lay the groundwork for my own experiences, from which I

approach this topic.

In the fall of 2007, I completed an internship with the Archaeological Research Center at

KU to process the papers of the late Carlyle S. Smith, one of KU’s prominent archaeologists. In

the summers of 2007 and 2008, I interned and worked (respectively) at the American Folklife

Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress to process the video, film, and unpublished manuscript

series of Alan Lomax’s collection, which had been acquired recently by the AFC. Currently I am

processing the legacy files of the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas in order to

create a permanent archive for the museum. Using daily diaries that I kept during work on the

Carlyle S. Smith and the Alan Lomax collections, and incorporating experiences gleaned from

my present work at the Spencer Museum of Art, I plan to illustrate more clearly these instances

of storytelling in archival processing. With vignettes and specific examples of ambiguities and

tough choices, I hope to weave my narratives in and out of the larger realms of archival theory

and practice.6 Exploring the ambiguities, the complexities, the practices, the standards and the

layers of interpretation related to processing archival collections, I hope, as an archivist, to come

out from under the veil of professionalism—a professional still, yet a critical scholar as well—to

raise questions about the implications and possibilities for archives in the future. I want to expose

archivists and users of archives to the idea that archives are always already mediated.

6 See Appendices A & B for full-text versions of my daily journals respectively from the Carlyle S. Smith Project at the University of Kansas Archaeological Research Center and from the Alan Lomax Collection Project at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.


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And so I will begin again. Archives play an integral role in how we understand and

interpret the past. These collections become a resource from which we reflect and attempt to

revisit what already has transpired. Users of archives rely heavily on the archive’s context,

structure, and contents to retell events and ideas of the past. Practitioners of archives often see

themselves as professionals, neutral or activist, reconstructing archival collections that

nonetheless document a definable past. But how often do these users and guardians suspect the

notion that the archive reflects a great deal of the contemporary mindsets and personal

experiences of archivists themselves? The practices of arrangement and description reshape

archival records. The archive is the story of the archivist.7

7 In the French translation of the 1898 Dutch Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives, the French editors, Cuvelier and Stein recognizing the dangers that interpretation and individual subjectivity pose on the nature of archival collections once they are in the care of an archivist, added the following note to section 18: “There is some truth in the saying that the archivist himself is the greatest enemy of the archives, because he systematically destroys the arrangement of his predecessor, pretending to improve the arrangement (Muller, Feith, and Fruin, Manual, xxviii).” I do not read this as a criticism of archivists as much as a reflection on practice.


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II. OVERVIEW & SITUATION

I begin my exploration of archival practice with an overview of the disparate ways

archives are and have been defined over time. Certain theoretical concepts underlie western

definitions of archives. These principles lead to methodologies for the management of archives.

Central to archival methodologies are the practices of arrangement and description. There are

other archival activities but they are not the focus of this paper. Archival practices support the

proposed basic functions of an archival institution: access and preservation. I consult a sample of

writings from over the years to evaluate consistencies and developments in the discourse on

archival arrangement and description.

Carolyn Steedman, in Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, evaluates the nature of

writing history, or narrativizing the past. She distinguishes histories from life-writing, archives

from histories, and history from the past. According to Steedman, what we say about the past is

never actually what happened. Archives only provide a trace of that past we seek; anything we

say about that past is new and never what was. Steedman’s work, and that of her predecessors,

including Jacques Derrida and Hayden White, influences my thinking in this exploration. I begin

this writing process with the perspective that nothing in an archival institution is unmediated.

Archives, as collections of documents from the past, are first and foremost records created by an

entity at a time and place. In the simplest scenario these items are passed from the original

creator to the archivist and in this case the archivist becomes the second-stage mediator, an

interpreter of another’s interpretations.8 In more complex situations, the original items flow

8 See Heather Beattie’s work on archival description, provenance and women’s diaries, “Where Narratives Meet: Archival Description, Provenance, and Women’s Diaries,” 2008.


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through many hands, or interpreters, before finding a home in an archival institution.9 By the

time the researcher arrives on the scene, the silt is deep. As I evaluate the history of arrangement

and description, I am reading for the foundations of the principles that underlie archival

arrangement and description, but I am also reading for assumptions about the nature of these

concepts, about the purity of archives. Archives are always already mediated memories.

Much has been written and said concerning archives, documents, records, information,

and memory. For the purpose of this project I am engaging the literature devoted to activities of

maintaining order in an archival setting, specifically arrangement and description, with an

emphasis on arrangement.10 In order to recognize these activities and their functions, it is

necessary to investigate the trajectories that led to their present states. A number of individuals in

the English-speaking archival community have written about archival pasts, typically tracing a

quick, narrow path from the deep past to the French Revolution, then exploring in detail the

transfer of principles from Europe to the United States, from legal administrators to historical

manuscript collectors, from government records managers to activist archivists. These archival

historians consistently note distinctions between archives and manuscripts, between public

records and personal papers.11 Theorists, archival and cultural, have a tendency to be more

abstract in the exploration of archival traditions. In their writings we find connections between

diverse traditions of memory and the preservation of the past.12

9 See Geoffrey Yeo’s exploration of custodial history for a complex example of custodianship and the ambiguities associated with collection histories: “Custodial History, Provenance, and the Description of Personal Records,” 2009. 10 In 2008, Richard J. Cox explored the nature of storytelling in archival description in “Revisiting the Archival Finding Aid,” in Journal of Archival Organization; as does Heather Beattie, Geoffrey Yeo (2009), and Verne Harris (see bibliography). My work builds on these writings, adding archival arrangement to the list of ways in which archivists impact collections. 11 See works in the bibliography by Richard J. Cox, T. R. Schellenberg, Margaret Cross Norton, James O’Toole, and Kathleen D. Roe. 12 See explorations by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Carolyn Steedman, Luciana Duranti, and Verne Harris in bibliography.


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A few important concepts come together in archival theory and practice to influence

current thinking in western archival discourse. These concepts include, first, a sense that archival

records have a naturalness in their aggregation, that they are organic bodies in relation to their

creators and other records created by their creators. Secondly, they include a privileging of

literacy over orality, the authentic written text over material culture or the ephemeral spoken

word. Finally, a certain notion of authority is buried in the western notion of archives.

I make the distinction between western archival discourse and what could amount to

many other perspectives on archives because, as has been seen in the historiography of U.S.

archival practice, U.S. practice is based almost entirely on principles taken from European

nation-building and the growth of modern governments in western nations.13 More work is

needed to understand the extent to which archival principles are culture-specific. In a recent

article addressing the needs of archival education in Pacific Rim communities, Anne Gilliland,

Sue McKemmish, Kelvin White, Yang Lu, and Andrew Lau begin a discussion of western

hegemony in archival theory and practice. The authors call for an examination of “core

assumptions and practices of the archival profession,” and for more inclusion of non-western

cultural preference in international archival practice, cultures that are “outside the traditional

archival paradigm.”14 How would professional archival practices of arrangement and description

change with these added voices? Certainly, western archives privilege literacy over orality—the

tradition of recorded information over human memory.15 Technological assistance (pen, paper,

ink, typewriter, computer, etc.) is preferred over oral transmission. Recognizing the necessity of 13 See works by Michel Foucault; T. R. Schellenberg; Muller, Feith, and Fruin; and Verne Harris in bibliography. 14 Ann Gilliland, Sue McKemmish, Kelvin White, Yang Lu, and Andrew Law, “Pluralizing the Archival Paradigm,” 90, 110. 15 In their 2006 Society of American Archivists-sponsored exploration of the history of archival practice, Understanding Archives & Manuscripts, James O’Toole and Richard J. Cox continue this line of thought in archival discourse: “After the advent of writing, knowledge can be objective rather than subjective (O’Toole & Cox, 5).” There is an assumption here that writing, because it is a fixed media, is more accurate than human memory or oral transmission.


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technology in archival practice, it is questionable how natural western practices are. What

evidence do we have that the written record is more reliable than the oral record? More is to be

done with this, but it is apparent that culture, social thought, and technology play important roles

in a society’s preference for archival practice.

The concepts I mention above are those of information, memory, record, authority,

authenticity, public, private, and control. Without a sense of most of these concepts, a society

cannot define its archives. Without a definition of archives, it is not possible to define what an

archival institution does and how it should go about doing what it does. It is possible that it is

impossible to establish clear definitions of the above concepts. As critics such as Derrida have

shown, meaning is shifting, an endless play of difference.16 And if the concepts that ground

archives are in flux, then the definition of archives itself is in a constant state of change.17 This is

all possible. Recognizing this, I situate my thoughts in experiences I have had in the United

States, South Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, and on online listservs as an archival agent over

the past seven years, and in the reading of writings of archival actors from the 1890s to today.

16 Jacques Derrida, “Differance,” 1968. 17 American archivist, T. R. Schellenberg, recognized that there was no prevailing definition of archives in the 1950s (Schellenberg, 15). Verne Harris and Shelley Sweeney both advocate this notion today.


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III. DEFINING RECORDS & ARCHIVES

In order to explore archival practice, I must engage the substance of archives: what

makes a thing archival? Early archival theorists sought to define archives according to key

concepts of creation and preservation, as well as through ideas of legality, historical value, and

public obligation. In the United States, canonical modern archival theorist Theodore Roosevelt

Schellenberg defined the essential characteristics of archives in relation to the function of the

records—the reasons why records came into being—and the element of selection—the reasons

why they were preserved.18 These characteristics privilege creator over record. If the reasons

records are created meet a certain standard, then they are archival, regardless of their content.

This allowed Schellenberg, and other archivists, to distinguish archives from manuscripts as

separate species of records.19 According to Schellenberg the difference between archives and

historical manuscripts is a systematic versus a haphazard original arrangement.20 He goes on to

note that “modern archives are kept for the use of others than those that created them, and that

conscious decisions must be made as to their value for such use.”21 According to this distinction,

if an archival institution sees records as appropriate for preservation, then they become archival,

regardless of their content. It is no mystery, then, why 1960s social and cultural critics implicated

modern archival institutions in hegemonic collecting practices.

Trevor Livelton updated these definitions in his 1996 monograph, Archival Theory,

Records, and the Public, challenging Schellenberg’s distinction between archives and

manuscripts with a preference for simplicity. Although Livelton’s intent is to define the nature of

‘public’ records, i.e. not personal papers or historical manuscripts, he explores the theoretical

18 T. R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives, 16. This concept echoes through archival literature to today’s theorists and historians. For instance see: Kathleen D. Roe, Richard J. Cox, James O’Toole, and Michael Cook. 19 Trevor Livelton, Archival Theory, Records, and the Public, 65. 20 T. R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives, 18. 21 T. R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives, 14.


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foundation for all archives before focusing his gaze on public governance. His contention is that

whether or not archivists consciously recognize the effect of theoretical principles on their work,

in order to function as an archivist one must hold certain preconceptions about the nature of

archival practice and archival materials because “archivists both have and use ideas…. They do

their everyday work in certain ways because of the ideas they hold about the nature of the

material they work with.”22 According to Livelton theoretical ideas about the nature of records—

that they are organic, structured, and authentic—“dictate the archival methodology by which a

particular [record] is examined by the archivist, which in turn determines the resulting scholarly

product.” 23 For Kathleen D. Roe, contemporary archival practitioner and author of Arranging &

Describing Archives & Manuscripts, the “archivalness” of a body of records is determined by the

extent to which the “primary and most significant defining characteristic is that it is evidence of

the activity for or by which it was created, assembled, or collected.”24

What ideas, then, do archivists hold about records? The word ‘record’ is linked

etymologically to memory, to the act of remembering.25 It is a process of re-creating and

recollecting. Drawing from the field of diplomatics,26 Livelton traces the genealogy of the

archival ‘record’ from the ‘scientific’ family of ‘intelligence.’ ‘Information’ is “intelligence

given”; a ‘document’ is “recorded information,” and a ‘record’ is a “document made or received

and preserved.”27 From this definition, then, if an archive is a group of records, then an archive is

22 Trevor Livelton, Archival Theory, Records, and the Public, 27. 23 Trevor Livelton, Archival Theory, Records, and the Public, 45. 24 Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts, 28. Roe provides an overview of practical approaches in the US and Canada to archival arrangement and description with examples and historical background. She writes for practicing archivists responsible for the management of historical manuscripts, personal papers, and government and institutional records. 25 Trevor Livelton, Archival Theory, Records, and the Public, 59–60. 26 Livelton defines Diplomatics as “the study of the genesis, inner constitution, forms, natural aggregation, and transmission of archival documents (Livelton, 46).” 27 Trevor Livelton, Archival Theory, Records, and the Public, 82. Livelton eventually narrows his definition of records to account for only public records by specifying who it is that makes or receives and preserves the records,


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a group of documents made or received and preserved. The specific social, cultural, and temporal

setting of an archival institution, its mission, and the intentions and underlying values of the

archivists will help answer the more specific questions about who it is that made or received the

documents of interest to that particular repository.

For the purpose of this paper, I am trying merely to lay down a foundation for defining

essentially what types of things archival institutions collect. First, an archival institution collects

what it determines to be ‘archives’. According to modern and contemporary archivists, archives

are preserved for their evidential and informational values, meaning that the things archival

institutions preserve provoke recollection and remembrance, and that they have an assumed

authenticity.28 Records provoke recollection. Records, as noted earlier by Livelton, are

documents made or received (by someone or something) and preserved (ultimately by the

archival institution, although often there are intermediaries along the way). If documents, then,

are information recorded (in any form), then an archive consists of information recorded in any

form that is made or received by someone or something and subsequently preserved.29 An

archive consists of records.30

The concept of ‘record as a type of document’ signifies a privileging of form over

thought, of fixed over ephemeral. In two successive 2008 publications of American Archivist,

archival theorist Geoffrey Yeo explores the concept of ‘record’ in an effort to ground

as well as classifying for which function the records were originally made or received. For my present purposes, I am borrowing scientific classification of records as part of an ‘intelligence’ hierarchy. 28 T. R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives, 139. See Richard Pearce-Moses’ A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology for continued use of these values in the definition of archival records. 29 Although simplifying it for my purposes, much of this line of thought was inspired by the work of Trevor Livelton. 30 In the introduction to the 2006 Society of American Archivists-sponsored Understanding Archives & Manuscripts, James O’Toole and Richard J. Cox describe archivists as “students of the nature and varieties of recordkeeping itself” (O’Toole & Cox, xiii). In contemporary thinking, although distinctions are still made between archives and manuscripts, the underlying assumption is that archivists and archives deal in all respects with records, linking the archival profession to librarians, curators, records managers, and automated data specialists.


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contemporary perceptions of what archivists perceive as records.31 Bridging theories of

categorization from psychology and sociology, Yeo introduces notions of ‘prototypes’ and

‘boundary objects’ to clarify archivists’ definitions of records. According to Yeo, archivists

develop social prototypes of what records are. The further from the prototype an item is, the

harder it is to classify as a record and the closer it is to being a boundary object. Subjective

perspectives privilege classification and, therefore, complicate archival concepts of naturalness

and impartiality. For example, audiovisual records, although they are records according to the

general definition, have been shown to be under-cared-for and marginal to an archivist’s

prototypical concept of “record.”32 This type of analysis is important for multiple reasons. It

reveals the subjectivity of the archivist as a classifier of records, and it provides an explanation

for the arbitrary, yet very real, preference of archivists for static versus dynamic information.33

Although I disagree with the notion that one culture of individuals will produce only one

prototype of a concept34, there is value in recognizing that definitions themselves are contingent

on human perception.

Yeo’s analysis also complicates the assumed distinction naturalized by archivists between

organizational records and personal papers or historical manuscripts.35 The prototype explanation

put forth by Yeo deconstructs the “natural” distinctions between these archival records types. If

archivists’ prototypes of archival records are those that originate from the functions of a

31 Geoffrey Yeo, “Concepts of Record (2): Prototypes and Boundary Objects.” 32 For example, Michael Rush, Lynn Holdzkom, Prudence Backman, Daniel A. Santamaria, and Andrea Leigh document the “common practice in moving image archives of segregating the moving images from their accompanying paper documentation (p 223)” in their case study, “Applying DACS to Finding Aids: Case Studies from Three Diverse Repositories,” 2008. 33 See data in 2005 Heritage Preservation and Institute of Museum and Library Services report, “A Public Trust at Risk: The Heritage Health Index Report on the State of America’s Collections.” Although Archives hold only 6% of all recorded sound collections in the US, that 6% represents 43% of the total recorded sound items that are in need of preservation help in the US (http://www.heritagepreservation.org/HHI/HHIchp4.pdf, 40). 34 Geoffrey Yeo, “Concepts of Record (2): Prototypes and Boundary Objects,” 119-120. 35 Geoffrey Yeo, “Concepts of Record (2): Prototypes and Boundary Objects,” 124.


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government agency, then the records of a person or family will fall outside the scope of the

prototype. The further away from the prototype the less likely the records will be considered

archival by an archivist. The opposite scenario, and others imaginable, is true as well. According

to Yeo, prototypes have a “graded membership.”36

36 Geoffrey Yeo, “Concepts of Record (2): Prototypes and Boundary Objects,” 124–125.


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IV. ARCHIVISTS AND ARCHIVAL INSTITUTIONS

Archivists generally attribute the beginning of the codification of western archival

principles and techniques to the Netherlands with the 1898 publication of Muller, Feith, and

Fruin’s Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives. At least a century of

professional practice in Holland and other European countries led to this publication. Further, it

is known that many European archivists experienced the E’Colle de Chartres in Paris, a school

for the training of archivists in the 19th century. Certainly writings developed in France from this

school, although I have found no mention of them in the literature. Historians mark the 1789

French Revolution as the birthplace of modern archival practice, especially in the public sphere,

marking 1795 as the first public proclamation of the “right of access to public records.”37

Previous to the revolution, commentators note the unsystematic attempts to preserve important

documents and records of the past, as far back as the 5th millennium B.C.E.38 Collections were

prevalent, but they were largely groups of records collected for their perceived importance and

legal value, and they were rarely kept in any order other than subject-based or chronological

order. In the words of the authors of the introduction to the 2003 edition of the 1898 Dutch

Manual, Middle Ages archives were “arsenals of charters that were created by religious and

secular potentates to prove their claims to power.”39 From the 16th century forward, the contents

of archives became more complicated as document creation diversified, but there remained “no

set rules for the arrangement of documents other than charters and deeds which were usually

37 T. R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives, 5. 1790 marks the institution of the Archives Nationales of Paris, the first national archives (Schellenberg, 4). Schellenberg also notes that the creation of records and the preservation of records as archives related to the rise in human population and the development of record-creating technologies (Schellenberg, 35). Carolyn Steedman marks the birth of Archives in the early 1800s (Steedman, 91). 38 See Richard J. Cox, Closing an Era: Historical Perspectives on Modern Archives and Records Management, for an in-depth history of records and records management. 39 Muller, Feith, and Fruin, Manual, vii.


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identified and arranged chronologically.”40 Public archives as we know them today in the

western world had not yet evolved we are told. After the French Revolution, however, historians

construct an evolution of public records management and archival practice that proceeds through

19th century Europe into the 20th- and 21st-century United States.41

The 1898 Dutch Manual, focusing on public records and omitting personal papers and

family archives, marks the codification of certain archival principles that have held sway until

present-day western archival practice. The Manual introduced in writing the ideas that records

were related to the functions of their creators and that the records of any one creator or agency

were recognizable as an organic whole.42 The Manual, which became a bible for modern

archivists, “preached the principles of structure and of provenance and prescribed a methodology

based on the archive’s own features,” not those of libraries.43 According to the authors of the

Manual, “each archive is unique, but the method of dealing with it, the principles and the

terminology should be the same,” which set the stage for the standardization of method and for

the development of an archival theory.44 The Dutch trio also laid the groundwork for recognizing

archival collections as organic entities with a certain natural design, structure, and classification,

stating that the “archive arises as a consequence of the activities of the person who formed it...a

40 Muller, Feith, and Fruin, Manual, vii. 41 Similarly to Western museum practices, commentators of archival history often trace a tradition of memory preservation to Ancient Greece, which then leads through the Romans to Mediaeval Europe and on to Modern Western Democracies. See T.R. Schellenberg’s Modern Archives; Muller, Feith, and Fruin’s Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives; and Kathleen D. Roe’s Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts (Chapter 3). This familiar path has been challenged in many post-colonial cultural critiques. More work is possible in this area of archival history. What are the connections between social structure, technology, and memory preservation? 42 Muller, Feith, Fruin, Manual, xii, 19. 43 Muller, Feith, Fruin, Manual, xxx. The work of the authors of the Manual is the result of intellectual conceptual development that took part widely in post-Napoleonic Europe (Muller, Feith, Fruin, xxxii). 44 Muller, Feith, Fruin, Manual, xiii.


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living organism.”45 These principles established a systematic method for maintaining archives,

and required the definition of archival concepts.

Sir Hilary Jenkinson continued the extrapolation of archival principles in England in the

early 20th century. Another public records advocate, Jenkinson instituted rigorous archival

practices that, according to Terry Eastwood, “instituted far more exacting methods for the

control of records and the communication of information about them to researchers.”46 His

writings emphasized principle over practice and imbued archival records and their provenance

with a sense of impartiality and authenticity.47 According to Eastwood, Jenkinson’s

“unshakeable belief that context was the key to understanding archives made him hold

tenaciously to the idea that the archivist should do nothing to add or subtract from the character

or qualities of records endowed by their creation.”48

In this early history of archival practice, these systematic principles along with the fact

that public archives were collecting most records mark a significant distinction drawn between

“archives” and “manuscripts.” Those who kept government and institutionally public records

kept “archives.” Family papers and other private collections were “manuscripts” with historical,

not archival import. This distinction between archival administrators and historians is important

because it influenced the modern development of archives and continues to affect the profession

and the understanding of archival practice today. Public and institutional archives are often

45 Muller, Feith, Fruin, Manual, xx. Peter Horsman, Eric Ketelaar, and Theo Thomassen, authors of the introduction to the 2003 reissue of the Manual, critique the organic metaphor and its widespread use today stating that the interpretation of the organic metaphor is superfluous because “what had been intended as metaphor was turned into an organizational principle. (Muller, Feith, Fruin, xxi)” I critique this as well, especially where the archive is too incomplete to be an organic whole, but does have enough fluidity not to be structured arbitrarily without loosing important contextual relationships. Here the archive is both natural and unnatural at once, a complex unity, a paradox. 46 Terry Eastwood, “Jenkinson’s Writings on Some Enduring Archival Themes,” 34. 47 According to Terry Eastwood, Jenkinson’s work encompasses public and private archives of both organizations and individuals (Eastwood, 39). 48 Terry Eastwood, “Jenkinson’s Writings on Some Enduring Archival Themes,” 39.


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defined as true organic archives, whereas private repositories collect only “manuscripts.” This

ideological battle between historians and administrators affected and affects archival practice

deeply. Early European archives were legal in nature, established for the protection of ownership

and the establishment of power. During the Enlightenment, a sense of historicity prevailed in

archival practice, establishing ideas of logical and natural order in archival practices. With the

rise of the nation-state, ideas of efficiency, legitimacy, and authority imbued archival practice

and archivists claimed to be administrators rather than historians. Of course, homogeneity is not

the best metaphor to use in this case. Archives and archivists have had complex histories. These

quick characterizations provide only a sense of the ideologies that have participated in the

development of archival practice.

According to Kathleen D. Roe, in the United States, historical manuscript repositories

developed before public records. Justin Winsor (Harvard and the ALA) established the first

cataloguing rules for manuscripts in 1888. The public archives tradition began in 1901, and

caught hold in 1934 with the establishment of the U.S. National Archives. Not until the 1970s

did these two separate traditions begin to converge in practice and theory.49 Today, manuscripts

and archives are managed by similar principles. It is important to take into account historical

distinctions and schisms between “archives administrators” and “manuscripts historians.” These

two traditions have had differences in the past.50 Even though they converge today in some

sense, certain underlying principles get translated that do not always work in both settings.

Kathleen D. Roe continues this distinction in her 2005 update on archival arrangement and

description.51 Verne Harris adds significantly to this discourse in his 2004 article, “Concerned

with the Writings of Others: Archival Cannons, Discourses, and Voices,” in which he articulates

49 Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts, 33–36. 50 See Richard C. Berner in my bibliography for excellent history of these traditions. 51 Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts, 1.


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generally three current international English-language archival discourses: the western positivist

school of methodologists, the modernists, and the postmodernists.52

Not until the 1940s are the principles of provenance and original order found in U.S.

archival literature.53 Word of mouth carried them in and out of the United States in the early 20th

century. Marjorie Rabe Barritt and Richard C. Berner provide separate, detailed accounts of the

introduction of these European principles to U.S. archivists and historians.54 T.R. Schellenberg

was a widely respected U.S. archivist in the 1950s and 1960s. A public records advocate,

Schellenberg wrote to historicize archival theory and to solidify archival principles for U.S.

practitioners, especially those in the employ of the U.S. government’s National Archives. In

Modern Archives: Principles & Techniques, Schellenberg added a U.S. voice to international

archival discourse. Published in 1956, Modern Archives engages in distinctions that continue

today between current and non-current records, archives and libraries, inter-archival practices, as

well as U.S. and international practice.55 Schellenberg’s four reasons for the creation of archival

institutions stem from concepts of governmental efficiency, legitimacy, responsibility and

functionality.56 The idea that archives are a governmental function underlies the entire text.

Important for Schellenberg (as well as many archival theorists) are the structure and the

context of any archival collection. Once designated archival, content becomes and remains

secondary.57 Similarly, Schellenberg distinguishes two types of information in archival

collections: evidential and informational. As noted above, evidential becomes primary while

52 Verne Harris, “Concerned with the Writings of Others: Archival Cannons, Discourses, and Voices,” 211–220, 218. 53 T. R. Schellenberg notes that Dr. Waldo Leland began to adopt the principles in practice around 1912 (Schellenberg, 180). 54 Marjorie Rabe Barritt, “Coming to America: Dutch Archivistiek and American Archival Practice”; Richard C. Berner, Archival Theory and Practice in the United States: A Historical Analysis. 55 T. R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives, x. 56 T. R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives, 8-10. 57 T. R. Schellenberg defines these as the (1) structure or physical character of the records and the (2) substantive content of the records (Schellenberg, 95).


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informational is secondary.58 The archivist’s job, then, is to protect the context of the archival

collection by identifying the structure of its original arrangement and preserving that

arrangement above all things. Researchers can analyze the content and make their interpretations.

According to Schellenberg, the archivist’s responsibility “at all times is to preserve the evidence,

impartially, without taint of political or ideological bias, so that on the basis of this evidence

those judgments may be pronounced upon men and events by posterity which historians through

human failings are incapable of pronouncing. Archivists are thus the guardians of the truth, or, at

least, of the evidence on the basis of which truth can be established.”59 We, archivists, are, of

course, superhuman. I include this quote from Schellenberg to illustrate the discourse that

pervades archival thought that suggests archival principles first and foremost preserve, as well as

possible, the ultimate possible amount of information about a group of records and the

creator(s)/function(s) they represent. Also evident in Schellenberg’s passage is the notion that

archivists have the unique ability to transcend subjectivity. We are the impartial “guardians of

truth.” Theoretically, maybe. Archivists develop guiding principles with that goal in mind. Is it

achievable? That is questionable. There is more evidence to suggest not than there is in support

of it.

In Schellenberg’s defense, his faith in the strength of the systematic arrangement of

public records overrode his recognition of human subjectivity. He was aware that fundamentally

the nature of archival arrangement requires the necessity for choice and subjectivity. He

establishes the analysis of records as “basic to practically all activities of the archivist.”60 In

analysis there is choice. There is the necessity to choose one thing over another, to establish an

58 According to Schellenberg, three characteristics of archival institutions lead to the maintenance of evidential value in archival collections: (1) records of one agency are kept together; (2) records are kept in their original arrangement (as closely as possible); and (3) records are kept in their entirety without alteration (Schellenberg, 15). 59 T. R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives, 236. 60 T. R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives, 114-117.


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importance, where one option is favored over another. Schellenberg’s text is full of phrases

establishing the archivist’s requirement ‘to judge,’ ‘to know,’ to recreate,’ ‘to decide,’ ‘to

identify,’ ‘to appraise,’ ‘to choose,’ ‘to restore,’ ‘to order.’ Subjectivity resides in each demand

upon the archivist, who, however, “is not an interested party with respect to the preservation of

evidence, whether favorable or unfavorable to an agency’s administration. He will not judge of

its partiality: he is interested only in preserving all the important evidence.”61 Who is to say, first

of all, what is important and what is not important?62 Schellenberg’s ability to overlook even his

own subjectivity is braced by his determination to improve archival methodology and to achieve

a type of objectivity that would allow archival institutions to function in efficient service of the

government and the public. Discrepancies between theory and practice are not new, and they are

difficult to resolve.

Contemporary archival discourse views archivists as “scholars of records and record

keeping systems,”63 describing the identity of contemporary archivists in three broad areas of

activity: saving and acquiring archival records, organizing the records, and making the records

available.64 David W. Carmicheal argues against the ‘exceptional archivist’ in his book on

archival theory for non-professionals citing the preservation of our national memory and

documentary heritage as the purpose of archives.65 O’Toole and Cox identify four categories of

archival knowledge as: knowledge about producers of records, knowledge about records of

61 T. R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives, 29, (emphasis added). 62 T. R. Schellenberg notes that since 1934, the Archivist of the US has been responsible for submitting an annual “list or description of the papers, documents, and so forth…which appear to have no permanent value or historical interest” (Schellenberg, 100). 63 Terry Eastwood “Fundamentally Speaking: The Third Version, A Review of the Archival Fundamentals Series II,” 231. Cox and O’Toole echo this idea in the introduction to their 2006 Understanding Archives & Manuscripts, (Cox & O’Toole, xiii). 64 James M. O’Toole & Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives & Manuscripts, xv. 65 David W. Carmicheal, Organizing Archival Records: A Practical Method of Arrangement and Description for Small Archives, vii–viii. Carmicheal does, however, maintain the traditional distinction between archives and historical manuscripts (Carmicheal, 6).


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producers, knowledge about uses of records, and knowledge about principles for managing

records.66 Reading around archival literature, these ideas are widely supported. Archivists are

records-focused agents who seek specialized knowledge about records, their use, and their

creators.67

The main difference between modern and contemporary archivists is the willingness of

contemporary commentators to accept similarities between traditionally distinct public records,

personal papers, organizational records, and historical manuscripts. For instance, Michael Fox

and Peter Wilkerson, as well as David W. Carmicheal, in their manuals on archival organization

and description, provide discursive (perhaps not intentionally) examples of an emerging archival

perspective that stems from the tradition of cultural heritage management, rather than that of

historical manuscripts or public records.68 Museum theory enters the discussion here as

collection managers and archivists merge and serve similar functions in museum, archive, and

cultural heritage settings. I sense that more museum voices found their way into archival

discourse in the 1980s and 1990s. Here a sense of public trust emerges where institutions feel the

need to explain their relevance and their importance in society. There is less distinction in this

mentality between the public records tradition and the historical manuscripts tradition. Here all

records are considered worthy of public preservation if they are so deemed regardless of

provenance or original function. This discourse does not overtake records theory from a

government perspective or from historical traditions. It adds more perspectives on the nature of

records and their collection, arrangement, and preservation.

66 James M. O’Toole & Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives & Manuscripts, 88. 67 See Michael J. Fox & Peter L. Wilkerson, Introduction to Archival Organization and Description, 1998; David W. Carmicheal, Organizing Archival Records, 2004; and Elizabeth Yakel, Starting An Archives, 1994. 68 See Verne Harris’ description of the postmodern archivist in his 2004 article “Concerned with the Writings of Others: Archival Canons, Discourses, and Voices” in the Journal of the Society of Archivists.


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A concurrent development in the contemporary archival worldview is the infiltration

(prevalence) of electronic means of creating and transmitting documents. For instance, in 1996,

the Getty Information Institute “invited educators and practitioners from museums, archives,

libraries, and visual resources collections to discuss new directions in cultural heritage

information. The meetings focused on electronic information that can be cooperatively

developed and shared for easy access by a wide range of users.”69 These types of gatherings,

which happen with great frequency today, mark the beginning of the convergence of heritage

institutions that were traditionally disciplinarily separate. Archival theory at least through the

1970s consciously developed methods and theoretical constructs distinct from Library (and often

Museum) standards. For practical and ideological reasons, this pattern held until the introduction

of computer systems capable of delivering information to users outside the context of the

delivering institution. For the first time, the setting of the object’s storage was absent from the

delivery of the information the object contained. For the user it does not matter where the object

comes from, just that the information is discoverable, and transmissible. Libraries, museums, and

archives slowly attain the same goal and rely on the same technology to deliver their product.70

To the user, they may just be the same, a reality that leads to an additional emergent school of

archival proponents—the digital information archivists (not IT professionals).

In recent years a large growth of Human Rights and socially conscious archives have

risen internationally with a common tie to salvage the record of the wronged, the marginalized,

and the environmental and social catastrophes, and to preserve them by transferring them into the

69 Michael J. Fox and Peter L. Wilkerson, Introduction to Archival Organization and Description, v. 70 Shelley Sweeney recognizes this convergence in her discussion of the history of archival provenance, stating that “finally, as the information age and computerization move the once-separate fields of archival enterprise, library science, and museology closer together, so utilization of concepts in the history of the term ‘provenance’ stand to inform and enrich the vocabularies and understandings of all of these fields individually and together. (Sweeney, 208).


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digital world and making them widely accessible. These are a new breed of archivist—not a

homogenous group—but a cacophony of archivists, museum professionals, librarians,

academics, and socially conscious global citizens who are not obstructed by walls of the past,

who work for social justice, not the SAA, ICA, or any organization alone. Echoing David

Bearman, these are the individuals transforming archives from repositories to intermediaries.71

More research and exploration needs to be done on this topic. I mention it as an important

observation and as a recognition that the traditions and principles I engage in this paper are not

static or necessarily the only methods followed in archival institutions. It is a large world, and as

Richard J. Cox notes, “Many of the long-cherished ideas or concepts about records and archives

were formed in societies and organizations very different from the ones in which we now

operate.”72 There are many perspectives on memory, history, and the methods to store and share

stories from the past.

71 As quoted in Richard J. Cox’s “Revisiting the Archival Finding Aid,” in Journal of Archival Organization, 12–13. See also Terry Cook’s exploration of the characteristics of societal-focused archivists such as Hugh Taylor and Eric Ketelaar, and how their modes of thinking “represented a shift in the archival discourse from one based on the state to one reflecting the broader society that the state serves. (Terry Cook, 21).” 72 Richard J. Cox, Closing an Era, x.


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V. ARCHIVAL PRACTICES – ARRANGEMENT & DESCRIPTION

As the story goes, foundations for modern archival theory were set in mid-19th century

Europe with the principle of respect des fonds, which established a method whereby archives

could be ordered according to their relationships to their original creator(s) as opposed to the

many subjects that might be found within a repository.73 This principle, also known as the

principle of provenance, rests on the rule that groups of documents (fonds74) from one individual

or organization are not to be mixed with those of another.75 According to Richard J. Cox, in 1881

the Prussian State Archives issued “the regulations on this principle, requiring ‘arrangement

according to source and the maintenance of the order and file designations assigned in the

agency of origin.’” Cox also suggests the principle was a response to 19th century social

conditions, especially in relation to shifts of power from religions and monarchs to nations and

the public.76 As early as 1885, Dutch archivists were beginning to recognize that artificial

arrangement (e.g. chronological arrangement and subject-based arrangement according to

pertinence) had caused much damage to the historical record. There was a growing tendency in

European archives to respect the original order of a collection of records, the support of which

came in part from interest in diplomatics, which concentrated “attention more on the relationship

73 T. R. Schellenberg dates the origination of the “fonds” in 1841 with Count Duchatel and Guizot (Schellenberg, 170). More detailed histories of the principle of provenance recognize the practice in disparate European locales as far back as the mid-17th Century (for example, see Shelley Sweeney, “The Ambiguous Origins of the Archival Principle of Provenance,” 2008). 74 Fonds—“the whole of the documents, regardless of form or medium, automatically and organically crated and/or accumulated and used by a particular individual family or corporate body in the course of that creator’s activities or functions” (Roe, 19). Synonyms for fonds abound: e.g., manuscript group, assembled collection, record group, and series. 75 In Closing an Era, Richard J. Cox pinpoints the development of the provenance principle as a result of “the increasing volume of records, recognized as a problem as early as the seventeenth century, [which] had gained recognition as the foremost problem by the nineteenth century, and this led to new efforts to formulate principles for the management of the records, especially the principle of provenance.” (Cox, 2000, 37). 76 Richard J. Cox, Closing an Era, 38. Schellenberg also marks this date, 1881, for the Prussian State Archives (Schellenberg, 174).


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between the form of the record and its creation and development.”77 By the time of the 1898

Dutch Manual, the principle of provenance—herkomstbeginsel—developed to include a

secondary, yet equally important, principle of maintaining the original order of a group of

records. Muller, Feith, and Fruin argued against subject-based and chronological-based

arrangement of records because such a system “cannot be all inclusive…. It must be arbitrarily

imposed from without and does not arise from the order or content of a collection.”78 In their

view, a systematic arrangement based on the original organization of the records is the only

system that can be applied consistently to an archival collection. Hence the introduction of the

concept of original order.79 Hilary Jenkinson, in the early 20th Century, furthered the objective of

the archivist “to establish or re-establish the original arrangement,” calling this exposition of

original relationships the “moral defense of archives.”80

These two principles, provenance and original order, are the most dominant concepts

underlying archival theory.81 As I mentioned earlier, these concepts are grounded in the ideas

that archives are organic groups of records created by an individual or organization as a result of

its activity or function, and that there is a discernable structure to their physical and intellectual

arrangement. They privilege the context of the creation and use of the records as a necessary

precursor for interpreting their content. O’Toole & Cox stress that the employment of these

principles allows archivists to avoid imposing any predetermined subject categories onto record

77 Muller, Feith, and Fruin, Manual, ix-x. 78 As paraphrased by T. R. Schellenberg in Modern Archives, 176. 79 For the first detailed and codified explanation of original order, see Muller, Feith, Fruin, Manual, 48–65. 80 T. R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives, 178; Michael Cook, Archives Administration, 105. 81 Contemporary theorists view provenance as the central organizing standard and original order as the second most important organizing standard (O’Toole & Cox, 102). Paul Brunton and Tim Robinson describe arrangement and description as “the heart” of the archivist’s work (Pederson, ed., 129). See also Margaret Cross Norton, Norton on Archives, 1975; Michael Cook, Archives Administration, 1977; and Richard C. Berner, Archival Theory and Practice in the United States, 1983.


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groups.82 If archives are as such, then the aggregate is more important than an individual item

within the aggregate.83 The context, in which the records came to be, is of primary importance to

understanding their meaning more than the content itself, although often the content is essential

for determining the context. Furthermore, the structure of the records—how they relate to one

another within the whole—as instituted by the creator of the records must necessarily be

preserved in order to represent the context of the records accurately. Therefore, in order for an

archives—defined as a group of records—to be archival, it must have a context and a structure to

reflect. Hence, contexts must not be mixed (provenance), and structures must not be changed

(original order). I must note that the entire argument rests on the definition of an archive as

different from an informative group of records with no “organic” context and structure. As Ann

Pederson says, “all archives are records, but not all records are archives.”84 In essence, archival

arrangement and description is only used when it is necessary to maintain context and content of

a body of records. According to archival principles, therefore, just ‘old’ materials might not

require archival treatment.85

O’Toole & Cox insist original order is always present in a collection of records even if it

is difficult to ascertain. The difficulty for the archivist is discovering and recreating the existing

original order.86 A central problem for archivists is the reality of the variety of ways record

creators maintain their records before they become archival records. Personal papers are seen as

disorganized and difficult to assess for original order; bureaucratic records often are seen as well

82 James M. O’Toole & Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts, 103. 83 Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts, 17. 84 Ann Pederson, ed., Keeping Archives, 5. 85 Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts, 29. 86 James M. O’Toole & Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts, 104.


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organized and easy to arrange. Distinctions also are made between collections that are assembled

intentionally versus those that accrue naturally. 87

In her 2005, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts, Kathleen D. Roe, writing

from the intersection of public records and historical manuscripts, defines archival arrangement

as the process of organizing materials with respect to their provenance and original order to

protect their context and to achieve physical and intellectual control over the materials.88

Elizabeth Yakel defines arrangement as “intellectual and physical organization of records with

regard to archival principles such as provenance and original order.”89 Archival arrangement

requires physical and intellectual control of a group of records. Some archivists allow for

differing physical and intellectual arrangements of any one collection in order to account for

complexities in the form or function of the records.90 According to O’Toole & Cox, “Archivists

thus share with librarians & museum curators the mission of organizing the materials in their

care in some systematic manner and then codifying and communicating that order to users who

want to retrieve information.”91 Terry Eastwood adds, “the most important facet of arrangement

is not physical but identifying archival relationships intellectually.”92 Schellenberg marks

“classification” as a principle that goes to the “roots of the problem of arranging records.”93 He

recognizes three factors of classifying archival records: (1) the action to which they relate, (2) the

organizational structure of the agency that produced them, and (3) their subject matter.94 Michael

87 Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts, 20–23. 88 Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts, 11. Paul Brunton and Tim Robinson employ similar definitions of archival arrangement and description (Pederson, ed., 129–130). Roe notes that this approach is “most applicable in a paper-based environment” (Roe, 11). 89 Elizabeth Yakel, Starting an Archives, 41. 90 Michael Cook, Archives Administration, 106–107. 91 James M. O’Toole & Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts, 100. 92 Terry Eastwood, “Fundamentally Speaking,” 239. 93 T. R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives, 52. 94 T. R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives, 53–55. Schellenberg also recognizes that classification requires “a large measure of subjective judgment (Schellenberg, 91).


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Cook encourages archivists to avoid the concept “classification”, opting for “arranging.”

According to Cook, “to classify” is “to allocate [records] to categories previously established,”

whereas “to arrange” is “to place [records] in an order relative to each other.”95

During archival arrangement, records are therefore placed in an order relative to their

provenance and original order. Kathleen D. Roe, in contemporary terms, observes that the

context of creation and the use of records are essential to arrangement and description.96 In order

to establish intellectual control of a collection of records, they must be evaluated physically and

understood.

Margaret Cross Norton of the Illinois State Library was a strong advocate for public

records archival practice and theory. Her writings fall in step with those of other public records

commentators such as Schellenberg, Jenkinson, and Muller, Feith, and Fruin. Provenance and

original order are essential characteristics of archival practices, as opposed to subject

relationships. Functions of government organizations and departments dictate the order of the

records. Most importantly for Norton, the archivist must understand government thoroughly in

order to be able to arrange documents of the government. The archivist must understand and

have digest of every relationship between departments within the government.97 Norton espouses

a strict adherence to the structure of originating agencies as the guiding principle for arranging

archival records.

Arrangement, for O’Toole & Cox, is an activity simultaneously both theoretical and

practical. By applying principles of provenance and original order, archivists refine “intellectual

and physical control over [records]” and “organize them in a systematic and useful way,” noting

95 Michael Cook, Archives Administration, 103. 96 Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts, 3. 97 Margaret Cross Norton, Norton on Archives, 108.


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that “in general…neatness and order are effected.”98 This act of establishing control through

order is synonymously called ‘processing’ in archival discourse. Processing envelopes acts of

accession, arrangement, and description.99 Kathleen D. Roe states that the archivist must first

arrange intellectually—i.e. identify the intellectual pattern, original order, existing in the

materials—and then make sure their physical organization reflects that intellectual pattern.100

Ann Pederson warns that “the temptation to sort new acquisitions too hurriedly must be resisted

to prevent permanent damage being done to the integrity of the records through an inexact

understanding of the relationship between various items.”101 Not only do archival theorists argue

that records should be arranged according to these principles, they assume that archivists can

accomplish a complete recreation of the records’ original state. Michael Cook illustrates in his

definition of archival arrangement as “putting archives into their proper and final order.”102 “In

establishing a ‘pure’ archival arrangement the archivist is safeguarding the historical authenticity

of the archives.”103 I call this the myth of the ‘exceptional archivist.’

Archivists are permitted, when necessary, to diverge from the original order when none

can be determined.104 This fact led Carl Gustaff Weibull to question the ideas of original order

and to propose archivists do something “that is not merely restorative but actually creative in

character.”105 Yet, even if we could attain a recreation of the original arrangement, are we

overlooking the nature of human activity? In essence, an archivist is only capable of restoring 98 James M. O’Toole & Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts, 122–123. 99 James M. O’Toole & Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts, 122; Elizabeth Yakel, Starting an Archives, 16. 100 Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts, 6. 101 Ann Pederson, ed., Keeping Archives, 117. 102 Michael Cook, Archives Administration, 103. 103 Michael Cook, Archives Administration, 105. 104 See T. R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives, 186. See also contemporary archival arrangement and description manuals, including Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts: if structure is disturbed (or non-existent), “the archivist should establish order relying on the principles of provenance and original order in so far as possible” (Roe, 11). 105 T. R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives, 188–189. Paul Brunton and Tim Robinson describe this process as “rather like doing a jigsaw puzzle because the archivist is trying to fit all the different pieces together” (Pederson, ed., 129).


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order to one moment in time. The order of a collection is fluid thing, growing and shifting

throughout its use. Milan Kundera, in Unbearable Lightness of Being, describes the image of

time and the traces of time as a constant image of a body in motion through time and space with

all moments and spaces constantly visible: history illuminated. Are archives, in their construction

by creator and function, like this? Each body with its own trace, zigzagging and intersecting in

time?106 Original order is a misnomer. Final order may be more precise. To be precise enough,

one would need to know the date and time of the arrangement that they are trying to recreate.

What is more is that archival proponents of provenance and original order maintain the necessity

of the archivist’s role in fixing the order when it is lost, or improving upon the order when it is

disorderly. Paul Brunton and Tim Robinson observe that “some collections may still be in their

original order, while others will need extensive re-organization either to restore the order in

which they were created and used, or to impose a new order if none previously existed.”107

Methods are suggested for attempting the processes of restoration, reorganization, but it should

be noted that this process is much like gambling. This re-storing and imposing is a space where

archivists craft their stories. For example, Brunton and Robinson continue, “First, the archivist

surveys the whole collection to discern whether or not the material during its active life, was kept

in any particular way. If so, the archivist records the method of arrangement and if necessary

restores to its original arrangement any material that might have been disturbed or disordered.”108

A complication here is that people are complex and often we work in haphazard ways.

Sometimes we recycle our records to uses in other projects and what may look out of order is

actually in order. Kathleen D. Roe implies that when records are kept poorly by an individual or

an organization (or are disorderly), then archivists should reorder, rearrange, and weed

106 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 107 Ann Pederson, ed., Keeping Archives, 130. 108 Ann Pederson, ed., Keeping Archives, 131.


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extraneous materials.109 Margaret Cross Norton provides an example of public records practices

where this “just-in-case” allowance is accepted. According to Norton, “When series come

without any apparent system of filing or in disorder it is, of course, necessary for the archivist to

arrange the documents according to what, upon study of the ways in which they will be called

for, seems the most efficient method.”110 Michael Cook echoes this sentiment.111 Is the archivist

so exceptional?

Pederson, O’Toole & Cox, and Roe equally profess the exceptional ability of the

archivist, because of his/her archival knowledge, to make the best choices about arrangement and

description in order to protect context and preserve content.112 These archival writers also in the

same breath maintain the common notion that processing can be done by clerical or technical

staff or by student interns or volunteers.113 There is a contradiction here. We must recognize that

we allow arrangement to be an ambiguous task by systematizing it into an exceptional archival

task and by our willingness to pass it on to the least experienced.

Archivists recognize the need to be reflexive in their work by maintaining documentation

of the work done to a particular collection—“actions taken on the records”—to add to the

administrative history of the collection.114 Max Evans calls this “authority control”—

administrative histories and biographical sketches created by archivists and kept indefinitely with

the archives.115 Michele Light and Tom Hyry suggest the additions of colophons to archival

109 Kathleen, D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts, 49–50, 61–62. 110 Margaret Cross Norton, Norton on Archives, 117. 111 Michael Cook, Archives Administration, 99. 112 For instance, Ann Pederson states, “Discerning the original order and interpreting the context and use of the records poses the archival challenge and require the exercise of professional skills” (Pederson, ed., 7). 113 Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts, 68. 114 Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts, 84–85; Michael Cook, Archives Administration, 108. 115 Max J. Evans, “Authority Control: An Alternative to the Record Group Concept,” 1986.


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finding aids.116 Heather MacNeil builds on the work of Light and Hyry and argues for increased

responsibility on the part of the archivist for transparency in the descriptive process.117 It is also

important to note, as has been recognized by Shelley Sweeny, that the concept of provenance

(and other archival principals) is not applied evenly in actual archival settings, leading to

variations in the treatment of records in differing locations.118

Some criticize the archival approach to arrangement. Philip N. Cronenwett approaches

the concept of provenance with disdain. He fears the tendency of provenancial arrangement to

neutralize the perceived greater historical value of certain records over others. “An important

manuscript or series of manuscripts should not be buried within another body of papers simply to

preserve what is, at best, an artificial provenance.”119 This is a valid point. Archivists attempt to

counter this tendency through descriptive practices that offer specialized access points for

researchers to discover perceived historically important records or series. Unfortunately,

Cronenwett takes this critique into the territory of snobbery. In the same article describing the

contents of personal papers of a renowned musician, Cronenwett proceeds, “A number of

settings are by noted composers; others are, at best, amateurish attempts for a single

performance. Tapes and manuscripts of the latter have little research value and are best removed

from the collection.”120 Some early modern theorists, such as Sir Hilary Jenkinson, recognized

the impossibility of objective archival selection. Jenkinson warns archivists against “suggesting

that any qualities of scholarship or experience will make it possible for anyone to ‘choose’ with

certainty out of a mass of Records those which future historians will find most useful.”121

116 Michele Light and Tom Hyry, “Colophons and Annotations: New Directions for the Finding Arid,” 2002. 117 Heather MacNeil, “Picking Our Text: Archival Description, Authenticity, and the Archivist as Editor,” 272. 118 Shelley Sweeney, “The Ambiguous Origins of the Archival Principle of ‘Provenance,’” 206. 119 Philip N. Cronenwett, “Appraisal of Literary Manuscripts,” 110. 120 Philip N. Cronenwett, “Appraisal of Literary Manuscripts,” 112. 121 Sir Hilary Jenkinson, Selected Writings, xvi. Both Terry Eastwood and Verne Harris employ this quote in their own writings.


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Jenkinson prefers that creators and users of records make selection decisions. Once the records

enter the archive, according to Jenkinson, they are not to be disturbed or destroyed. Many

modern and contemporary archivists reject this notion (appraisal and selection are condoned

archival activities), but there is currency in the notion that archivists become creators of the

historical record when they make selection decisions as to what will be included in the historical

record.122 Although Cronenwett, in this extreme, offers terrible advice to unsuspecting archivists,

Cronenwett provides an excellent example of hegemonic archival practices that were criticized in

the 1960s and 1970s. With worldviews such as Cronenwett’s overseeing the historical record,

just how much “amateurish” history already has been removed from the archive?

Patricia Aronsson suggests an alternative approach to provenance, speaking about

collecting congressional collections according to a system focused on delegations instead of

individuals: “Although this approach seems to wreak havoc with the archival notion of

provenance, perhaps archivists interpret that concept too narrowly…. 20th Century congressional

papers are a new breed of archival materials. The old guidelines may no longer apply.”123

Aronsson identifies an underlying assumption of the concept of provenance that depends on the

purpose of collecting and the intended uses of the collection in the future. Provenance is a

concept employed because of the way it preserves certain information for use in the future,

namely the context of the records. According to Michael Cook, the “principle of provenance is

adopted, not for its own sake, but because it is the only satisfactory way of interpreting series of

records as material for research.”124

Contemporary archivists criticize archival arrangement and description in hopes of

expanding the interpretations of provenance and original order. Heather Beattie, draws on the

122 Terry Eastwood, “Jenkinson’s Writings on Some Enduring Archival Themes,” 40. 123 Patricia Aronsson, “Appraisal of 20th Century Congressional Collections,” 98. 124 Michael Cook, Archives Administration, 105.


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work of scholars in academic disciplines such as literature and cultural studies as well as post-

modern archivists, to argue for an expanded, complex conception of archival provenance that

includes not just the individual or organization who created the records, but also the social,

political, and technological context surrounding the creation of the records.125 Writing about the

treatment of women’s diaries in archival settings, Beattie identifies the need for archivists to

recognize “four main aspects of the diary’s provenance that are rarely mentioned in archival

description: the diarist’s motivation for writing, the intended audience, the implications of the

diary’s custodial history, and the role of the archivist in its representation.”126 Geoffrey Yeo

offers a similar critique of provenance as it stems from traditional archival interpretations of

organic fonds and artificial collections. Again, espousing a more complex understanding of

records, Yeo departs from binary understandings of record groups (fond vs. collection; organic

vs. artificial) in search of an integrative, analytical method for classifying archival provenance

based on context of creation and custodianship.127 According to Yeo, “It seems impossible to

postulate a rigid dividing line between aggregations that are artificial and those that are not.”128

Similar critiques in the digital era have appeared with commentators noting the difficulties of

archiving born-digital records, especially with the application of provenance and original order.

125 Heather Beattie, “Where Narratives Meet: Archival Description, Provenance, and Women’s Diaries,” 86. 126 Heather Beattie, “Where Narratives Meet: Archival Description, Provenance, and Women’s Diaries,” 86. 127 Geoffrey Yeo, “Custodial History, Provenance, and the Description of Personal Records,” 50–64. Yeo documents the contextual and custodial history of a 17th Century collection of private papers. Coincidentally, Alan Lomax’s collection of papers bears striking resemblance to this collection of Sir Richard Fanshawe. 128 Geoffrey Yeo, “Custodial History, Provenance, and the Description of Personal Records,” 57.


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VI. CRAFTING ARCHIVES – Organizing, Discerning, and Arranging

Carlyle S. Smith Papers processing project, Lawrence, Kansas, Daily Journal, B. Lyons February 14, 2007 We have begun making selection distinctions based on what “fits” with this collection and the purpose of this project versus what is “outside of the scope” of the project. The reasons have to do with space and time (money). I would prefer to keep it all together; the work is not much more. We have decided to keep these “discarded” materials in separate boxes to be given (offered) to the family of Carlyle Smith, the University Archives, and other sensible repositories. I have argued that we also keep these discarded piles labeled according to the project group from where they were separated. If we maintain the link to the materials they go with then other repositories can connect to these related papers we are storing here… We have made considerable progress—establishing first a broad order to the documents and now (second) slowly approaching these groups one by one and allowing their inner‐order to mold appropriate groupings so that an outline can be formed which describes or explains what was once only a pile of various documents. February 16, 2007 Today I completed processing the Norwegian Expedition materials. Mary Adair, my supervisor, has instructed us to include only certain types of documents with this collection: e.g., we are putting aside (rejecting) materials that are peripheral to the project at hand. Duplicate manuscripts, resource materials, general correspondence—these are items that we are putting in separate boxes to be given to the family or offered to University Archives. To maintain some semblance of order and provenance, I have been making sure each folder or box that is set aside has been labeled as to which group, sub group, and series it originally came from in our arrangement processes. February 23, 2007 Mary and I discovered today that we are on the same page and the right track regarding the arrangement and categories of the Missouri River Basin (MRB) materials. She has many collections in the Archaeological Research Center (ARC) and her goal with this project is to organize Carlyle’s papers in order to add depth to the documentation of these collections. We have been organizing the materials with that in mind. With this approach some archaeological collections will have more documentation than others. We have no say in this. The documents have already been created by Carlyle and we can only strive to get them in proper piles. Whether he actually had documentation for each collection is out of our hands. Over the past few days we have been looking to find answers to the collections in the ARC via Carlyle’s papers. We will not find all the answers, only those that are contained here in these papers. If we are confident with our sorting procedures (considering that we have exhausted materials to sort)


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then we can move forward and begin arrangement, description, and re‐housing of each small collection pile that we have amassed. The inherent order will solidify as we proceed. April 4, 2007 John Miller and I began the physical organization of the entire set of materials then began arrangement of the correspondence into chronological order. I briefly started the finding aid. Maintaining intellectual order is difficult as these collections begin to merge. April 20, 2007 I had a discussion with Mary about the “separated” material—documents not related to any of the projects from which the ARC has material artifacts—and she intends to offer it back to Carlyle’s children. There are parts that she will offer to the Carlyle S. Smith Library in New York and KU’s University Archives. If the children do not want the documents offered them, Mary intends to dispose of the documents. I think she should offer everything not taken by one of the above entities to the University Archives. Carlyle was a professor here at KU for many years and they may find value in his papers. If they refuse, and the kids have refused, and Mary is sure they are not valuable to archaeological materials, then I would agree with the decision to discard them. But I think an attempt must be made to find a home for them first. At this point we have accessioned, organized, preserved, arranged, and described (in finding aids) twenty linear feet of documents related to over sixteen archaeological expeditions led by Carlyle S. Smith in his career as a KU professor and museum administrator. Alan Lomax Collection Film & Video processing project, Washington, D.C., Daily Journal, B. Lyons June 19, 2007 Todd Harvey and I began discussing the steps that we would like to follow for the organization and preparation of the Alan Lomax Film collection at the American Folklife Center (AFC) in the Library of Congress (LC). This part of the project will result in establishing “order” to the Film Collection, applying MV#s (accession numbers) to each item, and integrating 7 indexes into one access database. All of this is in preparation for an intern who will be re‐housing the films and applying barcodes in preparation for their move to the Culpepper facility. This morning, Todd and I visited the films in Deck 50 (Jefferson Building) to orient ourselves and refresh our knowledge of the collection. We identified the current order (generally) and began to identify the various sub‐groups in which this collection was created. We are discussing the idea of slightly re‐ordering the films in an organic fashion—in the order that they were culled over time. The other question that remains to be answered is how we will apply MV#s to the films. There are canisters of films and many times there are multiple pieces of film within one canister.


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Sometimes these pieces are related to each other and sometimes they are not. We are leaning towards giving each individual item an MV# and clarifying intellectual relationships in the database. June 25, 2007 Todd and I went to Deck 50 in the Jefferson Building to begin physically working with the Lomax Film collection. The collection is constituted of small film groups of unique intellectual order. Todd ordered the “Choreo Workprint Library” according to Choreo number, i.e. Choreo 1 to Choreo 500. I similarly ordered the “Choreo Master Library” according to TR#, i.e. TR‐1 to TR‐189. The cans were dusty and gloves were absolutely necessary. We worked for two hours. We are working towards developing a definite order to the collection and establishing a method of applying new unique AFC MV#s to each item. When this is complete, Jennifer Pondo (the NYU Film Conservation intern) will re‐house each item and prepare them for the move to Culpepper. After lunch, I returned to meet with Todd further on the Film project. He was waiting for a tour that was late, so I researched Choreometrics further, looking for clues to deciphering the chronology and intellectual order of the films. This is helpful and I will continue this. Nancy Johnson (consulting archivist at the Lomax Archive) will help me investigate the documentation at the Lomax Archive (from afar). Perhaps we will find some useful evidence regarding the films. June 27, 2007 When Todd arrived, we ventured back to Deck 50 to continue organizing and arranging the Lomax films. Todd continued with the T‐series and completed it. I arranged the Presentation Films and Lomax’s Folk Films. Todd left and I stayed to verify our indexes with the actual films. I was able to fix the misnumbering situation with the Choreo Films subcollection. At the moment, all the films are in order with the exception of the Choreo Sound Reels. They don’t seem to be here at the LC. I’m not sure where they are. They may still be in NY. I am going to need to check next time I’m there. After four hours in the chilly deck, I broke for lunch—I had chili. Alan Lomax Collection Manuscript processing project, Washington, D.C., Daily Journal, B. Lyons June 18, 2008 How do we deal with all the office materials that are appearing from the 1980s? They deal with multiple projects, both Folklore‐related and Performance Style‐related, e.g. a folder containing correspondence related to Choreometrics films as well as preliminary ideas for American Patchwork. I began a subseries category called, “professional activities”. Maybe these general folders can file into this category with descriptions in the notes field of related projects…. June 24, 2008


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The only glitch will be the arbitrary distinction that was made between Lomax’s “folklore/field” work and his “performance style” work. I think there is no clear divide between these aspects of Lomax’s psyche and it shows in his work. The collection will always show a scar where this separation took place. It must be accepted that Lomax developed into an anthropologist/ethnomusicologist and his folklore work developed with him. Lomax describes American Patchwork (in a 1990 letter to Brian O’Doherty of the NEA, pg. 5) as “the first field test of the systems for the analysis of performance style that have been developed in my lab in the last couple of decades.” The letterhead of this particular letter reads, “The Association for Cultural Equity / Alan Lomax & Conrad Arensberg, Co‐Directors / A Global Study of Expressive Behavior” and lists associated projects: American Patchwork Television Series; Cantometrics; Choreometrics; Global Jukebox. To properly understand this collection and its contents, it is important to recognize the seamlessness of Lomax’s work. Even the project to prepare 12 lps from Alan Lomax and John Lomax’s early fieldwork entitled, A Recorded Treasury of Black Folk Song, is laced with “performance style” elements. The project was funded through and overseen by Lomax’s Cantometrics umbrella; the goal of the project includes (expressly stated by Lomax) the desire to use performance style analysis to organize and arrange the recordings. In a letter to Erik Barnouw and Robert Carneal (12/13/1979) requesting support for the project, Lomax writes, “As you both know I have been studying performance style for a number of years. I thought it might be helpful if I reevaluated the Lomax collections of field recordings at the Library of Congress and prepared the best of them for publication—first of all in a series of albums, organized in a way that might help to show blacks and other Americans the beauty, the variety, the regional traits and the African characteristics of this great body of song.”


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VII. THE NEUTRAL & NATURAL ARCHIVAL NARRATIVE

I am interested in exploring, in further depth, two underlying narratives that shape

western archival practice. I recognize there are many narratives that shape archival practice. For

the purpose of exploring arrangement and description in further depth, I limit myself to the

following narratives. In one version, archivists are neutral guardians of the historical record that

preside as gatekeepers for selected aggregates of records which by nature are organically

structured entities capable of offering accurate representations of a definable past and are

assumed to be intact contextually. Much of the evidence of this storyline I have shown in the

previous sections. I call this the neutral and natural archival narrative. In another version,

archivists fill a necessary societal function to preserve and to make accessible the legacy of

human endeavors via the collection of records created in the process of human existence.

Because this narrative focuses more on the nature of the profession than on the principles that

ground it, I have not explored it previously in this paper. I call this the preservation and access

archival narrative. In the following sections, I intend to explore issues related to each of the

above narratives. I hope to provoke critical reflection upon, not to erase, these narratives.

Of the two elements in this narrative, the neutrality of archivists has been widely

challenged in correlated disciplinary attempts to add agency and subjectivity to human actors. I

will not recount these arguments here, but evidence of them can be found in critiques of

positivism and objectivity throughout academia. For the purpose of my argument, I include a

recent examination of the identity of archivists that addresses continued debates in archival

practice concerning the neutrality/objectivity of archivists. According to Elizabeth Snowden

Johnson, in “Our Archives, Our Selves,” which looks at the identity of the American archival

profession, the concept that archives are unmediated collections where the archivist serves as a


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neutral guardian avoiding any temptation to apply personal judgment to the permanent record

still holds sway in the profession.129 She notes that the counter argument is fashionable as well,

to see the “archive as a creation” and to see the archivist as a social actor.130

As early as the 1890s, collections of records were characterized as natural and organic

entities. In the Dutch Manual, the authors in prescribing methods for managing archival records

insisted, “a natural classification should be used that orders the documents according to their

natural relationship,”131 criticizing previous subject-based systems of arrangement because “in

breaking up the numerous dossiers the natural relation of the documents is destroyed.”132 They

proceed by characterizing a collection of records as an “organic whole.”133 In the 1920s, Sir

Hilary Jenkinson, British archive giant, classified a group of archival records as an “organic body

of records,”134 adding that archives come “together by a natural process” and are not collected

for literary or historical purposes.135 According to Hilary, this leads to the interrelatedness of

archival records “by virtue of participating in the same activity and affair and how important it is

therefore to understand the workings of the body (or individual) that created them.”136 In the U.S.

in the 1950s, T. R. Schellenberg again characterized records with a natural, organic metaphor

stating that the “nature of archival materials is organic relationships between items and between

creators and records.” Australian archivist, Ann Pederson, in the 1980s defined archives as

“unique, organic materials with evidential and informational properties.” 137 Paul Brunton and

Tim Robinson, in the same text, add that records, as “organic products of continuing work or life

129 Elizabeth Snowden Johnson, “Our Archives, Our Selves,” 191. 130 Elizabeth Snowden Johnson, “Our Archives, Our Selves,” 191–193. 131 Muller, Feith, and Fruin, Manual, xixi. 132 Muller, Feith, and Fruin, Manual, 50. 133 Muller, Feith, and Fruin, Manual, 19. 134 As quoted in Trevor Livelton, Archival Theory, Records, and the Public, 29. 135 Terry Eastwood, “Jenkinson’s Writings on Some Enduring Archival Themes,” 42. 136 Terry Eastwood, “Jenkinson’s Writings on Some Enduring Archival Themes,” 42. 137 Ann Pederson, ed., Keeping Archives, 7.


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activities, can only be fully understood through a knowledge of why and how they were created

and used over time.”138

I can go on an on with examples of archivists and the narrative of natural records.

Ultimately what I want to show is that this is a prevalent narrative that stretches from early

archival discourse to the present moment. And it has. In recent 21st century publications, these

characterizations are present in almost identical language. James O’Toole and Richard J. Cox in

the most recent Society of American Archivists foundations publication, Understanding Archives

and Manuscripts, contend again that it is the “organic nature” of records that is the foundation

for the concept of original order.139 Kathleen D. Roe, updating another Society of American

Archivists foundations publication, Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts,

defines archival records as “by products of human activity,” citing the “organic nature of

archives” as the underlying reason for archival methods of arrangement and description.140

Building on these metaphors of natural and organic bodies of records, archivists have

incorporated further natural metaphors into the execution of their practices. Michael Cook adds

an archaeological overtone by insisting that the archivist, as an arranger, is looking for the

“primitive order” of records.141 Of course, Foucault and other cultural and social theorists have

extended the archaeological theme of archives.142 Similarly, Walter Benjamin explores the

relationship between collection and collector (provenance) in his writings. For Benjamin, this

aggregation is an intimate, idiosyncratic affair, where the collector comes to life in the

138 Ann Pederson, ed., Keeping Archives, 130. 139 James M. O’Toole & Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts, 103. 140 Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts, 2–3. 141 Michael Cook, Archives Administration, 105. 142 See Michel Foucault; also see Sven’s The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy, second chapter.


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collection.143 Frances Blouin uses the phrase “archival bond” to describe the relationship

between a record and its generator.144

Another widely accepted view of records is that they have a life cycle.145 Their creation is

said to be an organic process related to the humans or human institutions that create them in the

course of activities or functions. An entire pre-archival profession of records management was

instituted in the U.S. National Archives in the mid-20th century specifically to address life cycle

issues of records by scheduling from the moment of creation the expected trajectory of a record

through space and time. In some cases a record fulfills its function and then is marked for

disposal; in others, the record is destined for the archives. Some archivists go so far as to

recognize a sense of ‘birth control’ in record management, establishing not only the intention to

create a record, but also the ability to minimize record creation.

The implications of the natural archival narrative are far-reaching. The narrative

influences the development of archival practices, such as arrangement and description; it

establishes selection criteria for how archives ingest collections; and, at least in one case, it has

allowed for the invention of an entirely new profession. The narrative is not given, however. The

existence of previous and alternate archival methods establishes clearly that there are other ways

to conceive records and their relationships to each other and their creators. There are also recent

attempts to complicate the idea of inherent archival naturalness. Richard J. Cox recognizes the

constructedness of this narrative in a recent exploration of archival practices. Cox notes that the

143 Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 2007. 144 Frances Blouin, “Vatican Archives”, 418. Luciana Duranti also employs this term in her work. 145 T. R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives, 37. James M. O’Toole & Richard J. Cox, and Kathleen D. Roe also explore the life cycle of archival records.


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hierarchical character of archival arrangement and description has the tendency to make

hierarchical relationships between records appear natural.146

I offer a further complication of this narrative. Beginning from the theoretical foundation

that archives are collections of records that have an organic relationship to the activities of their

creator(s), it is possible to show the inadequacy of such a static assumption about the nature of

archival records. The archival profession builds on the perception that records are created for

specific purposes and that they have natural relationships to their creators and other records

created by their creators.147 The tenets of archival arrangement and description, namely

provenance and original order, assume a final, natural, preferred arrangement of archival records

which reflects the original order of the records as kept and used by the original creators of the

records. That there is a final order to a collection of records from a particular entity is

theoretically possible. It is also theoretically possible that there exists a perfect archivist who can

identify the preferred original order hidden in the structure and arrangement of the records.

Even in this best-case scenario, however, privileging occurs. It is a simplification of the

complexity of human interaction to imagine that a collection of records existed only in one,

original order. A collection of records exists on a day-to-day basis during the extent of its

creation and use by the original creator. The records—as they are created, collected, and used—

are in states of flux in their relationship to the creator and to other records created by the creator.

There is an ongoing evolution to the so-called order of the records. And on the day that the

creator is no longer in control of the records, when the records are transferred to the perfect

archivist to be processed and assigned a final, natural arrangement, the archivist uses the

principles of provenance and original order to ascertain this final, natural arrangement: the

146 Richard J. Cox, “Revisiting the Archival Finding Aid,” 17. 147 See Muller, Feith, and Fruin, T. R. Schellenberg, and Sir Hilary Jenkinson, as well as contemporary archival theorists.


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records of the creator will be kept together and they will be kept in the order assigned to them by

the creator. Yes, of course. But this final, natural order is only one of many possible orders in

which the records existed. In this case, our archival original order is actually closer to a

presumed final order as interpreted by the archivist. There are many contingencies that underlie

these interpretations by the archivist. The perfect archivist ascertains the final order of the

records, assuming that records only have one possible, natural order. As Michael Cook reminds

us, “it is archival arrangement that preserves and explains this original context and its

implications.”148 As if archival arrangement calcifies or petrifies, paralyzes, records in their one,

true historic order. As if the records themselves are not and were not always in a constant flux of

action and inaction, being written and being read, rewritten and re-read. The principle of original

order is the principle of a frozen order. On each successive day in the life of a record it is

possible for the record to shift in order, to shift in meaning, to find a new use, and to acquire new

relationships to other records. In such a case there are many potential original orders to any

collection of archival records. By choosing a final order, we privilege it over other possible

orders, and in doing so we build archival theory on a paradoxical assumption that it is possible

for something natural to be static and unchanging. If archival records have a natural, organic

relationship to their creators, then it is impossible that they could have a single original order that

is not merely a final order. For as creators and their activities change, so do the records and their

relationships. It is important for practitioners of archives to recognize the extent to which the

activity of identifying original order during arrangement procedures is an act of writing archives

and crafting order by freezing the final relationships (at best) of records and privileging those

relationships over other potential relationships that may have occurred during the life of the

148 Michael Cook, Archives Administration, 105.


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records. Geoffrey Yeo takes this argument further suggesting that there is actually never a “final

order” to a collection. Future changes are always a possibility.149

A further complication to the naturalness narrative is that it privileges a misconception

that archives are an organic whole, that there are no gaps or holes in a collection of records. The

organic whole metaphor privileges the recorded over the ephemeral, suggesting that the

authenticity of past events can be verified simply through what was recorded, collected, and

preserved. Little room is left for recollection of the material, emotional, intellectual, and oral

occurrents of the past that were not recorded or selected for archival treatment. Archives are

never complete. A collection of records that enters an archival institution as an archival

collection is never complete. Michael Cook reminds us of the “likelihood that the consignment is

not complete in itself.”150 Archives arrive in an always already incomplete—non-

comprehensive—state. Steven Ricci sees archives as “always fragmentary and therefore

profoundly metonymic.” 151 Richard J. Cox asks, “And do finding aids—as a descriptive

device—only provide a kind of false order to these piles of stuff, which have accumulated over

time and have little order except as the product of a collecting or hoarding impulse?”152 Quoting

Matthew H. Edney, Cox questions the naturalness of archival order, highlighting the imposition

of order by archival methods: There is “no longer the coherent and ordered archive as it

traditionally has been envisioned: it is fractured, ambiguous, duplicitous, nuanced. The

coherency and order of the archive is an ideological myth.”153 Illustrating the power of the

paradox, Walter Benjamin, who previously I showed reflecting the naturalness of archival

149 Geoffrey Yeo, “Custodial History, Provenance, and the Description of Personal Records,” 60. 150 Michael Cook, Archives Administration, 98–99. 151 Steven Ricci, “Saving, Rebuilding, or Making: Archival (Re) Constructions in Moving Image Archives,” 443–444. 152 Richard J. Cox, “Revisiting the Archival Finding Aid,” 20. 153 Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 39 (quoted in Richard J. Cox, Journal of Archival Organization, 21).


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collections, hints simultaneously of the artificiality of collections: “For what else is this

collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can

appear as order?”154

Geoffrey Yeo provides an excellent example for imagining this concept. In a recent and

important article exploring conflations of provenance in archival practice, Yeo highlights an

important, often misunderstood, distinction between archival concepts of fonds and collections.

Yeo explains the conceptual fonds as the total of all records created by, collected by, affected by,

created about, or in any way related to an individual or institution. A collection, according to

Yeo, is merely the physical aggregate of records created by, collected by, affected by, created

about, or in any way related to an individual or institution that is actually in custody of an

archival repository. These concepts are often conflated in archival practice and lead to

misrepresentation of the context of records in a particular repository. Yeo’s work here

complicates traditional distinctions between institutional and personal records as well as between

conceptions of organic versus artificial collections.155 The records that we find in archives are

always only incomplete collections of traces from the past.

In a previous study, Geoffrey Yeo semantically exploring archives defines records as

“persistent representations of occurrents” and as “species of representation” recognizing that

there is “no claim made that records are in any sense perfect.”156 Occurrents for Yeo imply a

temporal entity, and it is important for Yeo to state that records are only one type—species—of

representation, explicitly reminding us of their imperfection as representations of past occurrents.

Ultimately, for Yeo, records reflect past occurrents; and perceptions of records are diverse,

multifaceted, and dependent on cultural and temporal experience. These notions complicate the

154 Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 60. 155 Geoffrey Yeo, “Custodial History, Provenance, and the Description of Personal Records,” 2009. 156 Geoffrey Yeo, “Concepts of Record (2): Prototypes and Boundary Objects,” 135, 136.


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perceived naturalness of archival records. Archives are not only incomplete, but also differ from

what we imagine them to be. Heather Beattie explicates this idea recognizing in her critique of

archival description that “the custody that a diary passes through on its way to an archives and

any other material that accompanies it or indeed that is not passed along form part of its

provenance. This is because the record that arrives in the archives is not necessarily the same as

the record that was originally created.”157

Because of the nature of this paradox in archival thinking—archives are organic, yet

incomplete; fixed, yet mutable—theorists and critics imply that the archive is not quite fully

organic. They note that archives are by nature incomplete, yet that archives are organic unities

with natural relationships to their creator(s). Geoffrey Yeo demands, “Consider the paradox

emerging from recent literature, where records are seen as both fixed and mutable, as providing

stable evidence of past events, but also constantly evolving over time.”158 Critics hint at this

paradox in their writings, which are usually focused on imperfections of the archival system or

the records, but they commonly ignore the possibilities that the paradox lies not in an

inconsistency or impossibility on behalf of archives, but in the very nature of interpretation and

absence themselves. Take for instance, Carolyn Steedman’s suggestion that “nothing starts in the

Archive, nothing, ever at all, though things certainly end up there. You find nothing in the

Archive but stories caught half way through: the middle of things; discontinuities.”159 Steedman

continues her analysis reflecting on Derrida, Freud, and human memory:

But the problem in using Derrida discussing Freud in order to discuss Archives, is that an Archive is not very much like human memory, and is not at all like the unconscious mind. An Archive may indeed take in stuff, heterogeneous, undifferentiated stuff…texts, documents, data…and order them by the principles of unification and classification. This stuff,

157 Heater Beattie, “Where Narratives Meet: Archival Description, Provenance, and Women’s Diaries,” 94. 158 Geoffrey Yeo, “Custodial History, Provenance, and the Description of Personal Records,” 59. 159 Carolyn Steedman, Dust, 45.


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reordered, remade, then emerges—some would say like a memory—when someone needs to find it, or just simply needs it, for new and current purposes. But in actual Archives, though the bundles may be mountainous, there isn’t in fact, very much there. The Archive is not potentially made up of everything, as is human memory; and it is not the fathomless and timeless place in which nothing goes away that is the unconscious. The Archive is made from selected and consciously chosen documentation from the past and also from the mad fragmentations that no one intended to preserve and that just ended up there…160

The past comes to us in pieces. It will not be done away with. But it is the archivists who

tell the present story of the past by assembling the pieces. The actual stories of the past’s past are

for the telling of those whose past it was. Furthermore, these records come to us with another

crucial paradox. For theorists, the functions and the context(s) of the records are the unique

elements that make archives archival. They are the foundation upon which all archival theory is

based. Their histories are the histories that archival practice aims to preserve. But what will we

make of their disappearance? What will we make of understanding that the contexts and

functions of the past are no longer present? How do they tell their past through the archivists’

eyes? In truth the paradox continues. The creators and the functions—the unique archival

characters—are absent. They do not arrive with the records. The records hint of them—the

records echo their voices. The archivists are left to tell the story.

For these reasons, I argue that archivists in fact are storytellers. Archivists create

narratives about why they manage records the way they do and they simultaneously tell stories

about the records in their care, arranging and describing them for use by others. None of this is to

say that archival theory is incorrect. I hope, instead, to add depth and poetics to the process of

performing theory and the practice of writing archives.

160 Carolyn Steedman, Dust, 68.


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VIII. CONTROLLING ARCHIVES – Indexing, Documenting, & Finding

Carlyle S. Smith Papers processing project, Lawrence, Kansas, Daily Journal, B. Lyons February 20, 2007 I like the arrangement method that we have begun—it is becoming apparent that we should keep finding aid notes ongoing as we process a collection—allowing for more in‐depth description (persons involved, companies, subjects, locations, etc.) of the series, which in the end allows the researcher a clearer look into the documents to determine if they are suitable for his/her purposes. March 9, 2007 Today I continued the integration of loose documents into appropriate project boxes and folders. We are coming to an end to our sorting and arranging and must now begin the descriptive process which I believe will lead to a little more fine tuning in the extant arrangement. This will allow for a more organized and useful archives storage situation and the finding aid process will help us to solidify the contents of each folder, box, and project. March 19, 2007 John and I are solidifying our processing systems. Now that the projects are in order—we are making preservation photocopies and describing the projects in finding aids. Today we continued making appropriate photocopies for the Norwegian Expedition series of the South Pacific Collection. We completed that task and are now writing the finding aid for the project. There are actually two series to this collection and we need to make appropriate photocopies for series two—Marquesas—and add it to the finding aid. It is difficult to include useful (but not extraneous) information in the finding aid inventory. I think we can improve in this category of our work. At the moment we are including a good deal of redundancy. I think we need to factor some common elements out into subheadings—that will leave us room in the descriptions to include specific useful information. April 25, 2007 Carlyle kept two photo scrapbooks that he produced after his 1956 journey with the Norwegian Expedition. In one he included an eighty‐page “excerpt” from his journal which he kept during the nine month expedition. This “excerpt” is attached to the scrapbook and cannot be removed safely from the book. I carefully made a photocopy of the entire eighty pages today to add to the Easter Island series of documents. I integrated the copies into the collection and made entries into the finding aid, appropriately labeling them as photocopies—making note of the location of the originals as well. May 2, 2007


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As I have been creating labels, I have also been making further edits and corrections to the finding aids. One thing that we lack is a standard for subject titles, associated records, how to write inventory entries, etc. We have created standards as we go and we try to stay consistent, but even with just two people making entries, inconsistencies arise in the use of commas, em & en dashes, work order, headings, etc. I can see how the archival profession has had such difficulty setting access standards and guidelines for consistent finding aids. Each collection (even within a collection) is so different from the next. I have been using DACS (Describing Archives: A Content Standard) to try to keep our work in tune with other archival finding aids. If Mary decides to make these accessible online, hopefully they will mesh with other archival resources. This has been a useful experience, giving me insight into the difficulties and issues that archives face when working to provide broad access to their collections through their own catalogs and websites and through regional, national, and international catalogs like World Cat, etc. It has helped me understand the need for EAD and the use of XML (SGML), MARC, and other digital markup systems for cataloging material and providing transparent access to said catalogs and finding aids. Alan Lomax Collection Film & Video processing project, Washington, D.C., Daily Journal, B. Lyons June 26, 2007 Todd and I returned to Deck 50 for some more dust and film. Todd focused on organizing the T‐Series sub‐collection according to previously affixed “T” numbers. I worked on the Movement Style and Culture Choreometrics film elements, which have multiple numbering and labeling systems in place. Working from an index, I chose the most unique ID and began ordering the films physically according to these numbers, looking for patterns to develop. I discovered that the index numbering system is off. The content is correct, but the numbers don’t match. The reason is that there are a few items with identical numbers. This was overlooked when the index was created, causing the numbering system to be off and not match exactly with the index. I will fix the index tomorrow after Todd and I finish the physical organization of the films. Then we will compile the multiple indexes into one master Access database so that the film intern (Jennifer) can begin re‐housing and applying MV#s. August 6, 2007 Getting closer to the goal of inventorying every item in the Lomax Film collection and preparing an up‐to‐date index of the collection, I spent most of the day in Deck 50 inventorying the films. I made it to the end of the collection. All the films are now in order on the shelves, and each film is accounted for in the inventory. All that is left to do is adjust the database entries, incorporate


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the films that will arrive in the next shipment (both intellectually and physically), and finally attach MV#s to each database entry. Alan Lomax Collection Manuscript processing project, Washington, D.C., Daily Journal, B. Lyons June 25, 2008 Regarding reprints and collected materials (of which there is a great deal in this collection), are we going to differentiate between reprints and collected materials kept specifically for “performance style” uses versus those kept for “folklore” uses, or should we include all reprints and collected materials in autonomous categories? If we tag a reprint as “performance style” it separates it from other collected materials. If we tag it as “collected materials” we separate it from “performance style” materials (since we are making the distinction). Many collected articles come from Lomax’s “reprint” drawers. They don’t all refer to “performance style” research. Most do, however. We could develop a subseries label for collected materials, e.g. “collected materials, reprints” or we could do the same thing under performance style, e.g. “performance style, reprints”. One way or the other, a consistent approach should be established to handle the massive amounts of collected material that appear in this collection. I spent some time browsing materials that are currently identified as “collected materials” and noticed that there are plenty of instances of misidentification. For instance, in 1968 Lomax participated in a conference at Atlanta University put on by the Center for African and African‐American Studies. He was invited back in 1969. The folders were titled “Black Studies” and given the identification of “collected materials” (I think it was assumed that these were articles on black studies). In this instance I created a new sub‐subseries (“Conference on African and African‐American Studies, 1968‐1969”) and placed it within the “professional activities” subseries; therefore, we now have: “professional activities, Conference on African and African‐American Studies, 1968‐1969” which includes (currently) two large folders with correspondence about the conference, reprints of conference papers, notes, and other collected materials from the conference. Worth mentioning, also, is that Lomax participated in this conference on the momentum of his work with the Black Identity Project (which has its own sub‐subseries heading under the subseries “projects”). Do these materials fold into the Black Identity Project, or do they stand alone as Lomax’s professional work?


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IX. THE PRESERVATION & ACCESS ARCHIVAL NARRATIVE

The preservation and access archival narrative holds that archival institutions owe their

existence to the need to preserve records of the past for the purposes of making them accessible

to the public in its many manifestations. In some sense, as I have shown in previous sections of

this paper, archival principles were designed with a focus on preservation. The principles of

archival practice—provenance and original order—are designed to preserve the context and,

therefore, the informational and evidential values of archival records. From these principles

flowed the practices of arrangement and description. However, over time, the practice of

description has splintered into a two-fold process: description of archives for the preservation of

context and description of archives in order to make them discoverable by and accessible to a

public. The weakness of the narrative of preservation and access is that these two ideals, once

conceived as hand-in-hand ideals, are often driven by two differing goals. Where the goal of

preservation is to maintain records in a state where they are representative of the past to the

greatest extent possible, this goal has remained relatively the same over the past centuries. Where

the goal of access is to give users enough context about the original function, custody, and use of

the records so that the most information and evidence can be gleaned from them, this goal has

become muddled with changes in the possibilities of delivering archival records and information

about them to potential users. And therefore the narrative that there is an equal balance between

preservation and access in archival processes fades in relation to reality. Because of

technological advances, the principle of access—archival description—now often overshadows

the principle of preservation—archival arrangement. Since archival description is more

influenced by impulses to standardize practices, standardization weighs heavily on the archival

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The current push to standardize descriptive practices in international archival institutions

is driven predominately by technological advances in information discovery, access, and

dissemination.161 Kathleen D. Roe in 2005, updating a foundational SAA publication, Arranging

& Describing Archives & Manuscripts, identifies 1977 as the year when U.S. archives began

standardizing practices of arrangement and description.162Archivists find that the internet and

digital data management offer greater potential to provide access to their collections than

previous methods of description on paper. Using computerized information technology

efficiently requires the development of standard information formats. Archivists internationally

collaborate to create content, value, and structural standards for the delivery of archival

description to networked and discoverable online interfaces. These standards, which do increase

access to archival collections, are also in need of being evaluated for the extent to which they

require archivists to standardize their perceptions of collections themselves and, in so doing, to

stifle the uniqueness and the assumed natural organicity of archives that ground the entire

archival enterprise. Kathleen D. Roe identifies four main archival standards: A Glossary of

Archives and Records Terminology, DACS, ISAD(G), and RAD2.163 According to Roe,

automation in the 1960s and 1970s (and the convergence of library and archive practice, the

convergence of historical manuscript and public records practice) underscored the need for

descriptive standards and has dominated development of archival descriptive practices.164 In this

sense, technology—not theory—drove standardization in archival practice. Automation has

161 According to Kathleen D. Roe, standardization or archival practice, both internationally and nationally, has grown tremendously in the past two decades and includes the development of technical standards (usually not developed by archivists) and professional standards (usually developed by archivists), (Roe, 94–95). Richard J. Cox marks the 1987 introduction of the US MARC AMC format as the impetus for archivists’ to learn standardized methodologies (Cox, 2008, 7). 162 Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts, xiii. 163 Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts, 1. Roe identifies three types of data standards: data structure standards (e.g., MARC 21, EAD, ISAD(G)); data content standards (e.g., DACS, RAD2, APPM, AACR2); and data value standards (e.g., LC Subject Headings, AAT) (Roe, 95–97). 164 Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts, 37.


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significantly changed archival arrangement and description. These changes expose the need to

adapt from paper-based to digital-based interpretations of provenance and original order.165

Archival description, an activity usually seen in concert with archival arrangement, is

traditionally a narrative activity. O’Toole & Cox describe archival description as “the archival

activity that fixes and records information about the organized collection in some medium other

than the archivist’s own head and serves as a guide to any potential user.”166 DACS is described

as “an attempt to begin moving away from the idea of finding aids as finely crafted narrative

documents and towards recognizing them as tools that consist of distinct data elements.”167

Although I value the benefits of data standards for providing efficient access to

information, I am compelled to question the ways standardization of archival description affects

archival collections themselves. The Dutch trio, who codified archival theory and the principles

of provenance and original order, argued against rigid descriptive practices maintaining that each

item needs a unique descriptor and that rigid description leads to the misrepresentation of items,

restricting the freedom of the archivist who describes the items.168 They also contended “every

archival collection has therefore, as it were, its own personality, its individuality, which the

archivist must become acquainted with before he can proceed to its arrangement.”169

Contemporary cultural critics, such as Heather Beattie, provide evidence for the need of more in-

depth, narrative descriptions of archival collections by archivists. Beattie evaluates the nature of

archival description as it is related to women’s diaries, noting the richness, found in other

165 Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts, 99–102. 166 James M. O’Toole & Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts, 123. 167 Michael Rush, Lynn Holdzkom, Prudence Backman, Daniel A. Santamaria, and Andrea Leigh, “Applying DACS to Finding Aids: Case Studies from Three Diverse Repositories,” 215. 168 Muller, Feith, and Fruin, Manual, 106–107; however, the Dutch trio do express the importance of the uniformity of terminology in inventories (Muller, Feith, and Fruin, 190). 169 Muller, Feith, and Fruin, Manual, 19.


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disciplinary expositions of women’s diaries, is absent in archivists’ descriptive practices,

especially in this new era of descriptive standards.170

Because what are archives if not human memories? Standards of description force them

into tighter and tighter boxes until the flexibility, fluidity, and ambiguities of reality are neatly

organized.

Emmi Whitehorse, “Self Surrender (#1242)”, 2003.0082 Charmion von Wiegand, ‘untitled’, 2000.0104

Take for instance the two paintings pictured here. Self Surrender (#1242) by Whitehorse

illustrates my interpretation of human activity, where the lines, colors, and shapes represent the

complexity of discourse, action, and materiality. Untitled by Wiegand represents the archival

treatment of records that once inhabited the ambiguity of space and place in the first painting.

Because of the archival need to organize, classify, name, and order, what once was a fluid

existence becomes linear and rigid, structured and orderly. As standardization intensifies, so does

the distortion of records and their relation to a recognizable past.

Standardization takes place in both arrangement and description. Practitioners such as

Oliver Wendell Holmes employ a standard perception of the nature of archives that includes

“five levels of arrangement.”171 These levels include the repository, archival group, series, file

170 Heather Beattie, “Where Narratives Meet: Archival Description, Provenance, and Women’s Diaries,” 2009. 171 Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Archival Arrangement: Five Different Operations at Five Different Levels," 1964; also noted in T. R. Schellenberg’s Modern Archives and Kathleen D. Roe’s Arranging & Describing Archives & Manuscripts.


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unit, and individual item. Earlier commentators began these distinctions (although in 18th century

Holland the concept of “community archives” was present, which extends at least one level

higher than the repository level).172 Here, again, is the tendency to place life and all its

contingencies into neat, organized packages. Among institutional and bureaucratic settings where

control of the creation of documents is well-organized, and through the imposition of pre-

archival records management practices, these levels of arrangement may work, but only because

the imposition of control was established in the early life cycle of the records, before they were

created. Still, how many records created by the government become boundary objects, incapable

of clear classification? What about in private papers or historical manuscripts where records birth

control is less prevalent, if present at all? The application of these levels of arrangement, the

‘series’ for instance, necessarily re-shapes the nature of the documents, their relationships to

each other, their relationships to the creator(s), and, possibly, their interpretive potential. At what

point does a record’s boundary of association with other documents end? Frances Blouin

provides an excellent example of the complication of archival collections as she shares her

experience with the Vatican Archives, revealing the problems of making divisions and

distinctions with records.173 Paradoxically, Blouin continues with the statement that no set of

records is “exceptional” in light of archival processing standards. 174 Yet, Michael Cook, and

many archival theorists ground their work on the idea that “every archive accumulation is

unique, and the way in which it is arranged must be determined after a study of its

composition.”175

172 See introduction to Muller, Feith, and Fruin’s Manual. Geoffrey Yeo also notes that soviet archivists recognized one complete Soviet fonds in “Custodial History, Provenance, and the Description of Personal Papers.” 173 Frances Blouin, “Vatican Archives,” 426-427. 174 Frances Blouin, “Vatican Archives,” 431. 175 Michael Cook, Archives Administration, 104.


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Descriptive standards impose similar constraints on the original nature of archival

records. It is possible that the extent to which principles of arrangement are designed to assure

the maintenance of the original context is counteracted by the extent to which descriptive

standards limit the archivist’s ability to describe the organic nature of archival collections. How

do data standards affect the shape and nature of archives/documents? According to Richard J.

Cox, “there are limitations to seeing archival records as matter mainly to be placed in conceptual

containers in order for their contents to be quickly searched and harvested. When we think like

this, we begin to lose sight of some of the most salient characteristics of an archival record.

Sometimes the concentration of energy on descriptive standardization, while certainly important,

robs us of the beauty and significance of the documentary record.”176 Geoffrey Yeo echoes the

inadequacies of archival description, noting that descriptive standards, such as MARC, EAD,

ISAD(G), etc., reduce and simplify complex realities.177

The influence of electronic communication plays a serious role in the drive to standardize

arrangement and description, especially with the strictures of value, content, structural, and

interchange data standards. Historian archival theorists, O’Toole & Cox, describe all

contemporary archivists as technologists, not curators.178 As noted in the beginning of this

section, there is a growing disparity in the relationship between archival arrangement and

description (brought on by developments in digital technology). Arrangement principles are

designed to preserve the context and essential evidential and informational qualities of archival

records for successive generations. Michael J. Fox and Peter L. Wilkerson, writing on behalf of

the Getty Institute, note that “navigation of collections are affecting policy and practice as much

176 Richard J. Cox, “Revisiting the Archival Finding Aid,” 27. 177 Geoffrey Yeo, “Concepts of Record (2): Prototypes and Boundary Objects,” 142. 178 James M. O’Toole & Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives & Manuscripts, 140.


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as more theoretical concerns about provenance and respect des fonds.”179 Description is now

driven by technological change—by the desire to standardize activities for ease of distribution

and access. Do descriptive standards defeat principles of arrangement? Are they compatible—

theoretical principles and technological standards? Some commentators on archival theory push

this idea one step farther. Richard J. Cox calls for archivists to “expand the notion of what we are

representing in archival representation,” noting that since archivists are “purportedly concerned

with considering how records function and will be used over time” they “ought to apply the same

kind of analysis and thinking to their finding aids.”180 Archivists need to step back and evaluate

reflexively the ways they describe collections. In Richard J. Cox’s criticism of the archival

finding aid, he constructs a comparison between archival finding aids and museum exhibitions in

order to illustrate the similarities in how these divergent institutions have a tendency to collect,

organize, and share information with the public and in so doing are capable of constructing

histories for the objects in their care although they intend to educate about the histories of objects

in their care.

In essence archivists encourage unity, uniformity and standardization to preserve the

historical record and to protect context, but also to allow better access to information—to such a

degree that ultimately, with automation, access begins to overtake theory—to overtake protection

of context or at least discussions of the nature of the records themselves.

179 Michael J. Fox & Peter L. Wilkerson, Introduction to Archival Organization and Description, 40. 180 Richard J. Cox, “Revisiting the Archival Finding Aid,” 5.


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X. PRACTICING ARCHIVES – Contingencies and Ambiguities

Carlyle S. Smith Papers processing project, Lawrence, Kansas, Daily Journal, B. Lyons February 27, 2007 After continued dialogue on finding aid development, we are making progress on a standard method for arranging and describing ARC manuscript collections. Mary is certain that the manuscript papers should be a resource to the collections (specimens) in the ARC and that they (the finding aids) should point to materials instead of describing the creator of the documents (Carlyle S. Smith). Hence, we have arrived from the creation of the Carlyle S. Smith Collection to the creation of multiple project collections—Stricker, Gun/Flint, Talking Crow, etc. The papers that relate directly to the man, Carlyle S. Smith, are falling out of the arrangement and in essence they are creating a new collection that are the Carlyle S. Smith papers, which can be offered to the University Archives to reflect Carlyle S. Smith’s work and life in general—these papers include correspondence, manuscripts and publications, university correspondence, biographical documents, and interests. The questions posed by Mary are relevant, yet I believe that the documents are being arranged or manipulated to tell a story or provide information that they do not contain. Perhaps the documents would do better describing Carlyle and his life work. They are supposed to support the collections of ARC, but the information that is in the manuscripts does not shed too much light on the actual artifacts in the ARC. It does reflect the history of how the artifacts (some of them) were attained, and also how they were reported to the academic public. This will help with information on the archaeological provenience. We will keep thinking and communicating about this and I am sure we will find the logical steps. March 7. 2007 This afternoon John and I integrated materials from the old Carlyle Smith archive here at the ARC with collections we have been arranging. The process worked well. Many gaps in the documentation were filled and our initial organization of the materials meshed well with the old organizational system. March 22, 2007 I completed photocopying field notes and data from South Pacific Collection—Series 2. When copying notebooks I began numbering corners of copies on pencil so that the original order can be maintained if they are shuffled inadvertently. How much order should the archivist impose on records of no original order? I am tempted to develop the logical sequence of documents, but I also realize there is much to do and time should be used proportionately. April 16, 2007


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We first re‐assessed our initial arrangement of the materials from the Spain Site, verifying that a logical order still existed. The standard groupings of correspondence, manuscripts, publications, field work, analysis, financial, grant/funding, photo logs, maps, and media appeared again in the arrangement. We began making appropriate preservation copies, re‐housing, boxing, and inventorying the materials. As with other collections, the most difficult task is to determine to what level the contents need to be described and arranged. Mary has instructed us to follow our intuition, which is easy when the material is familiar; however, when complicated groupings appear, guidance is helpful to maintain consistency. In this MRB collection, we have four series (at least). Each series necessitates unique description. We are just now working to make sure that we continually add (or include) useful information from each series in the finding aid itself. Tomorrow I will go back through Spain Site documents to harvest subjects, names, places, etc., for use in the finding aid. Alan Lomax Collection Film & Video processing project, Washington, D.C., Daily Journal, B. Lyons July 25, 2007 This morning, Marcia Segal answered my questions about the floppy disk, the 35 mm film, and the audio material that I found within the Video collection. As I imagined, the floppy disk and the audio material will be separated and included with their respective media collections. The 35mm film will be numbered in sequence with the videos, yet it will be stored separately when it arrives at the NAVCC in Culpepper. August 3, 2007 There is a researcher coming in on Monday to use Alan Lomax manuscript materials. Some of the boxes are unprocessed, so Todd asked me to look through them for items that might be sensitive. I found two such items: 1) a document with Alan’s social security number on it; 2) a letter to Alan from a lawyer detailing the financial circumstances of his father’s estate. We (pending further instruction) inserted place‐holders into the original folder and pulled the items from the box. Alan Lomax Collection Manuscript processing project, Washington, D.C., Daily Journal, B. Lyons


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June 6, 2008 I don’t think we should over‐simplify Alan’s work/life. We need extensibility to account for non‐stereotypical activities, e.g. professional associations and commitments. We have already added one sub‐series heading, namely “professional activities”. This first day of processing, we used The Land Where the Blues Began (the book) as a test. I went through eleven document boxes and made corrections to a number of misidentified or unidentified folders. Some materials that Lomax brought together for work on the book (including original field work, interviews, and other folklore materials) had been removed previously by AFC staff, other similar materials had not. All the materials were used as source material for the monograph. A decision should be made for consistent processing of these types of projects. Lomax noticeably uses old research to build new output. These materials typically are stored together. June 19, 2008 What remains to be seen is how we will define and describe the majority of Lomax’s work that falls between the lines of the larger, well‐known projects. Lomax had a long and productive life. His work, ideas, and time were requested and given in many fields and under many projects. We need a high‐level descriptive field to organize these materials, e.g. Lomax’s work to revitalize cultural expression in many parts of the US in 1970s and 1980s (through NEH, PBS, Louisiana organizations, etc., etc.); Lomax’s work with People’s Songs; Lomax’s continuous correspondence and activity related to folk music (in and out of larger projects). It is also clear that much of what Lomax kept in his office (which is the collection of materials with which we are now dealing) was related to projects. In many cases, original source materials (Fisk transcripts, Caribbean field notes, etc.) are kept in files related to projects undertaken much later (The Land Where the Blues Began, Brown Girl in the Ring). In order to keep the authenticity of the collection and to maintain original contexts, it is important to keep the earlier materials imbedded in the later projects. Stripping them out would leave holes and gaps in the later projects and provide incomplete access to the earlier documents (which largely are not in comprehensive bundles). The context of the final state of the documents warrants an approach that uses descriptive pointers in the notes field to make necessary cross‐references for researcher access. What we are organizing is not an intended archive, but a stopped‐in‐its‐tracks production office of an extremely prolific individual. We need to remember the intent of the creator of the materials. He was busy. He was active. He was a writer. He thought on paper and on tape. He thought out loud and in correspondence to others. Words were his tools. What we are finding in this collection are the remnants of developed plans, communicated plans, executed plans, and all the source material needed for successful plans. June 23, 2008


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I am a little troubled by the idea to separate all performance style‐related materials from the remainder of Lomax’s manuscripts. The more I read about Lomax’s work and the more I read Lomax’s writings in this collection, the more I understand that the idea of cross‐cultural analysis of performance style permeated Lomax’s work from the late 1940s and developed concurrently with all his work throughout the remainder of his career. Even American Patchwork is instilled with the underlying ideas of Cantometrics and Choreometrics. Lomax was looking at large traditions of American performance style and relating them to world folk performance styles. The separation has already been started, but it should be noted throughout the finding aid that, although they are separated, Lomax’s “folk” work and his “performance style” are fused and continuously related throughout his career (even more so as time progresses).


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XI. CONCLUSION: WRITING ARCHIVES

My critique is not wholly novel. Critics have written of archival description as a

storytelling process. Most notably, Verne Harris and Wendy M. Duff, explored this concept in an

article entitled, “Stories and Names: Archival Description as Narrating Records and Constructing

Meanings,” in a 2002 volume of Archival Science. Duff and Harris observe, “In archival

description archivists tell stories about stories; they tell stories with stories.”181 As I have

expressed, however, it is necessary to add to any exploration of the act of archival description a

finely articulated understanding of the nature of archival arrangement, a process that in archival

practice goes hand-in-hand with description. So I investigated arrangement and the extent to

which it is also a storytelling process perhaps more pervasive and more impacting than

description. I also evaluated the extent to which archival narratives about practice and principles

affect archivists and their storytelling sensibilities. Archivists narrate both their practices and the

records in their care.

In closing, I want to look a bit deeper into storytelling processes of archival practice.

Cultural historian Carolyn Steedman, exploring the dust of the archive, finds an image of the rag

rug misplaced in her imagination. Analyzing the rug, she notes, “but the rag rug is irreducibly a

thing made from the torn scraps of other things, from rags, indeed.”182 Historical representation

in any sense, including arrangement and description practices in the archive, is much like the rag

rug, a composite of scraps and traces of disparate objects, put together to create a new object.

The traces in the Archive do often become the rags with which Historians create their rag rugs.

The traces in the archives also become the rag rugs of archivists. Furthermore, the creation of the

rag rug says nothing about the scraps with which it is constituted. The compilation of Archives to

181 Wendy M. Duff and Verne Harris, “Stories and Names: Archival Description as Narrating Records and Constructing Meanings,” 276. 182 Carolyn Steedman, Dust, 116.


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represent the past says nothing about the actual past, only about the organizers and researchers of

the Archives. “What we can be certain of, is that these modes of desire and representation have

no necessary connection at all with the people who actually, in time and social circumstance,

occupied the cruel habitations. Which is why I like the rag rug, and my mistake about it, for the

rag rug is made from the torn fragments of other things, debris and leavings, the broken and torn

things of industrial civilization. The rag rug carries with it the irreducible traces of an actual

history, and that history cannot be made to go way; but ways of writing it and wanting it (and

what it represents) are actually somebody else’s story.”183

Even when following archival principles and practices to the letter of the law, even when

respecting provenance and original order, the archivist and the archives cannot provide a full

representation of what the archives once were. Stories must be told about them to make them

available to users—the creators are gone, as are the functions and memories that give them

depth. Instead, archives depend on interpretation. Interpretation, not just on behalf of the

researcher mining their depths, but also on behalf of the archivist in capturing their arrangement

and describing their pertinence.184

We all (archivists) have difficulties with this and we all tell stories about complicated

situations during processing, but what I am attempting to highlight in this paper is that we tell

stories to solve our problems. One way or another we are privileging one story over another

when we make choices as processors/arrangers of archives. Because of previous coverage in the

literature, I am less concerned here with the overall description of the records as I am with

decisions about intellectual and physical arrangement and how we physically alter the nature of

183 Carolyn Steedman, Dust, 128 (emphasis added). 184 Yet, archival practitioners continue to insist upon the ability of archivists to acquire enough expertise to be able to maintain neutrality, and that archivists have the ability to explain better than anyone else what records are and how they are organized (O’Toole & Cox, 89, 91, 92).


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the collection including choices to segregate materials based on formats, although, according to

Paul Brunton and Tim Robinson, “archival theory holds that the format of the record is not

relevant in deciding how it should be treated.”185 Brunton and Robinson say, “reassembling

original order is much like the restoration of a vintage car where the aim is to restore the vehicle

to its original condition and thereby ensure its maximum value.”186 Recent archival

commentators have questioned the clarity of archival description, noting a lack of attention paid

to the impact of the archival processor on the collection.187 Light and Hyry recognize that the

archival finding aid represents “but one viewpoint of a collection.”188 Richard J. Cox builds on

this idea stating “Yet, every archivist has imposed some order on the records under their control,

and the very substance of composing the truncated descriptions (apart from the more routine box

and file listings) results in a meaning-laden exercise that is, at its most basic, a public relations

exercise (one striving to attract researchers).”189

My work in this paper is a humanistic endeavor, not a normative one—what are the

practices, not what should they be. I am trying to understand and talk about the complexities of

archival activities. How archivists can never be certain they have reordered a collection

“correctly.” How archivists are always speculating about what happened in the past. How, just

like a historian, archivists are always retelling the past in some way or another. In some cases,

unlike a historian, archivists actually are rearranging the past physically, interacting with it,

making decisions about what happened or what should have happened by determining order and

arrangement. We as archivists are in contact with the past at these moments. We are mediators

185 Ann Pederson, ed., Keeping Archives, 141. 186 Ann Pederson, ed., Keeping Archives, 133. 187 See Michelle Light and Tom Hyry, “Colophons and Annotations: New Directions for the Finding Aid,” 216–218. 188 Michelle Light and Tom Hyry, “Colophons and Annotations: New Directions for the Finding Aid,” 217. 189 Richard J. Cox, “Revisiting the Archival Finding Aid,” 18. However, Cox is not willing to concede that this process is a creative, artistic task.


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slowing time to a halt, shuffling it, dusting it off, and sending it back into motion. How can it be

said that the archivist is neutral, objective, a pawn? Archivists are agents of history, agents of the

past, and agents in the present—at the intersection of the past, the present, the future. Archivists

patrol borderlands. We roam boundaries spatial and temporal—our invisible, yet very visible

marks and fingerprints add, subtract, soften, harden, and accidentally or intentionally mold the

past—just barely sometimes, and other times unavoidably.

As far back as the Dutch Manual, it has been apparent that archival principles can only

achieve so much. The Dutch trio talk of creating a full fleshy organism out of a skeleton, when

they explore the methods of archival arrangement. For the Dutch trio, the “series form the

skeleton of the archive” and “the loose documents can then be grouped around the series to

which they functionally belong.”190 Recognizing the impossibility of total re-organization, the

Dutch trio devise a method of ascertaining, through the principles of provenance and original

order, the main lines—the skeleton—the bones—of the original corpus. The meat can be lumped

on as near as possible to the appropriate bones. The shape may be the same as the original, but

the face and the contours will differ depending on the sculptor involved. Michael Cook contends,

“The archivist’s work suffers from an unresolved conflict in recognizing subdivisions in an

archive group. On the one hand he is seeking to control the group by breaking it up into units of

convenient size…on the other hand he is seeking to establish subdivisions which are natural to

the group because they reflect subdivisions in the original administration….”191 Richard J. Cox

recognizes the extent to which arrangement and description is transformative towards the records

being assessed. “What archivists sometimes neglect to consider is how they transform the

190 Muller, Feith, and Fruin, Manual, xxii, 70–84. 191 Michael Cook, Archives Administration, 108.


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records as they examine them and transform them again as they describe them.”192 Tom Nesmith

concurs, “In description and reference work, archivists, in effect, help decide what of this

extensive and complex body of information about how the records came to be counts as

meaningful context for launching readings of the records by archival researchers, or what

contextual information counts as meaningful to an understanding of the evidence.”193 Heather

Beattie insists, “the archivist plays a role in ‘creating’ the record through these interventions,

through the questions she or he asks and does not ask, and thus contributes to its provenance by

creating new knowledge about the record and its history.”194

According to Carolyn Steedman, what is written about the past is not what has been. It is

merely what is written about what has been. What has been can never be again as it was, only as

it is said to have been. Steedman cites the work of Louis Mink and his “judgment that stories are

not things that are lived, so much as told; that what comes to be told about the past is not part of

the events that are narrated: that telling is always something different from what happened

(whatever that was).”195 This is an important distinction for Steedman in regard to the reading

and writing of History, which I will extend to the reading and writing of Archives. In at least two

ways, archives are incomplete representations. In one sense, they cannot contain the entire extent

of the past. Only what was selected or accidentally included for preservation remains. Like a rag

rug, an archive is a composite (no matter how theoretically complete) of traces and scraps of past

events and expressions. In another sense, Archives are written and read by archivists who

arrange and describe them. Extending Steedman’s illustration, the read and written Archive is

192 Richard J. Cox, “Revisiting the Archival Finding Aid,” 16. 193 Tom Nesmith, “Seeing Archives: Postmodernism and the Changing Intellectual Place of Archives,” 35. 194 Heather Beattie, “Where Narratives Meet: Archival Description, Provenance, and Women’s Diaries”, 96. 195 Carolyn Steedman, Dust, 143. Steedman cites Hayden White in regard to the relationship between real events and the formal attributes of stories, as well as Paul Ricoeur in regard to narrative as semantic innovation, the bringing of something new into the world through language (Steedman, 144).


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never again an equivalent of what it once was. It is a mediated representation of a past that is no

longer present: a past that cannot be revealed as it was, only as it is said to have been. Steedman

reflects on Herodotus’ report about the Phoenician opinion on world events where “‘telling what

had been’ turns briefly, vertiginously, into something else, reminding us, as that earlier History

did, that the writing and reading of it depends on the unsettling knowledge that nothing need

have been said or written in the way it has been…nothing at all.”196 The archivist’s

representation of the archive, whether through arrangement or description, is a new creation, a

new act of reading or writing. It need not be said or written in the way it has been. It is the

archivist’s story. In “preserving and transmitting the record of human experience” archivists add

their own translations.197

196 Carolyn Steedman, Dust, 108. 197 James M. O’Toole & Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts, 132.


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Barrit, Marjorie Rabe. “Coming to America: Dutch Archivistiek and American Archival Practice.” In Muller, Samuel, J.A. Feith, and R. Fruin. A Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives. New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1898, 1968. ASS Archival Classics Series. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2003, xxxv–1.

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XIII. FURTHER READINGS Theory and Foundations: Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. P. Foss, P. Patton, and P. Beitch. New York: Semiotext(e),

1982. ——. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of

Michigan Press, 1994. ——. The System of Objects. Trans. James Benedict. London: Verso, 1996. ——. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Schocken, 1986. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by Richard

Nice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. ——. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Cambridge, UK: Polity

Press, 1999. de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in general linguistics. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert

Reidlinger. Translated from the French by Wade Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Peirce, C. S. “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs.” In Semiotics: An Introductory Reader, edited by Robert Innis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Methodology: Coffey, Amanda and Paul Atkinson. Making Sense of Qualitative Data: Complementary

Research Strategies. London: Sage, 1996. Harper, Richard H. R. Inside the IMF. San Diego: Academic Press, 1998. Johnson, Richard, Deborah Chambers, Parvati Raghuram, and Estella Tincknell. The Practice of

Cultural Studies. London: Sage, 2004. Latour, Bruno. “The Berlin Key or How to Do Words With Things.” In Matter, Materiality, and

Modern Culture, Paul M. Graves-Brown, ed. (London: Routledge, 2000), 10-21. ——. “Drawing things together.” In Representation in Scientific Practice, eds. Michael Lynch

and Steve Woolgar. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990, pp. 50. Norton, Anne. 95 Thesis on Politics, Culture, and Method. New Haven: Yale University Press,

2004. Storey, William Kelleher. Writing History: A Guide for Students. New York: Oxford University

Press, 1996. Archival Discourse and Information Studies: Brown, John Seely, and Paul Duguid. The Social Life of Information. Boston: Harvard Business

School Press, 2000. Cunningham, Adrian. “Harnessing the Power of Provenance in Archival Description: An

Australian Perspective on the Development of the Second Edition of ISAAR(CPF).” In Respect for Authority by Jean Dryden. UK: Hawthorne Press, Inc., 2008.

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Eastwood, Terry. The Archival Fonds: From Theory to Practice, 1992. Deromedi, Nancy. “Case 1: Accessing, Processing, and Making Available.” In American

Archivist 71:1, 2007. Hensen, Stephen L. Archives, Personal Papers, and Manuscripts: A Cataloguing Manual for

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Jimerson, Randall C., ed. American Archival Studies: Readings in Theory and Practice. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2000.

Ketelaar, Eric. The Archival Image: Collected Essays. Hilversum Verloren, 1997. Lowenthal, D. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University

Press, 1985. Merewether, Charles, ed. The Archive. London: Whitechapel, 2006. Osborne, Thomas. “The Ordinariness of the Archive.” In Journal of the History of the Human

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South Africa ten years after democracy.” In Innovation , No. 30, June, 2005. Pickover, Michele. “The DISA Project. Packaging South African heritage as a continuing

resource: content, access, ownership and ideology.” In IFLA Journal 2008:34; 192. Posner, Ernst. Archives in the Ancient World. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University

Press, 1972. SAA Archival Classics Series. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2003.

Ridener, John. From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory. Litwin Books, LLC, 2009.

Roper, Michael. “Development of Principles of Provenance and Original Order,” in The Archival Imagination, 1992.

Stielow, Frederick J. Building Digital Archives, Descriptions, and Displays: A How-To Do It Manual for Librarians and Archivists. New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc., 2003.

Stille, A. The Futures of the Past: The Loss of Knowledge in the Age of Information. London: Picador, 2002.

Trace, Ciaran B. “What Is Recorded Is Never Simply ‘What Happened: Record Keeping in Modern Organizational Culture.’” In Archival Science 2, 2002.

Wythe, Deborah, editor. Museum Archives: An Introduction. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2004.

Yakel, Elizabeth, S. Shaw, and P. Reynolds. “Creating the Next Generation of Archival Finding Aids.” D-Lib Magazine, 13, pp. 1082-9873, (2007).

Yakel, Elizabeth and M. G. Krause. “Interaction in Virtual Archives: The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections Next Generation Finding Aid.” American Archivist, 70, pp. 282-314, (2007).

Museology and New Heritage Studies: Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. New York: Routledge, 1995. Cameron, Fiona and Sarah Kenderdine, eds. Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical

Discourse. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007. Carbonell, Bettina Messias, ed. Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts. Oxford, UK:

Blackwell, 2004.


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Gurian, Elaine Heumann. “The Many Meaings of Objects in Museums.” Daedalus 128, 1999, no. 3 (Summer): 163-183.

Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1992. ——. Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture. New York: Routledge, 2000. Kalay, Yehuda E., Thomas Kvan, and Janice Affleck, eds. New Heritage: New media and

cultural heritage. London: Routledge, 2008. Karp, Ivan, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, eds. Museum Frictions:

Public Cultures/Global Transformations. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. Kavanagh, Gaynor. Making Histories in Museums. London: Leicester University Press, 1996. Kreps, Christina. Liberating Culture: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation and

Heritage Preservation. London: Routledge, 2003. Lowenthal, David. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. London: Penguin Books,

2007. MacDonald, Sharon, ed. A Companion to Museum Studies. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. MacDonald, George F. “The Museum as Information Utility.” Museum Management and

Curatorship 10: 305-311, 1991. Marwick, Alun. The New Nature of History, Knowledge, Evidence and Language. London:

Palgrave, 2001. Pearce, Susan M., ed. Interpreting Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study. Leicester:

Leicester University Press, 1996. Wallace, Amanda. “Collections Management and Inclusion.” In Including Museums:

Perspectives on Museums, Galleries and Social Inclusion, ed. J. Dodd and R. Sandell, 80-83. Leicester: University of Leicester, Department of Museum Studies, 2001.

Cultural Studies: Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge,

UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Appadurai, Arjun, and Carol Breckenridge. “Why Public Culture?” Public Culture 1, 1 (1988):

5-9. Bal, Mieke. Double Exposure: The Subject of Cultural Analysis. London: Routledge, 1996. Baron, Stephen, Tom Field, and John Schuller. Social Capital: Critical Perspectives. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2000. Collecting Societies, and Associations: Society of American Archivists: http://www.archivists.org/ International Council on Archives: http://www.ica.org/ American Association of Museums: http://www.aam-us.org/ International Council of Museums: http://icom.museum/ Council on Library and Information Resources: http://www.clir.org/ Midwest Archives Conference http://www.midwestarchives.org/ Association of Canadian Archivists http://archivists.ca/home/default.aspx


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Appendix A Bertram Lyons University of Kansas Archaeological Research Center Internship Carlyle S. Smith Papers, processing project January 30, 2007 – May 11, 2007 Daily Summary 01/30/2007 Our first meeting for this project was Tuesday, January 30th, 2007. I will work twenty hours per week, beginning Wednesday, January 31st. Project focuses on the papers of Carlyle S. Smith, Anthropology Professor and Curator of the Anthropology Museum, University of Kansas. Stated goal: organize papers; locate papers in relation to projects which led to accessions of materials stored in Anthropology Museum collection; create supplemented documentation for accessioned objects and artifacts; digitize photographs of association, print them out, and file them with the collection; develop finding aids for the collection. Initial questions that I have: What was the original arrangement of these materials? How did they arrive to this processing room? Daily Summary 02/02/2007 Continued on General Correspondence. Spoke with Mary about the project—relating to documents related in no way to the sited and work of Carlyle Smith. Mary clarified that our mission is to organize papers in relation to the various sites (known & unknown). The papers in relation and of interest purely to “the Man,” Carlyle, and who he was and what he thought (e.g., universal correspondence, grade school inquiries, biographical information, etc.) should be grouped separately to go to University Archives. In the afternoon I continued with correspondence. I am finding the scopes of his correspondence to fall into the following categories: Inquiries and responses to inquiries from general public Inquiries and responses to students regarding work and recommendations Project/site related correspondence Conference/lecture invitations and responses Inter/Intra university correspondence


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Personal correspondence (old students, friends, colleagues) Publication related communication involving submissions and editorships I added a new pile for Milford/Melvern Reservoir materials. All Long Island, New York related materials are now kept on top of the Gray Filing Cabinet for possible delivery to Carlyle S. Smith Library in New York. Daily Summary 02/05/2007 Continued sifting through correspondence. Finished first stack, moved second stack to the shelf and began sorting through pre‐arranged correspondence in green envelopes. Daily Summary 02/06/2007 Concluded arrangement of general correspondence. Reorganized stacks to clear table space. Began arrangement of Gun/Flint Collection. Arranged Gun/Flint Collection into categories: Canons Manuscripts by Carlyle Smith Site Analyses (done by Carlyle Smith for others) Copy of Military Histories Others’ Manuscripts and Papers Flint related correspondence Gun related correspondence French materials Like a Fish Hook site materials 1960 English/Italian projects 1964 French project Daily Summary 02/07/2007 Completed initial arrangement of Gun/Flint materials. Began preparation of Gun/Flint documents for arrangement, copying, and storage. Established temporary organization structure: e.g.,

I. C.S. Smith (fonds) a. GunFlint (group)


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i. France 1960 (sub‐group) 1. Funding Requests (Series) 2. Field Notes (Series) 3. Etc…

Processed England/Italy and France groups in Gun/Flint collection. Began processing Like A Fishhook Village materials. As of now, LAFHV contains: Related manuscripts and publications Photo Images of Items from Fort Bert/LAFHV Correspondence Notes and data I have foldered and arranged the first of the four series above. The other three series need to be ordered and foldered and the folders labeled….See labeled white folders for examples… As we process, we are removing staples, paper clips (replacing with vinyl clips); then we arranged correspondence materials in chronological order. Daily Summary 02/12/2007 Began “Collection Organization” notebook to track progress and document “Final” collection arrangement. Only add to it after a collection has been sorted, arranged, and rehoused. Eventually an Excel spreadsheet can take its place. Began Easter Island sorting. Generated initial project categories: Norwegian Expedition 1955/1956 Marquesas 1963/1964 Easter Island Cruises 1967 General Correspondence (unrelated to the above groups) Daily Summary 02/13/2007 Integrated found materials into greater collection. Group meeting today with Mary, John, and myself to address questions that are coming up in the project, especially in relation to “what to keep, copy, not copy, and discard.”


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What to keep: Manuscripts [Mary Adair instructed us to keep the most complete versions of the manuscripts]; Student Papers [Mary instructed us to put aside for now]; clippings [keep a couple tear sheets only]. What to copy: Field notes; Handmade Maps; Primary Source Info What not to copy: Typed manuscripts; Funding documents; General inquiry correspondence. We will also be writing summaries of each collection as we complete the work on them. Processed manuscripts and publications from Easter Island collection. Arranged manuscripts and publications from 1955/1956 Easter Island Group, includes manuscripts by Smith, Hyeradahl, Ferdon, Malloy, Students, and Murrill. Daily Summary 02/14/2007 Wrote summary of Gun/Flint collection. Continued arrangement of 1955/1956 Norwegian Expedition. Completed arrangement of Norwegian Expedition documents into the following broad categories: Related Manuscripts and Publications (C. Smith, et al) Correspondence, general Correspondence, expedition members Suggs Issue Correspondence, Chile reclamation Lectures and peripheral correspondence Background research, resource materials Field notes and expedition data Clippings Images [There are two boxes of discarded material from the collection: Manuscripts and Publications not by Carlyle Smith; Duplicate Manuscripts and Publications] We have begun making selection distinctions based on what “fits” with this collection and the purpose of this project versus what is “outside of the scope” of the project. The reasons have to with space and time (money). I would prefer to keep it all together; the work is not much more. We have decided to keep these “discarded” materials in separate boxes to be given (offered) to the family, University Archives, and other sensible repositories. I have argued that we also keep these discarded piles labeled according to the project group from where they were separated. If we maintain the link to the materials they go with then other repositories can connect to these related papers we are storing here.


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I am realizing also the importance of excess documentation during these arranging procedures. Not only can progress be tracked and recounted, but the collected information is useful when maintaining group summaries. Today I will write a summary of the holdings and organization of the Gun/Flint group of materials now that we have completed the processing of that batch. I am also reminded that I would like to look up the standard descriptors for multi‐level collections of materials, i.e. group, subgroup, subsubgroup, seris, etc. I am enjoying this process of approaching a new set of documents. The work of attaining a sense of the innate order of the materials is like a complex puzzle, where reoccurring dates, places, and names begin to congeal to reveal complete images of events, projects, and occurrences. We have made considerable progress—establishing first a broad order to the documents and now (second) slowly approaching these groups one by one and allowing their inner‐order to mold appropriate groupings so that an outline can be formed which describes or explains what was once only a pile of various documents. Daily Summary 02/16/2007 Continued and completed arrangement of Expedition Members Correspondence. Boxed folders temporarily to get them off the table. I am noticing a system of organization to our collection. I began an outline of the Gun/Flint Collection and the Easter Island Collection. We will need to stay consistent with our grouping so that we can use proper accession numbers down the road. Ex: C.S. Smith (Fonds) I. Gun/Flint (sub collection) A. France 1960 (sub sub collection) 1. Fundraising (Series) 2. etc. (Series) II. Easter Island

A. Norwegian Expedition (1955/1956) 1. Correspondence, Chile reclamation (Series) 2. etc. (Series)

Completed processing of Norwegian Expedition materials. Note: Need conservation work on Mulloy Manuscript and Skjolsvold Manuscript. I am noticing that my colleagues are not as interested in documentation as I am. Some days when I arrive there is little paper trail to what has been accomplished in my absence. Today I will continue the re‐housing of the newly arranged groups of materials from Carlyle’s 1955/1956 Easter Island Norwegian Expedition.


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Completed processing of Norwegian Expedition Materials. Mary has instructed us to only include certain types of documents with this collection: e.g., we are putting aside (rejecting) materials that are peripheral to the project at hand. Duplicate Manuscripts, resource materials, general correspondence—these are items that we are putting in separate boxes to be given to the family or offered to University Archives. To maintain some semblance of order and provenance, I have been making sure each folder or box set aside has been labeled as to which group, sub group, and series it originally came from in our arrangement processes. There are two manuscripts in this Norwegian Expedition group that need attention—one is encased in metal and smells of sulfur and the other is a strange carbon substance and it is extremely fragile. I will research what should be done. Daily Summary 02/19/2007 Began sorting and arranging 1963/1964 Marquesas trip materials. Completed sorting and rehousing manuscripts from this trip. Brought in three large containers that Mary received from Carlyle’s daughter—Mary will assess them first and decide what we need to bring into our scope. I was reading on the archives listserv that an average of 12 hours per cubic foot of materials is a good rate for processing manuscripts. I think we are moving a little slower than that pace, but not much, which, I think is good considering there is relatively little archival experience between the three of us. Daily Summary 02/20/2007 Began organization and sorting of Missouri River Basin materials. Worked on site list development. Meeting with Mary and Kate about finding aides web presentation as well as how to digitally create finding aids. I have been developing an outline for a finding aid as we have been working, including a content/scope note for each subcollection that we process. Today we met with Kate Rogge about finding aids and web presentation. She is developing a template for Mary to follow as she begins establishing an outline platform for access to the collections (archival) in her care. She will need a modified system for her physical collections as well. One question that came up in


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the meeting was what is the best digital format to keep finding aid information in before it is encoded? I look forward to understanding the answer to that question. The Missouri River Basin collection is going to be large, with many subtitles, mostly according to excavation sites. It is also becoming apparent that a synthesis series exists, where Carlyle compounded his work for multiple sites in efforts to broaden an analysis or perspective of certain topics. I like the arrangement method that we have begun—it is becoming apparent that we should keep finding aid notes ongoing as we process a collection—allowing for more in depth description (persons involved, companies, subjects, locations, etc.) of the series, which in the end allows the researcher a clearer look into the documents to determine if they are suitable for his/her purposes. A finding aid is the most descriptive one gets in relation to manuscripts materials. There is no item specific level. When is that called for? Photographs and images might require item level documentation. Is there a searchable index more appropriate than a finding aid? How will we organize, identify, and index the images related to this collection? Daily Summary 02/21/2007 Continued sorting MRB documents. Finished all of stack except one folder of correspondence which still needs to be sorted. Then it might be a good start to begin sorting Talking Crow documents. Some may relate to other sites. I don’t think we quite have this MRB stuff ready to house. Daily Summary 02/23/2007 Added additional documents into Gun/Flint subgroup and Easter Island subgroup. Also printed blank Finding Aid Template. Tested scanner with test photo. Talked to Mary about beginning description and arrangement of MRB sites as individual subtitles. Began MRB sites with Stricker Site. Proposed arrangement for Stricker site: Correspondence Field Notes and Specimen Data Publications, Manuscripts, and Reports – by C.S. Smith Publications, Manuscripts, and Reports – by others (including students of C.S. Smith)


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Researched finding aid layouts and organization. Mary and I discovered today that we are on the same page and the right track regarding the arrangement and categories of the MRB materials. She has many collections in the ARC and her goal with this project is to organize Carlyle’s papers so as to add depth to the documentation of these collections. We have been organizing the materials with that in mind. With this approach some collections will have more documentation than others. We have no say in this. The documents have already been created by Carlyle and we can only strive to get them in proper piles. Whether he actually had documentation for each collection is out of our hands. Over the past few days we have been looking to find answers to the collection in the ARC via Carlyle’s papers. We will not find all the answers; only those that are contained here in these papers. If we are confident with our sorting procedures (considering that we have exhausted materials to sort) then we can move forward and begin arrangement, description, and rehousing of each small collection pile that we have amassed. The inherent order will solidify as we proceed. This afternoon I researched the organizational possibilities of finding aids. Finding aids in essence describe the contents of a large, usually diverse collection of documents. Mary would like each of her “collections” documented individually. In such a case, this one large collection—the Carlyle S. Smith collection—would actually have many individual finding aids that document subgroups within the collection. The finding aids would be useful; however, the larger collection unity would disappear. Another option is to develop a multi‐level finding aid that describes first the collection as a whole; then establish an outline and for each subgroup a new scope/content note is developed along with subject, topic, location, and bibliographic data before listing the subsequent series within that subgroup. Then the next subgroup is treated similarly until the outline is complete. Accession numbers could be attached at this level of description. Finally an inventory of the boxes listed by subgroup, series, and folder. We will meet on Monday to discuss the options here. I am pulling for the latter in that it keeps collection unity and enables the research to understand more fully the scope of Carlyle’s work. Daily Summary 02/26/2007 Arranged Two Teeth materials today:

I. Two Teeth a. Correspondence b. Field notes and specimen data c. Publications, Manuscripts, and Reports


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Began and completed arrangement of Spain Site materials. There was much discussion regarding development and standardization of finding aids to work with ARC, C.S. Smith manuscript collections. We also discussed the concept of a photo catalog with Mary and how to store, name, and serve digital/physical images to the public. Daily Summary 02/27/2007 1pm meeting about finding aid standards with Mary, Ann, John, Bert, and Kate. Began finding aid development for collections we have already arranged. Processed general correspondence for second time to assure that we have pulled project related materials out initially. After continued dialogue on finding aid development, we are making progress on a standard method for arranging and describing ARC manuscript collections. Mary is certain that the manuscript papers should be a resource to the collections (specimens) in the ARC and that they (the finding aids) should point to materials instead of describing the creator of the documents (C. S. Smith). Hence, we have arrived for the C. S. Smith Collection to multiple project collections—Stricker, Gun/Flint, Talking Crow, etc. The papers related directly to the man, C.S. Smith, are falling out of the arrangement and in essence creating a new collection that are the C. S. Smith papers, which can be offered to the University Archives to reflect C. S. Smith’s work and life in general—these papers include correspondence, manuscripts and publications, university correspondence, biographical documents, and interests. The questions posed by Mary are relevant, yet I believe that the documents are being and arranged or manipulated to tell a sotry or provide information that they do not contain. Perhaps the documents would do better describing Carlyle and his life work. They are supposed to support the collections of ARC, but the information that is in the manuscripts does not shed too much light on the actual specimens. It does reflect the history of how the specimens (some of them) were attained, and also how they were reported to the academic public. This will help with information on the provenience. We will keep thinking and communicating and I am sure we will find the logical steps. Also, Mary verified that we will have hard drive space on KU server to store digital files. Daily Summary 02/28/2007


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Cleared a little space on the table to begin processing Talking Crow materials. Regarding Talking Crow—there is much draft material for final TC Manuscritp (1977). There is also draft material for three reports to the National Park Service in 1950, 1951, and 1952. I have also begun noticing field data and notes in folders marked…”39BF3: Features…” I completed sorting Talking Crow documents from the filing cabinet. Currently these categories exist: Correspondence Manuscripts and publications—C.S. Smith Manuscripts and publications—not C.S. Smith Field notes and specimen data and analysis I am going to temporarily box our arranged and sorted piles so that we can begin sorting Talking Crow—the final frontier. That is (currently) our last remaining collection of materials that is unsorted. It is about four linear feet of documents. Began and completed sorting Talking Crow materials from the cabinets to the tables—published reports were very helpful for determining what materials may exist in the collection and how they may be arranged. This being the largest collection of papers we have discovered a large amount of field notes and specimen data analysis among the papers, which is more along the lines of the materials Mary is looking (hoping) for in this manuscript collection. Mary is of the opinion that we will complete the project ahead of time. We still need to develop finding aid descriptions and organize the photo collection. We may also integrate other archived materials into appropriate collections. I begin to hope that I am not being too forward in presenting my ideas and experience to the group. I want to u se my knowledge to the benefit of the project, but I also want to make sure that everyone understands my desire to learn continually and to be flexible when I am wrong or when my suggestion is not suitable for the project. It is a balance that I hope to achieve in order to be a positive, effective, and enjoyable contributor. Daily Summary 03/05/2007 After appraising the stack of ceramics documents, I propose the following arrangement: Ceramics: Loan Inventories Ceramics: Work by others Ceramics: Comparisons Ceramics: Classifications and Descriptions


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Ceramics: Tabulations and Percentage Analysis [not necessarily in that order] I have just returned from New York where I spent Thursday, Friday, and Saturday working to organize the disposition of the remainder of Lomax’s archival materials to be acquired by the AFC at the Library of Congress. While I was gone it seems that only a small amount of work was completed on the C.S. Smith papers—Ann began the arrangement of a stack of field notes and data that I left for her on Wednesday. Today I will complete this arrangement and try to integrate a few folders that Mary dropped off for us that she must have found in one of the boxes from the family. The more I work with Smith’s papers, the more I understand the archaeological process. The Talking Crow papers offered more field data which illustrate the many dimensions of excavation including site labeling, artifact identification and tabulation, and artifact analysis. Daily Summary 03/06/2007 Met with Mary, Ann, and John today to discuss progress and establish methodology for finding aid development and photo catalogs. We discussed numbering systems for photos and descriptive fields for photo catalogs. Mary used Lomax Archive photo database as reference and we determined Accession#.I.sequential. We will begin sharing duties photocopying, describing, and scanning from now on now that we have determined our arrangement categories and methods. Today we also integrated our mystery pile and our subject correspondence piles, validated plains conference and created a pile for Mary to assess. With the documents we can now approach our collections (projects) one at a time and process and describe and photocopy and store. Daily Summary 03/07/2007 Integrated and temporarily boxed MRB collections where new documents were found. Also began the same task with the Kansas collections. Kansas Monument correspondence needs to be chronologically arranged and put in a box. Then Milford/Melvern needs arrangement and housing.


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Today I will continue preliminarily boxing the piles of manuscripts on the table in order to clear space so that we can begin permanently labeling and boxing each project group of materials. This afternoon John and I integrated the new materials from old archive with collections we have been arranging. The process worked well. Many gaps in the documentation were filled and our initial organization of the materials meshed well with the old organizational system. I spoke with Mary this afternoon about digital storage of scanned images and plans for beginning next phase of the work, i.e. scanning, photocopying, and final arrangement and description of manuscripts. I am happy with the progress we are making and I hope that I don’t move too fast for John and Ann. Sometimes I need to pace myself and seek perspective. Daily Summary 03/09/2007 Perused two boxes with photo materials—pulled field notebooks from 1963 Marquesas and integrated into Marquesas boxes. They were not related to the photos in the box. The photos should be assessed by Mary—some documentation is in the box with photos. It can be filed after photos are scanned and numbered and a link can be determined. Attempted first try at creating finding aid for the Gun/Flint materials collections. Printed for Mary’s input and editing. Also boxed general correspondence and biographical documents for discard pile and associations. Today I continued the integration of loose documents into appropriate project boxes and folders. We are coming to an end to our sorting and arranging and must now begin the descriptive process which I believe will lead to a little more fine tuning in the extant arrangement. This will allow for a more organized and useful archives storage and situation and the finding aid process will help us to solidify the contents of each folder, box, and project. We will also begin scanning photos and I am interested to see how we handle images that have accompanying documentation. Drafted an initial finding aid for the Gun/Flint collection so that Mary could have something tangible to work with while determining the format that we will follow for each finding aid. Some of the initial questions that came up for me were related to amount of detail to include and where are the appropriate fields to include specific details in order to reduce redundancy.


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I utilized examples from various archives to guide my reasoning in this first draft and I look forward to receiving Mary’s remarks and suggestions for the next draft. The inventory could use more detail, including, publication titles, and more descriptive titles to the folders. The content note could also use more information regarding each series—maybe a brief summary describing each series. I would also like to add more subjects, locations, and personal names so that the contents of the folders can become more accessible to the researcher. Daily Summary 03/12/2007 Mary basically approved my initial fining aid with a few specific changes regarding series use which actually helped me understand a little better how series works within a collection: where South Pacific is a collection of papers, two predominant series may breakout, e.g. Easter Island and Marquesas, each having their own abstract intellectual organization, yet related ultimately to the larger collection and only contextualized properly within that framework. We began preservation photocopying today—starting with field notes and data—I think some correspondence will want to be copied as well, especially in the Easter Island collection. Ann began scanning photos and she is developing an Excel spreadsheet with which to catalog and index her progress. John and I will maintain finding aid development and photocopying of the nine collections that have been determined from our processing work. Daily Summary 03/13/2007 Great meeting today regarding organization, arrangement, and processing of our collections. Also, copyright issues have arisen regarding photos owned by Smith family as well as repatriation issues with artifacts collected in 1955/1956 on Easter Island—a subordinate of the Government of Chile. We will only photocopy original field notes and specimen data as well as deteriorating correspondence, which will be interleafed into the appropriate location with originals stored together in marked envelopes for fragile items. Reference will be made to original location within collection on front of specific folders. Intellectual arrangement of documents to develop the finding aid is necessary—step back and envision before proceeding with physical arrangement. One project at a time.


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Daily Summary 03/14/2007 Rewrote Gun/Flint finding aid today. Took out series and wrote detailed complete inventory of boxes and folders. It is easier to process by keeping notes as you work on subjects, person names, locations, etc. Then you can add these more readily to the finding aid after the collection is arranged and ready for description. Daily Summary 03/16/2007 Photocopied Norwegian Expedition correspondence. Organized and assessed new materials brought in by Mary. Need to file on Monday. Mary and I discussed process for labeling folders. In the meantime we need to use sticky notes to make comments and erase what we have previously been writing. Label system: Accession # Project name Box # Folder # (we will include a printed inventory in each box) Daily Summary 03/19/2007 John and I are solidifying our processing systems. Now that the projects are in order—we are making preservation photocopies and describing the projects in finding aids. Today we continued making appropriate photocopies for the Norwegian Expedition series of the South Pacific Collection. We completed that task and are now writing the finding aid for the project. There are actually two series to this collection and we need to make appropriate photocopies for series two—Marquesas—and add it to the finding aid. It is difficult to include useful (but not extraneous) information in the finding aid inventory. I think we can improve in this category of our work. At the moment we are including a good deal of redundancy. I think we ned to factor some common elements out into subheadings—that will leave us room in the descriptions to include specific useful information. Daily Summary


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03/20/2007 Learning to write finding aids in EAD compliant form allows the document to be easily encoded at a future time. Our finding aids are currently in Microsoft Word format, but they are written appropriately so they can be easily converted to EAD at the end of the project. EAD code allows the document to become searchable on the web and within an XML environment. EAD is the archival answer to MARC records—a method to allow archival collections to be standardized and easily accessed and searched electronically. I would like to learn in more detail the methods of encoding into EAD format. I will attempt to encode one of our shorter finding aids in the future. Today I completed the inventory for the South Pacific Collection—Series 1. It is six boxes work of documents related to Smith’s work on the Norwegian Expedition to Easter Island. Daily Summary 03/21/2007 I worked a short time today. I began the final arrangement of South Pacific Collection—Series 2, adding detail to our notes, verifying labels, and photocopying necessary documents. I pulled large oversized maps out of the collection and placed them with maps Mary already has in preparation for encapsulation and flat storage. Daily Summary 03/22/2007 Completed photocopying of field notes and data from South Pacific Collection—Series 2. When copying notebooks I began numbering corners of copies on pencil so that the original order can be maintained if they are shuffled inadvertently. How much order should the archivist impose on records of no original order? I am tempted to develop logical sequence of documents, but also realize there is much to do and time should be used proportionately. Daily Summary 03/23/2007 Mary and I made use of our finding aid for the Gun/Flint collection today. She found loose flints and we were able to find documentation about them in our Gun/Flint document arrangement. I also completed the inventory for South Pacific documents. Monday I can begin the rest of the finding aid.


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Daily Summary 03/26/2007 This morning I worked on completing the South Pacific finding aid—writing abstract and a scope and content note and including subject terms, separated materials, etc. John finished it and we moved on to Kansas Monument collection. We made copies and began and completed the Kansas Monument finding aid. I think we should do initial (thorough) finding aid for each collection to make sure we get through them all. If needed and time permitting, we can return to finding aids at end of project to make more detailed. At least if we complete finding aids for each collection they become accessible. Finding aid can be fine tuned and added to later if necessary. Daily Summary 03/27/2007 Completed finding aid for Melvern Reservoir and Milford Reservoir collections today. John photocopied and I arranged and described the collections. Using reports and manuscripts within the collection has been helpful in crafting abstract notes for these collections. Also coupling information from Archives class with work in this project especially regarding finding aids. Daily Summary 03/28/2007 This morning I began the finding aid and photocopying for Perry Reservoir documents. John completed the photocopying and I completed the finding aid in the afternoon. We then both worked on arrangement and photocopies for Kanopolis Reservoir documents. Currently, we are continuing to photocopy fragile correspondence items and all related field notes, journals, and item data and analysis. The photocopies are being integrated into the collection in separate folders, but in proximity of the originals which they represent. And these photocopies are documented in the inventory of the finding aids. We are not currently using a content standard vocabulary in our finding aids, but we are working to be consistent in our usage of identifying terms. I’ll need to verify names and organizations have been consistently identified in our descriptions.


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I’ll bring this up with Mary. We are using a EAD compliant format to construct our finding aids. It was prescribed to us by Spencer Research Library. OT: I have noticed a slightly antagonistic relationship between the proponents of the anthropology collections and those of the archaeology collections. It seems a bit unprofessional and I wonder where the root lies and what good solutions there are for the unfortunate situation. Daily Summary 03/30/2007 Slow progress today. Photocopied preservation copies of Kanopolis field notes and numbered and arranged final set of folders for Kanopolis documents. Monday I will complete the finding aid and then move on to Tuttle Creek, the last of the Kansas projects. Also locked myself out of the Museum today—reminder: Keep keys on my person at all times while in Museum. Daily Summary 04/02/2007 This morning I completed work on the finding aid for Kanopolis project. Wrote abstract, scope and content, and completed inventory of contents. Brought in my copy of DACS so that we could, to the best of our abilities, keep our finding aids consistent with the larger community. It is also useful for understanding what we should be aware of as we add names, subjects, etc., to the finding aids and what certain elements in a finding aid should consist of. This afternoon I made preservation photocopies of Tuttle Creek field notes and analysis. We are almost halfway through the description process for these collections. Tomorrow we will finish copying for Tuttle Creek and begin writing the finding aid. Daily Summary 04/03/2007 Photocopied large (six folders) group of artifact work sheets from the Budenbender site and Tuttle Creek.


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Processed the materials to remove all staples and paper clips—kept organization by replacing with vinyl clips. John completed finding aid for Tuttle Creek. Tomorrow we begin the final frontiers—MRB. Daily Summary 04/04/2007 Met with Mary this morning to discuss Talking Crow materials. Determined method for arranging this large, complex group of documents. We will only photocopy primary field notes and logs and then deteriorating secondary analysis and correspondence. John and I began physical organization of entire set of materials then began arrangement of correspondence into chronological order and I briefly started the finding aid. Maintaining intellectual order is difficult as these collections begin to merge. However, our methods are working consistently for each collection regardless of the size. That is encouraging to our work and progress. We need to keep learning about finding aids (description) though. Daily Summary 04/06/2007 This last project is the most complicated group of records so far. The finding aid is much harder to visualize and I think we will need a few passes through the collection adequately complete the description. Currently, I am completing the inventory as we work. Today we completed organization and rehousing of correspondence and most of the manuscripts and publications. We rehoused appropriate items. The inventory provides great, easy access to the folders once they are stored in boxes. Daily Summary 04/09/2007


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Continued work organizing Talking Crow materials today—completed manuscript rehousing and inventory development for publications and manuscripts for Carlyle S. Smith, students, and colleagues. Began arrangement of field notes and copying and adding to index/inventory. Going to hear Bruno Nettl speak this afternoon. Need to leave early from work—more field work tomorrow. Daily Summary 04/10/2007 Continued photocopying journals from Talking Crow field notes grouping. Worked with John to determine scope of Missouri River Basin project collection—had implications for physical organization of collection and intellectual organization of finding aids and inventories. Mary determined we should keep North Dakota material together—the designation we had made previously. A numbering question is arising with the folders—Sarah and Kate have prescribed a method of numbering according to group (intellectual) instead of by box (physical). I am not sure at the moment how this will resolve. I would personally prefer to number according to physical locations and use inventory to address any intellectual designations. The methods for writing finding aids do not seem to be 100% clear. I see many differing approaches online and in archives and I wonder how strict the rules are and how much should be based on subjective logic and individual situations. We toured KSHS today with our archives class (Sheryl Williams) and had a lecture on electronic records and records management. The future of electronic records management is vast and complex and I wonder in what direction archives will proceed. It seems obvious archives need to stay technically current in order to acquire records of the future. Daily Summary 04/11/2007 Continued copying Talking Crow field notes—completed large group of Features forms and two catalogs of artifacts.


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Talked with Mary about numbering system for folders and she agreed that the logical approach is the best approach. For the time being we are maintaining the physical numbering scheme where each box begins with Folder 1 and accumulates to the last folder in the box, e.g. F1, F2, F3, etc. Daily Summary 04/13/2007 More rehousing and inventorying Talking Crow analysis documents. Organized analysis into ceramic and non ‐eramic groups and arranged according to sites, features and houses. Daily Summary 04/16/2007 This morning I continued to box, rehouse, and inventory analysis materials from the Talking Crow site. John completed Talking Crow this afternoon and we moved on to next series of the MRB project: Spain Site, 1953. We first re‐assessed our initial arrangement of the materials from Spain Site, verifying that a logical order still existed. The standard groupings of correspondence, manuscripts, publications, field work, analysis, financial, grant/funding, photo logs, maps, and media appeared again in the arrangement. We began making appropriate preservation copies, re‐housing, boxing, and inventorying the materials. As with other collections, the most difficult task is to determine to what level the contents need to be described and arranged. Mary has instructed us to follow our intuition, which is easy when the material is familiar; however, when complicated groupings appear, guidance is helpful to maintain consistency. In this MRB collection, we have four series (at least). Each series necessitates unique description. We are just now working to make sure that we continually add (or include) useful information from each series in the finding aid itself. Tomorrow I will go back through Spain Site documents to harvest subjects, names, places, etc., for use in the finding aid.


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I am also beginning to wonder about the folder numbering system. It is not currently expandable without serial renumbering. There must be a method to number folders and boxes so that insertion is allowable if new material is discovered that should be placed within an already organized collection. Currently, to add a folder to a box, demands the renumbering of each subsequent folder in the box. It does not affect any other boxes just the box in question. Maybe that is as good as it gets. I’ll keep thinking on this. Daily Summary 04/17/2007 John and I completed work on Spain Site today. I prepared scope and content note for Spain Site and we harvested subject, name, geographic, corporate terms for the finding aid. Began Two Teeth processing—first arranging folders, verifying contents, and generating preservation photocopies. Then began adding to inventory and keeping notes for developing scope and content notes. Daily Summary 04/18/2007 John completed Two Teeth and we then began Stricker this afternoon, making copies, and arranging materials. Completed Stricker and began arrangement of final series—MRB General. This grouping of materials is made up of documents related to MRB projects as a whole, not specific projects. It will be useful as supplementary material to the other MRB projects. When we complete this series we will need to complete the MRB finding aid and then reassess our work to address consistency issues and numbering and labeling boxes and folders. We will also need to label the discarded materials so that sense can be made of them at a future date. Daily Summary 04/20/2007 Continued and completed arrangement, inventory, and rehousing of MRB general materials. Need to complete finding aid on Monday—scope and content notes for Stricker, Two Teeth, and General series.


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Had a discussion with Mary about the “separated” material—documents not related to any of the projects that she has material artifacts from—and she intends to offer it back to C.S. Smith’s children. There are parts that she will offer to New York and University Archives. If the children do not want the documents offered them, Mary intends to dispose of the documents. I think she should offer everything not taken by one of the above entities to University Archives. Carlyle was a professor here at KU for many years and they may find value in his papers. If they refuse, and the kids have refuse, and Mary is sure they are not valuable to archaeological materials, then I would agree with the decision to discard them. But I think an attempt must be made to find a home for them first. At this point we have accessioned, organized, preserved, arranged, and described (in finding aids) twenty linear feet of documents related to over sixteen archaeological expeditions led by Carlyle S. Smith in his career as a KU professor and museum employee. Ann is also scanning images—which we are returning the originals to the family—that correspondence to these paper collections as well as the artifact collections held by the ARC. Daily Summary 04/23/2007 This morning I composed scope and content notes for the MRB finding aid. John completed the work and in the afternoon we met with Mary to discuss what tasks remain to be accomplished. All finding aids need to be edited for accuracy and consistency. Labels need to be created for boxes and folders need to be labeled and numbered appropriately. We have two boxes of photo images that we will sort, index, and store in the ARC photo archive. John and I will also begin to help Ann scan the images that are to be returned to the family of C.S. Smith. We also need to rearrange shelves in the archive to make room for the twenty linear feet of new boxes (40 boxes). Daily Summary 04/24/2007 I spent today organizing two boxes of miscellaneous photographs (prints and negatives) to be eventually rehoused and added to the preexisting print and negative inventories.


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John created labels for boxes and we discussed best methods for adding content in a consistent manner to these labels. There were a number of documents in the boxes with the photographs that needed to be integrated into the document collections. I filed them away and made appropriate motes on the finding aids where needed. We will also begin helping Ann with the scanning and today she acquainted us to her system of cataloging, selecting and capturing images. Daily Summary 04/25/2007 This morning I edited the South Pacific finding aid (15 pages) for consistency and accuracy. Carlyle kept two photo scrapbooks that he produced after his 1956 journey with the Norwegian Expedition. In one he included an eighty‐page “excerpt” from his journal which he kept during the nine month expedition. This “excerpt” is attached to the scrapbook and cannot be safely removed from the book. Carefully made a photocopy of the entire eighty pages today to add to the Easter Island series of documents. I integrated the copies into the collection and made entries into the finding aid, appropriately labeling them as photocopies—making note of the location of the originals as well. Daily Summary 04/30/2007 We are continuing to edit and finalize the finding aids that we have created. I edited four this morning for consistency, looking for errors in spelling and inconsistent descriptors and layout issues. This afternoon I began to develop a method for generating labels from the folders. Mary has given us directions as to what to include on each folder: Project Title Accession # Box # Folder # Contents Description I am working on a consistent method for harvesting this information from our Microsoft Word finding aids to a label format that will allow for shrink/enlarge options since the content field is


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different for each folder. Perhaps I could create an Excel spreadsheet database for each collection and then extract the data into pre‐designed label formats. Daily Summary 05/01/2007 Today Mary sat with us to answer questions concerning accession numbers, photo indexes, and labeling strategies. We determined the missing accession numbers to a few sample collections, which helped us to re‐organize the final series (5) of the MRB collection. The sub‐series of “sample collection” documents were assimilated into Talking Crow and other parts of the General series. Mary then was able to give series five a new accession #: 2007.4. After this research was completed John and I reorganized the MRB finding aid and renumbered the folders where appropriate. Mary also helped us to determine the best method for numbering and indexing the few extraneous photographs that we have with these collections. It was determined that we will inventory and catalog the photos along the same standards as Ann—with temporary #s—and when Ann is complete, we will add these miscellaneous images to the end of her inventory with sequentially appropriate numbers according to each collection. I then continued labels for folders completing Gun/Flint collection. This is a slow process and I do not like using adhesive stickers on the folders. It does not seem archvially sound to me (from what we have been taught) but Mary prefers this method. I think handwritten, in pencil, on the envelope is the more appropriate method. Daily Summary 05/02/2007 Having somewhat developed a system for creating many labels quickly, I made significant progress today creating labels for folders. I completed six collections today and we housed them on shelves in ARC archives area. There are two collections (large collections) left to label. I also noticed today that the laser printer may not be the best medium for permanent labels—maybe a typewriter (or pencil) would be more durable. In this case, that would be impractical and time‐consuming. Therefore, the printer will suffice. This is a step up from the ARC’s previous archiving procedures, which omit indexes on finding aids.


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As I have been creating labels, I have also been making further edits and corrections to the finding aids. One thing that we lack is a standard for subject titles, associated records, how to write inventory entries, etc. We have created standards as we go and we try to stay consistent, but even with just two people making entries, inconsistencies arise in use of commas, em & en dashes, work order, headings, etc. I can see how the archival profession has had such difficulty setting access standards and guidelines for consistent finding aids. Each collection (even within a collection) is so different from the next. I have been using DACS to try to keep our work in tune with other archival finding aids. If Mary decides to make these accessible online, hopefully they will mesh with other archival resources. This has been a useful experience, giving me insight into the difficulties and issues that archives face when working to provide broad access to their collections through their own catalogs and websites and through regional, national, and international catalogs like World Cat, etc. It has helped me understand the need for EAD and the use of XML (SGML), MARC, and other digital markup systems for cataloging material and providing transparent access to said catalogs and finding aids. Daily Summary 05/04/2007 My labeling system is finally starting to click. I opted for less labels per page in exchange for more space in the label and less need to manipulate size of text boxes when folders have excess descriptive information. I completed seven boxes today (approximately 140 labels). It will probably take the entire week (my last week) next week to complete the remainder of the folders. Today I had a meeting with Saralyn Reece Hardy and her staff at the Spencer Museum of Art to discuss options for building an internship for the fall (2007) at the Museum. David Katzman helped me set up the meeting. We thought that it would be important for me to explore new territory—to try a new environment. I have never worked within an art museum and I think it is valuable experience. The meeting went well. We brainstormed many ideas for projects I could begin in the fall. I enjoyed the energy and enthusiasm of Saralyn and I look forward to working in that environment in the fall. Some of the ideas we discussed explored the limits and definitions of exhibition work and access. I am excited to let my imagination develop concepts for possible projects—one project Sarlalyn mentioned was the idea of a living archivist working within the Museum galleries in some manner—providing feedback opportunities for the patrons. Oral history projects also came up as well as traditional organizational projects. I can’t wait to see how things go. Daily Summary


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05/07/2007 Began labeling again this morning. I completed the South Pacific and moved on to the MRB collection and the Talking Crow series. John greatly improved my system today by printing labels for multiple boxes and then applying labels in one sitting. I had been working box‐by‐box. With John’s new method, we were able to complete fourteen boxes today, working together. That leaves us with only seven boxes remaining, which we will finish tomorrow at this pace. I think this is an excellent example of productive teamwork. While I had time to perfect the labels and iron out the kinks, John was able to look at the process with fresh ideas and institute a new procedure, which effectively doubled the current work pace. This is our last week and we have almost completed every facet of the project, with some added bonuses. The finding aids weren’t expected but we are able to develop them with the help of Kate (an archive student doing a practicum for Sarah at the Spencer Research Library) and the application of our studies with Sheryl Williams in Archives class. After we complete the last of the labels, I plan to tie up loose ends for Mary so that our efforts are as complete and transparent as possible. Daily Summary 05/08/2007 Today we completed labeling all the folders. We then made space in the archive storage area for forty new boxes and shelved the boxes in their proper alphabetical location—according to project name. I began the process of cataloging miscellaneous images associated with the collection. I will continue tomorrow. There are images that are being kept by the ARC and they have not previously been included in the archival photographic storage cabinets. I am using Excel to create a temporary index and I am resleeving the images into safe polyester, polypropylene sleeves for storage. Daily Summary 05/09/2007 Today I worked on the final project of cataloging and rehousing two boxes of miscellaneous photo images that have accumulated over the course of this project. I completed one box, which leaves one final box for Friday.


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Mary also had us assist her with draping the storage shelves in the museum to protect the artifacts from the dust and debris falling from the construction work taking place overhead. The workers will be dismantling parts of the dropped ceiling soon and much debris is expected to rain down upon the collections. I cannot believe that the university is so quick to put its cultural collections in danger without first planning for their safety. For weeks, pounding, banging, and crackling has been going on in the main gallery of Spooner, which is directly above the archaeological collections. Everyday debris has been falling through the cracks of the suspended ceiling tiles, littering the collections with all sorts of particulate matter. I wonder if Mary of the University is at fault for not planning safe measures for the collections. Today (after weeks of construction) is the first time any of the collection has been actively covered to prevent accumulation of debris. Daily Summary 05/11/2007 Came in this morning and construction workers were in the collection area. They had left the door wide open. I encouraged them to shut it or leave cracked to help keep environment stable. Also added plastic sheeting over area where they were drilling a hole in the ceiling with water‐saw. Today I processed 711 negatives and prints. Rehoused them all and created general index for each group of images. I have about 300 left to work with, so I will come in next week, even though today is officially my last day of the internship. I’m not one to leave things undone. The negatives that I worked with had been rolled for many years. I unrolled them, cut them in strips of five, placed them in negative polyethylene sleeves. I have to weight them down to try to flatten them out. Otherwise, they roll the sheeting into a tube. I also had a stack of 200 3x5 prints separated into groups by index cards, which were interspersed throughout the stack. In order to preserve the original order of the stack, I placed labels in with each print that signified which group they were associated with in the stack, and I


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kept them in the same order in my numbering system. Someone could rebuild the stack if it was ever necessary.


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Appendix B Bertram Lyons American Folklife Center – Library of Congress Alan Lomax Collection Project June 13, 2007 – August 9, 2007 June 16, 2008–June 28, 2008 Appendix B.1 – AFC/LC, June 13, 2007—August 9, 2007 06/13/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 9:30am‐5:00pm (7 hours)

- Update with Todd in the morning - Met with Judy Ng to discuss use of camera and develop workflow for video imaging

project - Affixed MV numbers to Lomax videos - Met with Marcia/Judy to discuss workflow of digital image downloads and uploads as

well as digital file names - Entered Lomax videos into Series_4 database - Update with Todd in the afternoon - Filed corporate‐subject material in the Reading Room

This morning I met with Todd briefly to discuss the progress that I made yesterday with developing a workflow for the Lomax video database/imaging project. Todd was happy with the progress and said that he would be responsible for acquiring the resources that I needed to get the job done and otherwise he would stay out of the way. That was a nice compliment, I felt. At 10:00am, I met with Judy Ng to discuss the use of the camera. We established a workstation (near an exterior window) and discussed possible workflow procedures. I then met with Marcia to discuss digital image naming and storage. She is developing a naming system that is in tune with the LC/AFC’s existing schemes. I will also provide her with images as I work and she will upload them to the proper LC file server. After our meeting, I affixed more MV# labels to the Lomax videos in preparation for the project. MV#’s are the LC’s unique identifiers for each video in the collection, i.e. MV0001, MV0002, etc. Marcia has been printing out labels for me in batches. There are over 3000 videos in the collection and I can affix about 150 each day. Before lunch, I returned to the AFC Reading Room to type out workflow outlines for the video imaging and database projects (see printouts). The workflows for these projects will merge within the next few days. That is my goal at least. After lunch, I stopped in the Reading Room


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shortly to look for Todd. He was busy, so I took the Series_4 Access database on a zip drive to the AFC Annex and began entering videos into the database where I left off on Monday. Until now I have been entering data from photocopied images of videos (the first 230 videos have been packed to go to Culpepper and are inaccessible). Now that I have surpassed the photocopies and am now working with actual videos, I wanted to get used to the process of carting videos from the shelf to a workstation. After a few attempts, I found a comfortable system. The next task is to integrate this system with photography. At that point, I can really begin making progress on this project. At the end of the day I filed corporate‐subject material in the AFC Reading Room. I created my first new folder, “Cronk, M. Sam.” 06/14/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 12:30pm‐2:00pm (1.5 hours)

- Assist Todd, Marcia, and Guha with the unloading and moving of the newly acquired Pete and Toshi Seeger collection of film and audiotapes.

This afternoon I met at 11:00 with the AFC processing staff to accompany them on a good‐bye lunch for one of the processing interns. We ate at a Chinese restaurant and Nora, lead‐processor, who is from China, ordered her favorite dishes for us all to share. The meal was enjoyable. Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court judge, was eating with his four assistants at the table next to us. Upon my return, Todd asked that I assist him, Marcia, and Guha. Guha was arriving with a new delivery of Pete and Toshi Seeger films and audiotapes that he and Peggy Bulger (Director, American Folklife Center) had acquired from a recent visit to the Seeger’s residence. We met at the loading dock in the Madison building and transported about 5 flatbed carts full of 16mm film and various open‐reel audiotapes to the AFC Annex in the Adams building. We unloaded them onto four processing tables. I asked Todd what the next step would be and he said that they would assess the collection, organize them according to content, clearly describe and index them, re‐house them, digitize them, and finally apply permanent ID numbers and send them to permanent storage at the Culpepper facility. We returned to the AFC Reading Room. Guha brought me a laptop that I will use while I’m working with the collections. I checked it to make sure I could log on and that everything worked. All was well, and I returned home to focus on my Lomax Archive work.


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06/18/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 9:30am‐5:30pm (7.5 hours)

- Prepare workstation in AFC Annex for Lomax video imaging project - Attend LC Preservation Topics lecture on I.R.E.N.E.—audio preservation through digital

imaging—in Mumford Room - Begin Lomax video imaging project troubleshooting—documented 40 items with digital

camera - Assess imaging project with Todd Harvey - File corporate subject files in Reading Room; create five new CS folders

This morning I gathered all the necessary materials to begin the Lomax video imaging project—laptop, Access database, camera, white erase‐board, etc.—and arranged them in LA106 in preparation for the first pass at beginning the imaging project. Before I began, I attended the LC’s Topics in Preservation lecture on a new digital audio preservation tool, I.R.E.N.E., which is being developed collaboratively between the Library of Congress and the Lawrence Berkley…Carl Haber delivered the lecture and described in detail the new process they are developing which utilizes digital imaging to reproduce aural information from discs and cylinders which have visibly been altered in order to store recorded audio. After the lecture, I returned to LA106 to begin photographing Lomax videos. There are over 3000 videos in the collection and I am trying to develop a balance between efficiency and accuracy. In today’s first pass, I documented 40 items in less than two hours at an average of 3 images per item. I also entered database information for the items as I documented them. I’ve found that the slowest parts of the process are in the re‐writing of the number on the slate after each item and the renaming of the digital files once they’ve been uploaded from the camera. Todd and I will look into these problems tomorrow. Otherwise, I am ready to bear down on the project starting tomorrow. I will keep records of my progress so that I can assess the overall duration of the project. I did demonstrate the images to Todd to verify that I am capturing useable documentation of the videos. He was satisfied and is excited about the prospects of the completed project. From 3:00pm‐5:30pm I filed corporate subject files in the AFC Reading Room. A number of the cabinets where overfull. Todd helped me shift files to create room in the drawers. At the end of the day I created five new folders for CS’s that were not already in the files. 06/19/2007 Bert Lyons


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AFC Internship—Daily Summary 9:00am‐5:30pm (8 hours)

- Met with Todd in the morning to discuss Lomax Film organization project - Assessed Lomax Films in Deck 50 with Todd; established goals for project - Continued Lomax Video imaging/database project in LA106 (completed 130 items in 4

hours) - Summarized Video project in order to establish work‐rate and workflow

Todd and I began discussing the steps that we would like to follow for the organization and preparation of the Lomax Film collection. This project will result in establishing “order” to the Film Collection, applying MV#s to each item, and integrating 7 indexes into one access database. All of this is in preparation for an intern who will be re‐housing the films and applying barcodes in preparation for their move to the Culpepper facility. This morning, Todd and I visited the films in Deck 50 (Jefferson Building) to orient ourselves and refresh our knowledge of the collection. We identified the current order (generally) and began to identify the various sub‐groups in which this collection was created. We are currently discussing the idea of slightly re‐ordering the films in an organic fashion—in the order that they were culled over time. The other question that remains to be answered is how we will apply MV#s to the films. There are canisters of films and many times there are multiple pieces of film within one canister. Sometimes these pieces are related to each other and sometimes they are not. We are leaning towards giving each individual item an MV# and clarifying intellectual relationships in the database. Todd is going to speak with Guha Shankar about this idea before we proceed any further. The remainder of the day I continued developing workflow and work rates for the Lomax Video project. Performing three runs of 44 plus or minus items, I averaged 26 minutes for data entry and 34 minutes for imaging per set. I completed around 130 items and the process (including extracting and renaming digital files) took 4 hours—an average of 32 items per hour. I’m looking for ways to speed this process up. The slow areas continue to be “slate” numbering and digital image renaming. Otherwise the process moves quickly and I’ll work three to four hours per day on this project so that I can complete it before my time is up at the AFC. 06/20/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 10:00am‐5:30pm (7 hours)

- Continued Lomax Video imaging/database project in LA106 (completed 158 items in 5.5 hours)


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- Discussed projects with Todd Today I continued work on the Lomax Video imaging/database project. I’m continuing to try to speed up the process. Instead of two shelves at a time, today I worked with three shelves at a time. I haven’t compared numbers yet, but I think it sped up the process a little. I don’t think I can work any faster at this point. I am cataloging all three shelves at once, then photographing them. When I am done for the day, I upload the Access database to the server. Then I download the pictures from the camera to a flash drive. Renaming the images then takes about one hour. I deliver the renamed images to Marcia on the flash drive and she uploads them to a storage server. I then empty the camera and leave it under Judy’s desk. Todd and I discussed the Lomax Film project. We currently need advice on how to number the Films: canister by canister, or item by item. We will talk to Guha and Marcia and then move forward on the project. Today was a long day, but most of it was spent on the laborious Video project. It’s possible that this project will consume almost half of my internship. I am resigned to give more than 200 hours this summer so that I can gain as much varied experience as possible. I hope to limit the amount of time I spend on the Video project every day so that I can keep learning new things. 06/22/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 1:00pm‐5:30pm (4.5 hours)

- Continued Lomax Video imaging/database project in LA106 - Evacuated from Adams building due to chemical spill in sub‐basement - Discussed film project with Todd - Filed Subject files in AFC Reading Room; created 5 new subject file folders

Yesterday I was in New York at the Lomax Archive performing maintenance and management responsibilities. Today I came into the AFC to continue work on Lomax Video imaging/database project. I affixed MV#s to videos for an hour. I then entered three shelves of videos to the database and began photographing them. Halfway through the photographing process the fire alarms in Adams went off and everyone was evacuated. It was educational to see how efficiently the building was evacuated. The capitol police took control of the building and cleared everyone from the building and from the streets directly adjacent to the building. Emergency preparedness staff organized the evacuees and moved us to a safe location. Six fire trucks, two ambulances, and one Hazmat removal vehicle arrived shortly thereafter. The building is still closed. I left my belongings in the building when I evacuated and I will have to


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wait to retrieve them. Next time I will not leave my belongings behind. I also need to finish the project I was working on today. I left it halfway finished. When I realized I wouldn’t be getting back into the Adams building, I returned to the Jefferson building to check in with Todd. We discussed the upcoming work we need to do on the Film project and the progress I am making with the Video project. Next week we will focus on the Film project so that we can have the materials prepared for the intern who is arriving at the beginning of July to work on the collection. For the remainder of the day, I filed Subject files in the Reading Room. This process requires putting away existing Subject folders first from the staging box. Next loose papers are filed into subject folders from the staging racks. If a Subject folder doesn’t exist for the specified subject, then I check the binder of existing subjects to verify that a folder doesn’t exist. If not, I note the new Subject and the date the folder was created. Then I type a label, affix it to a folder, place the document in the folder and put the new folder in the staging box to be refilled. Today I filed for an hour and created five new folders. The ALA annual conference is being held in Washington this weekend. The LC had an open house today for ALA conference goers—all the reading rooms were open for tours. While I was filing, five individuals visited for tours. Todd assisted them and I listened to how he explained the AFC to them. He made the distinction between an “archive” and a “library.” The American Folklife Center is an Archive within the Library of Congress. The general public is not always aware of the differences. Todd’s explanation was clear and gave the visitors a better idea of the purpose of the AFC. 06/25/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 9:00pm‐6:00pm (8.5 hours)

- Continued Lomax Video imaging/database project in LA106 from where I left off on Friday

- Worked with Todd on Deck 50 on Lomax Film organization project; began intellectual understanding and ordering of films for re‐housing project

- Returned to AFC Annex to affix MV numbers to Films in preparation for more database/documentation

- Researched Choreometrics project for better understanding of film elements and groups - Met with NYU Film Conservation intern (Jennifer) who will be performing film re‐

housing on Lomax films; discussed history of Choreometrics project with Jennifer and gave her tour of Deck 50 where the films are currently stored

- Renumbered Video digital images to deliver to Marcia


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This morning I finished photographing the group of videos where I left off on Friday before the Adams Building evacuation. Afterwards, I met with Todd and we went to Deck 50 in the Jefferson Building to begin physically working with the Lomax Film collection. The collection is constituted of small film groups of unique intellectual order. Todd ordered the “Choreo Workprint Library” according to Choreo number, i.e. Choreo 1 to Choreo 500. I similarly ordered the “Choreo Master Library” according to TR#, i.e. TR‐1 to TR‐189. The cans were dusty and gloves were absolutely necessary. We worked for two hours. We are working towards developing a definite order to the collection and establishing a method of applying new unique AFC MV#s to each item. When this is complete, Jennifer (the NYU Film Conservation intern) will re‐house each item and prepare them for the move to Culpepper. To take a break from the films, I returned to the Annex to affix MV#s to the Videos in order to get out far enough ahead of myself so that I can continue database/photograph work on the Videos later this week. After lunch, I returned to meet with Todd further on the Film project. He was waiting for a tour that was late, so I researched Choreometrics further, looking for clues to deciphering the chronology and intellectual order of the films. This is helpful and I will continue this. Nancy Johnson (consulting archivist at the Lomax Archive) will help me investigate the documentation at the Lomax Archive (from afar). Perhaps we will find some useful evidence regarding the films. Towards the end of the day I returned to the Annex to pick up the camera and the laptop so that I could transfer the images and rename them before giving them to Marcia to upload to the server. When I returned to the Reading Room, Todd introduced me to Jennifer who will be re‐housing the films. We discussed the history of the Choreometrics project with her and then I led her on a tour of Deck 50 to see the films. She is focused on preservation so I think I will learn a bit working with her about the care and maintenance of film materials. I will be managing the film project, coordinating with Jennifer, Marlon (LC Conservation division), and Todd. The goal is to arrange, document, re‐house, and prepare for new storage location. I will be performing this task in conjunction with the Video project. 06/26/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 9:00pm‐6:00pm (8.5 hours)

- Worked with Todd in Deck 50 to arrange Lomax film collection; completed arrangement of Cord Library

- Worked in AFC Annex on Video database/imaging project; completed only 20 items


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- Attended AFC Staff meeting; introduced myself and listened to staff updates - Filed Correspondence folders in the Reading Room - Worked again with Todd in Deck 50 to arrange Lomax films; began organization of T‐

series and Choreo MSC Film elements Todd and I met this morning at 9am to continue arrangement of the Lomax film collection on Deck 50 of the Jefferson building. Having sufficiently organized the Choreo Workprint and Master libraries, we moved on to the Cord Library. This sub‐collection is organized according to world region. We deciphered the internal order and worked for a couple hours to rearrange the items according to the original numbering system. Afterwards, I returned to the AFC Annex in the Adams building to continue my work with the Video project. The Veteran’s History project was in full swing and I had to move my workstation from their space. This slowed my pace down a little bit. I conversed with Marcia to determine a new, appropriate space. I took some sample pictures in the new space to verify that the lighting would not significantly affect the quality of the images. The result was positive, so I began to set up shop in the new area. I entered and photographed about 20 items until I realized that an entire shelve had not received MV#s. This was my fault. Somehow, I missed the shelf and continued numbering. I assessed the situation and discovered where the problem was. I documented the numbers that needed to be reprinted and I left a note for Marcia to reprint the numbers when she has the time. I will need to re‐affix these numbers (85 of them) to the videos before I can begin imaging and entering data again. This is a small hiccup and I realize that I must be more careful when I am applying numbers. I hope to get this straightened out so I can begin again in the near future. I decided to break for lunch at this point. After lunch, I attended the bi‐weekly AFC staff meeting in the AFC conference room in the Jefferson building. During the meeting, the staff members took turns providing updates on their work over the past two weeks, including any upcoming events. I was asked to introduce myself to the staff (many of which I have already met). I explained my current situation. The meeting was educational and I hope to attend more in the future. It’s great to hear what everyone is actually doing and what they see as important aspects of their work and the work of the AFC and the LC as a whole. After the meeting, I filed Correspondence folders in the Reading Room, and then Todd and I returned to Deck 50 for some more dust and film. Todd focused on organizing the T‐Series sub‐collection according to previously affixed “T” numbers. I worked on the Movement Style and Culture Choreometrics film elements, which have multiple numbering and labeling systems in place. Working from an index, I chose the most unique ID and began ordering the films physically according to these numbers, looking for patterns to develop. I discovered that the index numbering system is off. The content is correct, but the numbers don’t match. The reason is that there are a few items with identical numbers. This was overlooked when the index was created, causing the numbering system to be off and not match exactly with the index. I will fix the index tomorrow after Todd and I finish the physical organization of the films. Then we will


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compile the multiple indexes into one master Access database so that the film intern (Jennifer) can begin re‐housing and applying MV#s. 06/27/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 9:00pm‐6:00pm (8.5 hours)

- Filed Correspondence folders and documents in the AFC Reading Room - Worked with Todd in Deck 50 arranging Lomax films; completed Presentation Films and

Lomax Folk Films; verified with indexes - Developed next set of tasks for Lomax film project with Todd - Created cross‐walk worksheet for use in importing and unifying Excel film logs into one

Access database - Began importing old Lomax film logs to Access

While I waited for Todd to arrive this morning I filed folders and documents in the Correspondence files in the AFC Reading Room. While filing I discovered that there was a file on me in the correspondence files. When Todd arrived, we ventured back to Deck 50 to continue organizing and arranging the Lomax films. Todd continued with the T‐series and completed it. I arranged the Presentation Films and Lomax’s Folk Films. Todd left and I stayed to verify our indexes with the actual films. I was able to fix the misnumbering situation with the Choreo Films subcollection. At the moment, all the films are in order with the exception of the Choreo Sound Reels. They don’t seem to be here at the LC. I’m not sure where they are. They may still be in NY. I am going to need to check next time I’m there. After four hours in the chilly deck, I broke for lunch—I had chili. After lunch, I met back up with Todd to discuss the progress on the films and the next tasks at hand. We established a basic order for the sub‐collections and determined that the next step would be to compile the old Lomax excel indexes into one Access database. I developed a cross‐walk worksheet which links fields from the different spreadsheets to normalized and specified fields in the Access database. When this was complete, Todd looked over it. We then discussed the process of importing each spreadsheet into a new table in Access. We walked through one together and then I completed two more before the end of the day. We will use these tables to build the final index of all the film elements in the collection. The current indexes only look at canisters. Some of the canisters have multiple reels and cores inside. In the new index, each reel or core will receive a unique ID #. Therefore, the current index will be expanded to include the additional items. The data from the old indexes is useful, so we will be keeping it and using it to create a detailed and accurate index of the Lomax film collection.


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07/01/2007 Bertram Lyons [email protected] [email protected] AFC Internship—Film Project Length of fragments Paper documentation and other loose items in cans Helix Video (Sony) Documentation of cans themselves Add field for info pulled from film leader and tape, etc. ¼” open reel mag audio When sound/pix rolled together – MV# A/B? – separate? T1153‐Develop unprocessed super 8 kodachrome cartridge? Verify with Todd that he wants anything on one core to stay on one core, even if just wound together, not spliced? Cut 16mm strips only 07/02/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 8:30pm‐6:00pm (9 hours)

- Completed importing Lomax Film Excel Indexes into Access tables - Met with Marlin Green and Jennifer Pondo to discuss Lomax film project (Todd is out of

town) workflow - Worked with Jennifer in Deck 50 assessing gauge of film materials and evaluating exact

count of items per each sub‐group (i.e. Cord Library, T‐Series, etc.) This morning I continued and completed importing data from old Lomax Film Indexes (in Excel) to Access database tables for use in the Lomax Film processing project that I will be managing over the next six weeks. I am preparing these tables so that we can work on the films sub‐collection at a time. We need to assign unique AFC (MV) numbers to each item and we would like to keep as much metadata attached to each item as we can from past indexes. I will use this data as we assign MV#s to create a comprehensive database of the films in each sub‐collection. At the end of the project, each Access table (sub‐collection) can be merged into one master Access table, in conjunction with the Video collection as well that I am working on in the AFC Annex.


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Around 11am, Marlin Green from the Preservation Directorate and Jennifer Pondo (NYU Film Conservation Intern) arrived to discuss the workflow and the goals for the film project. We met for an hour, discussing procedures for collecting condition data about each item, affixing temporary numbers to items, and how the project should begin. We will set up a meeting with staff from Culpepper, MBRS, Conservation, and the AFC to fine‐tune outlaying questions. In the meantime, we will assess the collection and begin assigning AFC (MV)#s to items so that Jennifer can begin re‐housing the films as soon as our conference meeting is completed. After lunch, Jennifer and I met to work on the films in Deck 50. We wanted to initially get a count of 16 vs 35 vs 8 mm films so that we could determine the amount of acid‐free paper strips to cut in order to begin affixing temporary AFC#s to the items. The collection is predominantly 16mm and we decided that if we cut 16mm strips only, we would be able to handle both 35 and 8 with the 16 mm strips. We then went through the Cord Library (since it will be the first sub‐collection to be re‐housed) one canister at a time to ascertain the exact amount of items in each can. I made notes on hard‐copy indexes that I printed out and brought along with me. This will allow us to begin assigning AFC#s to the materials. We completed the same procedure for the T‐Series sub‐collection as well. Going through the canisters one‐by‐one allowed us to finally understand smaller issues that we will need to deal with before the project begins:

- We need to determine what the maximum length for fragments is before they must be rolled onto a core

- We need to determine what we will do with paper documentation and other loose items in the cans (as well as the documentation on the cans themselves)

- What to do with 3 Helix Video (Sony) reels - Add field for info pulled from film leader and tape, etc. so that Jennifer can make notes

into the database - What to do with ¼” open reel mag audio tapes - When sound/pix rolled together should they be separated and if so will we assign

AFC/MV#s with A/B at end? - T1153 contains an unprocessed super 8 kodachrome cartridge. Should this be

developed? Both Jennifer and I will send out emails to Todd and Marlin about our work today and we will begin again tomorrow. I need to add information we gathered today to the Access tables in preparation for our work tomorrow.

07/03/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary


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9:30pm‐6:00pm (8 hours)

- Began work to assign MV#s to Lomax Films in Cord Library; entails consolidating entries and adding entries to Access database to create one‐for‐one database

- Met with Marlan, Jennifer, and Dana in Conservation Lab; learned about paper film strips and began cutting strips for temporarily labeling films with MV#s

- Worked with Jennifer in Deck 50 to document number of items in Choreo Master Library - Continued assigning MV#s in Cord Library; not complete yet

Building on the work that Jennifer and I completed yesterday with the films, I was able to begin assigning MV#s to films in the Cord Library and updating our Access database to reflect the reality of the items themselves. This work is difficult because our Access database currently holds data on multiple films that are spliced together on one core. We are only assigning one MV# per core; therefore, I have to consolidate the data in cases where we have multiple entries for what will only be one entry. By the end of the day, I was about ¾ of the way through the Cord Library. When I complete this process, Jennifer, myself, or Todd can begin physically applying MV#s (with acid‐free strips of paper wrapped around the reel) to each core in preparation for re‐housing and conservation efforts. After lunch, Jennifer and I met with Marlan and Dana in the Conservation Division to cut 35 and 16 mm strips for our temporary numbering system. Dana (photograph conservator) first demonstrated the efforts that go into preserving and re‐housing paper‐based film positive rolls that are in the Library’s holdings from the years 1893‐1920. The rolls were sent to the Library by Motion Picture developers who wanted to copyright their films in the early days of MP. There was no copyright law for MPs at the time and the filmmakers developed a method to treat the MP like an extended photograph or sequence of photographs. The films were developed onto paper, in long rolls, and sent to the Library to be copywritten. Marlan demonstrated how to use the large paper cutter and we cut 35 and 16 mm strips. Jennifer and I then spent an hour in Deck 50 assessing the contents of the canisters in the Choreo Master Library of films. It is becoming apparent that we will need to be aware of mag track vs. film and we will need to develop methods for expanding MV#s in cases where Jennifer will need to split a reel that consists of mag and film into two reels. I spoke with Marcia about applying MV#_a, MV#_b methods and she agreed that this will work. She suggests we use the opportunity to be descriptive, i.e. MV#_pt1, MV#_pt2, or MV#_sound, MV#_negative, etc. We need to determine how we will handle these situations. For the remainder of the day I continued work with the Cord Library Access database. It is a long and tedious process, but once I get out ahead of Jennifer, then she can begin the actual work to re‐house the collections.

07/10/2007


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Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 10:00pm‐6:00pm (7.5 hours)

- Met with Todd to discuss progress in Lomax Film project - Assisted AFC Reading Room researcher on Alan Lomax manuscripts questions - Assisted Steve Winick with Lomax audio research question - Continued assigning MV#s to Cord Library film items - Met with Jennifer Pondo to discuss progress on Lomax Film project - Began assigning MV#s to Choreometrics T‐Series items

The past four days, I have been in Guadeloupe for a presentation with the Association for Cultural Equity (Lomax Archive). Before I left, I prepared MV#s for 90‐plus items in the Cord Library film collection so that Jennifer and Todd could begin labeling and re‐housing. Today, upon my return, I found out that the preliminary labeling had gone smoothly and that Jennifer had begun re‐housing the films. The project is now up and running. I continued assigning MV#s to the films in the Cord Library so that I could get far enough ahead of Jennifer that she can focus solely on the re‐housing while I continue preparing the films for her. At lunch, I met with Jennifer (accidentally). We will meet tomorrow at 10am to continue discussing logistics and ironing out problems. Steven Winick (of the AFC) asked for my assistance today with a research question regarding Lomax’s recordings of Scottish balladeer John Strachan. Using the catalog that we have created at the ACE, I was able to ascertain whether we had a certain interview that he was looking for. Although the interview was not in our collection, we were able to find two audio items that he was interested in listening to in preparation for a presentation that he is giving on Robin Hood. I will have the two audio tracks sent down to Washington from the archive in NY. I also assisted a researcher in the AFC Reading Room today who is working with Lomax’s papers regarding Levee Camp Workers and the 1942 Coahoma County interviews and recordings. I gave him background on the organization of Alan Lomax’s archive and manuscript materials. I also was able to notify him of the existence of reference copies of video that Alan took in 1978 of Walter Brown (a Mississippi Levee worker). I am working to have these items sent down from the Lomax Archive so that he can access them. For the remainder of the afternoon, I completed assigning MV#s to the Cord Library and began working on the Choreometrics T‐Series subcollection. I assigned over 500 MV#s in this collection and I will add about 60 more tomorrow in order to complete the subcollection. If this continues to work out well, we will be left with a comprehensive, exact catalog of each individual film item in the Lomax Collection (over 2,000 items).


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07/11/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 9:30pm‐6:00pm (8 hours)

- Met with Jennifer and Todd to discuss progress of Lomax Film project - Visited Deck 50 with Jennifer and Todd to see how Jennifer is attaching temporary MV#s

to film items - Completed assigning MV#s to Choreo T‐series films - Assisted Todd and a researcher in AFC Reading Room with Lomax research questions - Completed affixing temporary MV#s to Cord Library films in Deck 50 - Updated Choreo Films Access database

Jennifer, Todd and I met this morning to discuss the progress and workflow of the Lomax Film project. We discussed a method for delivering the Access database to Jennifer so that she can add condition notes as she re‐houses the films. Her pace is slow at the moment (only 13 films in two days), but we are hoping that it will pick up once we get the kinks worked out. After the meeting, the three of us went down to Deck 50 so that Jennifer could show us how she is affixing temporary MV#s to the films. I am going to carry on with this process now that we are far enough ahead of her, and she will focus on rewinding and re‐housing the films. Todd and I assisted a research in the AFC Reading Room today. He is going through the Lomax manuscript collection, looking for information on Levee Camps and levee workers. We helped investigate a mysterious interview transcript. The recording itself is unidentified and we were working to find information on its provenance. I spent a little time completing the work of assigning MV#s to the Choreo T‐Series films and then I returned to Deck 50 to apply MV#s to the Cord Library films. I am using strips of acid‐free paper (labeled in pencil) and wrapping them around the film core in order to identify the MV# of each film item. Jennifer will give each item a new core and a new can. In the process, I am evaluating the accuracy of our database and updating it to reflect the true nature of the collection. This work has been fruitful and I have already identified many mistakes and inconsistencies in the indexes. I did realize, however, that I should not work too far ahead of myself. I have been assigning MV#s in the Access database and then taking the data to Deck 50 in order to attach MV#s to the films themselves. If I work too far ahead in the database, then if any inconsistencies occur, all the numbers that follow the inconsistency must be changed in the database. This is fine if it is only a few, but when I am 500 films ahead of myself, then the work to fix one


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number is overwhelming. I think I will work a little at a time on the database and then in Deck 50 in order to keep this from becoming a problem.

07/12/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 10:00pm‐6:00pm (7.5 hours)

- Adjusted numbers in Choreo T‐Series Access table - Affixed temp numbers to T‐Series films in Deck 50 - Collated T‐Series Access table - Assisted Todd with pulling materials from Adams for AFC Reading Room researcher - Filed Corporate Subject materials, created new folders

I realized that I needed to normalize the old Lomax numbers in the Choreo T‐Series Access table so that I could sort and organize the data according to the old Lomax numbers. This is the way they are now organized on the shelves. I completed that and printed a new index to use while assigning and affixing MV#s to the films in Deck 50. I spent an hour and a half with the T‐Series films and completed numbering 40 of them. Afterwards I returned to the Reading Room to update the Access database. After lunch I adjusted the Cord Library table for Jennifer and emailed it back to her. At this point the database is complete and accurate. Jennifer will add conservation notes and any additional information she can cull from the films as she re‐houses them. When she is complete, the Cord Library table will be ready to go to Marcia and will be extremely useful for researchers who are interested in the collection. Todd asked me to assist with returning and pulling boxes from the stacks for a researcher. We went to Adams to the 4th floor storage where the Lomax Manuscript materials are held. They have processed very little of the collection since it came to them in 2004. We talked about the idea of having me come back to assist with processing the collection either next summer or after I graduate. Lomax’s books from his library are also stored in Adams. When the Library acquires a collection of books from an individual, first they look for any ‘glossed’ copies that would have value for researchers interested in the individual themselves. Those books are pulled and kept with the collection. The remaining books are looked up in the Library’s catalog system. If no copy exists, the book is incorporated into the Library’s collection. If one copy exists, the book becomes the Library’s second copy. If two copies exist, the book is put into the Library’s gift/trade bin and redirected to another library. This work has been completed for Lomax’s books.


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At the end of the day I filed materials in the Corporate Subject files. Quite a lot of documents had built up to be filed. I spent about two hours on this project and at the end I created 7 new folders. 07/13/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 10:00pm‐5:30pm (7 hours)

- Filed materials in Corporate Subject files - Unpacked and counted new items from Seeger Film collection with Todd in Deck 50 - Applied MV#s to Choreo T‐Series films - Updated Choreo T‐Series Access table - Made photocopies for Todd (Alan Lomax CBS Radio Shows finding aid) - Applied MV#s to Lomax Video collection in AFC Annex - Answered two research queries in AFC Reading Room

In order to finish the work I did at the end of the day yesterday, this morning I created eight new folders in the Corporate Subject files. Afterwards, Todd asked me to help him unpack the newly acquired films from Pete Seeger, which are now stored down in Deck 50 with the Lomax films. We took them from the various boxes and organized them (in the order that they were in the boxes) on shelves. We made a preliminary, general count of how many sound items and how many image‐based items are in the collection. This was all the information that Todd needed for today. I stayed in Deck 50 to continue applying MV#s to films in the Choreo T‐Series. The workflow on this project is moving smoothly at this point. It’s a matter of maintaining a balance between numbering and updating the database. Today I numbered just over 100 items and updated the database. Yesterday I realized that I needed to get back involved with the Video project so that Marcia doesn’t get slowed down. I spoke with her today and discovered that I needed to get over there and apply MV#s to keep my progress just ahead of hers. Beginning next week I will begin splitting my time equally between the video and the film projects. At the end of the day, I spoke with Todd about prioritizing my work on the Video collection. I am going to cease photographing the items so that I can complete the database before my time is up for the summer. My knowledge of the collection is an asset that is best served in the database. Now that the workflow is established for photographing the items, any individual can


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follow behind me and continue that process. I will now be working entirely to finish the databases of both the video and the film projects. I also answered two research questions in the AFC Reading Room at the end of the day. Both queries involved identifying specific details about recordings made in the 1940s. I used the AFC’s card catalog to determine the answer to one question and I responded immediately (via email) to the inquirer. The second questions required the use of Numerical Files kept by the AFC about its collections. I was able to locate the file, but the information desired (where the recording was made) was not found in the file. 07/16/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 8:00am‐5:30pm (8.5 hours)

- Met with Todd and Jennifer; briefly discussed progress with Film project - Returned re‐housed films to Deck 50, loaded next set of films to be re‐housed - Provided tour of LC and AFC to Susan Tobin, ACE employee - Assembled Choreo Master Library access database for film project - Renumbered films in Cord Library and T‐Series due to the discovery of three films in

Adams 4th floor that had not been moved to Deck 50 with other films I am beginning the final month with the intention of working full days throughout the week, 8‐5. This morning I arrived at 8 and began preparing Choreo Master Library database for the film project. Jennifer came by at 9am to meet shortly with Todd and me. She has completed re‐housing the first group of films. We returned the films to Deck 50 (along with the empty, old canisters) and resituated them on the shelves (two sets, old and new, mirror‐images). I helped Jennifer load a new cart of films and helped her get them on the way back to her station at MBRS. She will give an update towards the middle of the week. At 10am, Susan Tobin, an employee from ACE, arrived for a tour of the LC and the AFC. I showed her around the Jefferson building and then brought her to the AFC Reading Room to introduce her to Todd Harvey. Todd gave her a brief tour of the Reading Room. I took her to see the Alan Lomax collections so that she could have a better idea of what they are and where they are stored. She is working on a project for the Alan Lomax Archive that involves Lomax’s audio/visual collections. After the tour of Jefferson and Adams, we had lunch in the Madison building and discussed Lomax work.


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During our tour of the Adams storage area (accompanied by Todd), I noticed three canisters of Lomax film items by themselves on the shelf. It turns out that these films were not brought down to Deck 50 with the rest of the films. It was easy to integrate them into the collection, but because of the one‐up numbering system that the AFC has instituted, I had to backtrack and renumber 200 films physically and in the database. This was a frustrating setback. Tomorrow I will try to move past it. I am continuing the development of the Access database tables for the film collections. The total work encompasses identifying the appropriate index, comparing index to physical items, readjusting index into database format to match one entry for one item, assigning MV#s to items in database, and applying MV#s to physical items. Jennifer then takes the items and the database, rehouses the items, and makes additional notes in the database. At the end, the small databases are integrated into one long concordance. 7/17/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 9:00am‐5:30pm (8 hours)

- Film project, T‐Series labeling - Video project, data entry

Todd and I went to Deck 50 first thing in order to fix the T‐Series numbers that were out of alignment after the discovery of an additional Cord Library film. After he left, I continued working on labeling additional films in the T‐Series collection. At 11:30 we went to lunch in order to bid farewell to an intern who is leaving. At lunch I spoke with Marcia about teaching her the process that I developed for capturing digital images of the Video items. I will work with her at 1pm on Friday to pass on the information so that I can focus on the database and she can come behind me to photograph the items. After lunch, I returned to Deck 50 for a few hours and pushed further ahead with the T‐Series films. The work is going very slowly (because of the meticulousness of the task). I asked Todd if he could assist me when he has the time. He agreed that it would help speed up the pace. Tomorrow he will help a bit in the morning. I got locked in Deck 50 by the electric workers and had to call Todd to come down and unlock me. I had the key, but the door cannot be unlocked from the inside. Free at last, I adjusted data in the Access table for the T‐Series. At the end of the day I went to the AFC Annex in the Adams building in order to continue my work with the Video project. I cataloged about 90 videos before it was time to leave.


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7/18/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 9:30am‐6:30pm (8.5 hours)

- Film project, T‐Series labeling - Video project, data entry - Video project, labeling

Today was spent largely furthering work on the two database projects that I’m involved with currently – Film and Video. This morning I spent two hours (with Todd) labeling film items with MV#s in Deck 50. Afterwards, I returned to the AFC Reading Room to adjust data in the database. I then moved to the AFC Annex in order to continue work on the Video project. Working from a computer station, I cataloged 120 videos in the master concordance. When complete, I ate lunch and returned to the AFC Reading Room to get the stacks pass in order to go back down to Deck 50 and the films. I worked for another two hours assigning numbers to films and then returned to AFC RR to adjust data. Briefly, before returning to the Annex, I assisted Todd with some reference work. I pulled an audio item from the stacks to be duplicated, and I identified an item in a journal to be scanned for a patron. Back at the Annex, I affixed MV#s to Videos. At this point, I need to work as diligently as possible in order to complete the two catalog projects. I imported data from an old index to the Video concordance in order to help quicken my pace. Hopefully this will not pose a problem for Marcia. 07/20/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 8:30am‐5:00pm (8 hours)

- Entered Videos into Access database - Assigned MV#s to Videos for Lomax Film Project


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- Instructed Marcia Segal on the use of the AFC’s digital camera (Marcia will begin photographing items as I have done instead of photocopying them)

- Finished Access database for Choreo T‐Series films This morning, Todd and I briefly discussed the priorities that we would like to follow for the remaining time that I have here at the Library. I am going to focus on completing the database and assigning MV#s to the Video collection. I will just try to complete the database for the film collection. At this point it is apparent that I will not be able to get MV#s attached to each film. If I can finish the database, however, it will be easy for someone to come along behind me and apply MV#s. My work will verify that each item exists and how it can be found. I entered videos into the database until I ran out of physical MV sticky numbers to attach to boxes. I asked Marcia to create some more and then I went to Deck 50 to try to finish the T‐Series before I was to meet with Marcia at 1pm. Todd came down to Deck 50 and told me that he was putting in a request to have me hired as a contract worker for next summer. It is not definite that it will happen, but both heads of the AFC are behind the request and hopefully it will. I was able to finish verifying the amount of items in the T‐Series today. Now that I am not attaching MV#s on paper strips to the film items, I can easily go can to can and count the exact amount of items while I write notes on the printed index. Then I can return to the Access database and adjust it to match the films. Having made my way through all the T‐Series films, I was able to finalize the database. At 1pm, I met with Marcia and helped her understand how to use the AFC’s digital camera. As part of the Video project, I suggested we take digital images instead of photocopies of each of the video items. My idea was warmly received and I was instructed to establish a workflow for the process. Now that I have done that, and it has proven effective, I am handing it off to Marcia so that I can focus on completing the databases before my time is up at the Library. I instructed Marcia on how to set up the items for photography, how to keep a slate‐number, how to get images from the camera, how to rename them, how to charge the camera, and how to properly care for it. I hope that the system works and that the AFC moves in that direction and finds it useful. When we finished, I continued cataloging videos until the end of the day. (Yesterday, I visited the Library’s new facility in Culpepper, VA – National Audio Video Conservation Center. I will write a separate report on the facility, included with pictures.) 07/23/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary


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2:30pm‐6:30pm (4 hours)

- Assist Marcia with Digital Photography troubleshooting - Continue Video database project

I returned from Seattle on a red‐eye this morning (9am in DC) and fell asleep as soon as I made it back to my apartment. At 1:30pm I awoke and went to the LC to try to catch up for the lost hours of accidental sleep. Marcia asked me to assist her with some problems she ran into while taking digital photos of videos/video boxes. She was having a lighting issue. The photographs were coming out with dark edges. I adjusted the camera so that it was aware that it was capturing images under fluorescent light. The colors became more true and the dark edge disappeared. I continued work on the Video database project. Todd told me to “sprint” with it. So I am. I worked as long as I could, until I ran out of MV#s to affix to boxes. I left Marcia a note to print more tomorrow so that I can continue making progress with the project. I am currently at MV1300 in the Video database. I began at MV0001. Tomorrow I will meet with Marlan Greene to discuss AV Preservation at 10am. Then I will help Jennifer Pondo get more films for the Film project and then I will get back to the Videos. 07/24/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 8:30am‐6:00pm (9 hours)

- Continued progress with Lomax Video project - Assisted Marcia with Digital Photographing questions - Attended One‐on‐One session with Marlan Greene and Jennifer Pondo about

Conservation of Audio/Video materials in Conservation Division - Moved re‐housed films to Deck 50, loaded more films in Deck 50 to be re‐housed by

Jennifer Pondo This morning I continued labeling and cataloging videos for the Lomax Video project. Marcia had more questions about the digital camera. I helped troubleshoot a problem she was having with the layout of the images once they were downloaded from the camera to the computer. She had to re‐orient them to landscape view after extracting them from the camera. I informed her that this wasn’t necessary if she extracted the images directly from the camera without


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using Nikon proprietary extracting software. That solved the problem, and we went back to work. At 10:00am, I met with Marlan Greene and Jennifer Pondo in the Conservation Division. Marlan gave us an overview of Audio/Visual preservation concerns. He demonstrated many A/V formats and noted the preservation issues with each format. After the demonstration, Marlan toured us through the Recorded Sound and Moving Image labs. These are being moved to Culpepper (NAVCC), so they were in a state of chaos while we were there. A reference librarian from the Recorded Sound division (along with Marlan) showed us some of the “treasures” of the Recorded Sound collections, including early discs from the Bell laboratories, original copper master plates from Berliner’s lab, the first broadcast disc of an American President (Coolidge), and others. While showing us these treasures, Marlan dropped a wax cylinder recording and it shattered on the ground. We were unable to identify what the recording was. It could have been very valuable. It was a great lesson for me, that even the best‐trained professionals make careless mistakes. It was also a reminder that no matter how comfortable you feel with an item or a format, you should always be very careful and observant when working with collections materials. Each item is as valuable as the next and deserves the utmost respect. Marlan was very embarrassed and upset with himself. The reference librarian just wanted to clean it up quickly and “sweep it all under the carpet.” She said, “no one will ever know.” I could tell Marlan wasn’t comfortable with that. I wonder how he will handle the situation. I imagine the most prudent decision would be to inform his supervisor and the head of the Recorded Sound division of the incident so that it could be properly documented. After the tour, Jennifer and I went to the Moving Image division to pick up a cart of films that she completed re‐housing. We took the cart to Deck 50 to drop off the re‐housed films and pick up another load of films for her to re‐house. When Jennifer made it back to MBRS, I returned to Adams to continue the Video project. Today was productive. I completed MV#s into the 1500s. I ran into some new formats (typically they have all been ¾” U‐Matic, VHS, or Betacam), including 1” open reel video, and D2 digital composite video. I also found ½” open reel audio and ¼” open reel audio in the collection. These will be moved to the Recorded Sound collections, although I will cross‐reference them in the database so that they remain connected to the MV items with which they are associated. I also found a ¼” floppy computer disc in the collection. I will ask Marcia tomorrow what I should do with it. 07/25/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary


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8:30am‐6:30pm (9.5 hours)

- Continued progress with Lomax Video project - Gave tour of AFC to Johannes Joch, a foreign exchange student from Germany

Marcia helped answer my questions this morning about the floppy disk, the 35 mm film, and the audio material that I found within the Video collection. As I imagined, the floppy disk and the audio material will be separated and included with their respective media collections. The 35mm film will be numbered in sequence with the videos, yet it will be stored separately when it arrives at the NAVCC in Culpepper. Today I made further progress with the Video collection, putting the end in sight by tomorrow! In the middle of the day, Johannes Joch, a foreign exchange student from Germany, came to the AFC for a tour. I took a break and showed him around the Library, especially the AFC Reading Room and Collections storage facilities. After our tour I returned to Adams and continued with the videos until the end of the day. 07/26/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 8:30am‐6:30pm (9.5 hours)

- Continued progress with and completed Lomax Video database project - Met with Deborah Thomas to discuss the Library’s work with Digital Preservation

Last day on the videos. Marcia brought down the stragglers from the 4th floor and, although they are out of original order, I entered them all into the database and tagged them with MV#s. This morning I finished about half of them and then I went to a coffee/donuts party held in the AFC conference room in honor of those of us who helped move materials to the new storage in Deck 50. This afternoon I attended a one‐on‐one session with Deborah Thomas (of the Library’s digital preservation initiative). For two hours we (along with Jennifer Pondo) discussed methods of digital preservation and digital file management, including standards, problems, projects, and other considerations. Deborah manages a digitization project of the Library’s pre 1920s newspaper holdings. The goal of the digitization project is to provide access to the collection, but also to develop a prototype, long‐term digital object management system. There are many


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concerns and few answers to the best methods for managing digital files. Deborah is working to develop standards for metadata collection, digital object creation, and long‐term sustainability. After the meeting, we toured the Library’s temporary serials storage facilities. In the afternoon, I completed the entering and labeling videos. I cleaned up the data for Marcia and I will work with her next week to pass on my work so that she can make the final adjustments before sending the items to Culpepper. I’ll be in New York for the next four days preparing and packing the Lomax Archive’s final materials for shipment to the Library of Congress. When I return, I’ll need to focus on the Film project, in order to get it to a decent state before we leave for Kansas. 08/02/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 11:30am‐5:30pm (4.5 hours)

- Finalized Video Database for Marcia - Corrected Choreo Master Library Access table for Lomax Film project

Having returned from an exceptionally long project in New York (preparing and overseeing the remainder of the Lomax Archive to be shipped to the LC in Washington, D.C.), I came prepared with the final information needed to complete the Lomax Video project that I have been working on this summer. I entered the “coming” videos into the Access table concordance. Marcia will only need to apply MV#s when the videos arrive and they can be photographed and shipped with the rest of the items to NAVCC in Culpepper. I am now faced with the task of getting as far as I can on the films before I leave. So I continued working on the Choreo Master Library in order to assign an entry in the database for each physical item in the collection. Todd will then be able to follow behind me (with the database) and assign numbers physically to the items. I spent the remainder of the day working on this project. 08/03/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary


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9:00am‐5:30pm (7.5 hours)

- Finished Choreo Master Library Access table for Lomax Film project - Met with Marcia to pass on completed video database and to tie up loose ends - Evaluated Choreo Workprint Library in Deck 50 in order to assess an exact count of

items in collection - Checked four boxes of Alan Lomax manuscript materials for Todd to assess whether

there were any “sensitive” materials that should be restricted for a pending researcher - Discussed goals for next week with Todd

This morning I finished the Choreo Master Library Access table. It is prepared and ready for MV#s to be assigned to the items and then added to the database. I met with Marcia to discuss the final aspects of the Video project. I explained to her that videos will be arriving with the next Lomax shipment. I have already entered their titles into the database. Marcia will need to affix numbers and add the numbers to the items’ titles in the database. We will come in just under 2500. The films begin at 2501. I then discussed the video database with Marcia. She is happy with the outcome and will make use of it as she continues to prepare the items for shipment to Culpepper. In Deck 50, I began evaluating the items in the Choreo Workprint Library. I was able to get a count of every item in the sub‐collection in preparation for completing the Access database. I spoke with Todd about this and I think it is best if I perform the same task for each sub‐collection before I leave. Then I can adjust the databases from afar and send them back to him. This way I will be able to deliver a completed product. There is a researcher coming in on Monday to use Alan Lomax manuscript materials. Some of the boxes are unprocessed, so Todd asked me to look through them for items that might be sensitive. I found two such items: 1) a document with Alan’s social security number on it; 2) a letter to Alan from a lawyer detailing the financial circumstances of his father’s estate. We (pending further instruction) inserted place‐holders into the original folder and pulled the items from the box. 08/06/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 9:00am‐6:00pm (8.5 hours)

- Retrieved Portable Disc Cutter (1930s) with Todd from Deck A - Inventoried Lomax Film collections (Workprint, Presentation Films, Choreo Films, Folk

Films) in Deck 50


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- Delivered loose film to Marcia in Annex to be added to Video collection - Updated Choreo Workprint Access database table - Ran query and printed report for Judith Gray of Native American recordings in Lomax T‐

Series audio collection The news came today that John Simmons will be leaving KU and stepping down as Director of the Museum Studies program. Kiersten Lathem will be standing in as interim Director. I am sad to see John go. His presence alone challenged me to achieve and excel to my utmost potential. I will keep that with me and learn from Kiersten what she has to offer. This morning I assisted Todd in retrieving a 1930s portable disc‐cutter from Deck A so that a patron could view it. Afterwards I delivered my KU Evaluation form to Todd so that he can fill it out and send it to (now Kiersten) John. Getting closer to the goal of inventorying every item in the Lomax Film collection and preparing an up‐to‐date index of the collection, I spent most of the day in Deck 50 inventorying the films. I made it to the end of the collection. All the films are now in order on the shelves, and each film is accounted for in the inventory. All that is left to do is adjust the database entries, incorporate the films that will arrive in the next shipment (both intellectually and physically), and finally attach MV#s to each database entry. I briefly ran a film up to the Annex so that it could be incorporated into the Video collection. Because it was originally with the Videos, and because it is related to them, I gave it an MV# in the video range and Marcia said I could bring the film up and store it in sequence on the shelf with the videos. For the remainder of the day I adjusted the Film database (Choreo Workprint Library). Judith Gray (head reference librarian) asked me to print a report of Native American films held in the Lomax T‐Series audio collection. I generated the report and presented it to her. She will be adding it to the Library’s index of Native American holdings. She will also make appropriate corrections to the data (in marks on the paper) as she works. I can then make adjustments to the index for posterity. 08/07/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 9:30am‐6:00pm (8 hours)

- Corrected Lomax Film Access databases (completed Choreo Workprint Library, Presentation Films, and began MSC Films)


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- Attended one‐on‐one demonstration with Dan Patterson in the Conservation Directorate

- Covered the Reading Room desk for Valda - Met with Jennifer Pondo about her progress on the Lomax Film collection

In an effort to get to a stopping place in my work, I continued pushing through the Lomax Film databases today. I finished the Choreo Workprint Library (the last of the epic groups), Choreo Presentation Films, and I began the Movement Style and Culture Film Elements group. Tomorrow I hope to complete these. My work will be temporary. These databases will need to be fine‐tuned as the films are re‐housed and rewound. My goal was to develop a line/entry in the database for every piece of film‐element material in the collection. At the moment the elements are in various canisters, so it was necessary to ID them by the canister. Once they are housed in their own cans, the Ids will become more specific and the information in the database will need to be corrected and honed‐down. At 10:00am, Jennifer Pondo and I met with Dan Patterson, a book conservator in the Conservation Division. He gave us a demonstration of the work that takes place in the Book Conservation division and toured us through the lab/workshop. We saw an Egyptian Binding that is deteriorating and being fixed in a 17th century book, as well as books once owned by Thomas Jefferson, that are now being re‐bound for an exhibit in the Library’s new welcome center. They use every effort not to handle or treat the books any more than is absolutely necessary. Every treatment strives to be un‐harmful and reversible. Dan showed us the many papers, leathers, and boards that are used to create new and re‐create old housings and bindings for rare and valuable books in the Library’s collections. After the tour, Jennifer and I briefly discussed the status of her work with the Lomax Film project. Since I am leaving on Friday, I advised her on how to continue her work with Todd as the new contact. She mentioned that her work is going slowly and that she initially under‐estimated the time that this project would take. She projects that she will complete a little more than 15% of the collection by the time she leaves at the end of August. Tomorrow, the AFC will have a going‐away lunch for me at a Greek restaurant. I hope to complete my database work before lunch. Todd and I will begin wrap up meetings after lunch and all day on Thursday. He will not be in on Friday, and neither will I. 08/08/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary 8:00‐6:00pm (9.5 hours)

- Completed development of Lomax Film Access tables


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- Generated report of Lomax Film materials that will arrive in next shipment - Going away Lunch at Greek Taverna restaurant - Recap with Todd about accomplished work this summer - Retrieved and returned Manuscript material to Adams 4th floor for researcher

The days are winding down at the AFC. This morning I completed developing and correcting all Access tables associated with Lomax Film sub‐groups. I then added (in the proper places) Lomax Films that will be arriving in the coming shipment. Todd will be able to shelve them in the appropriate places (I’ll make notes of this in the stacks) and then the database will already reflect the presence of the materials. At present, every film item in the Lomax collection is accounted for physically and intellectually. The AFC held a going‐away lunch for me today at the Greek Taverna. 10 individuals attended, including Todd, Judy, Marcia, Valda, Judith, Ann, and Jennifer from the AFC, as well as Marlan Green and Jennifer Pondo from the Preservation Division. I was presented with an AFC book, signed by all the staff. After lunch, Todd and I began the arduous work of recapping the accomplished work of the summer, including what should be done next after I leave. I will write a report for Todd so that he can carry my work on after I leave. Todd and I assisted a researcher named Christine Whittaker (grand‐daughter of Walter Garwick, designer of first disc cutter for John A. Lomax). She has developed a new method of digitally recording sound, using acoustic membranes to interact with the computer. She will be showing her work at a museum in Seattle this fall. We also returned manuscript materials to Adams 4th floor and retrieved more boxes for a researcher in the reading room. The room the materials are stored in is warm and not, probably, the best environment for manuscript materials. The Library knows this, but there is no other choice at the moment. Todd has put in for me to come back next summer to work (as a contractor) on the Lomax Manuscript collection. I think our work this summer will help deliver the Lomax Moving Image materials closer to a more accessible state. That was the goal, and I believe we reached it. Tomorrow we will visit Deck 50 so that I can place labels on shelves in preparation for whoever assesses the collection next. We also begin brainstorming for the future needs and direction of the Lomax Collection here at the AFC. 08/09/2007 Bert Lyons AFC Internship—Daily Summary


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10:00‐6:00pm (7.5 hours)

- Labeled and organized shelves and films in Deck 50 - Discussed summer work with Todd - Composed summary of internship projects for Todd - Toured Main Reading Room

Last day. Today I spent a good amount of time in Deck 50, labeling and organizing everything so that anyone could follow behind me and make sense of the databases I’ve created and the physical items themselves. Todd and I spent a great deal of time discussing the work that I completed this summer, especially how it should be continued when I’m gone. We also brainstormed about the overall goals of processing the Lomax materials over the course of the next five years. We will certainly stay in touch about this. Most of my day was spent composing a summary of the work that I completed so that Todd can use it for reference and for guidance in continuing the workflow and developing new tasks in the future. And, I finally got to see the Library’s main reading room. Todd realized that I hadn’t been there yet and dragged me up to see it. What a sight. After having spent the whole summer in the innards of the Library, it ties it all together to see the public interface and access point to these remarkable collections. I’ll have much to say about my experiences here. I said many goodbyes and was the last person to leave. Appendix B.2 – AFC/LC, June 16, 2008—June 29, 2008 6/16/08 Goals: Sub‐series intellectual arrangement Materials: 5,000 folders in collection Stable sub‐series labels: Financial, Personal, Index, Case Files, Correspondence


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Other labels: Fieldwork, Projects, Writings I don’t think we should over‐simplify Alan’s work/life. We need extensibility to account for non‐stereotypical activities, e.g. professional associations and commitments. We have already added one sub‐series heading, namely “professional activities”. This first day of processing, we used The Land Where the Blues Began (the book) as a test. I went through eleven document boxes and made corrections to a number of misidentified or unidentified folders. Some materials that Lomax brought together for work on the book (including original field work, interviews, and other folklore materials) had been removed previously by AFC staff, other similar materials had not. All the materials were used as source material for the monograph. A decision should be made for consistent processing of these types of projects. Lomax noticeably uses old research to build new output. These materials typically are stored together. I uncovered an unidentified book project of American Folk Songs (Negro, North, South, and West) from the early 1960s. Currently we call it “Big Ballad Book” in the database. It is now being separated intellectually from The Land Where the Blues Began. Using a form and genre terms list populated by Maggie Kruesi, we are normalizing all document types as we work. I am also adding detailed ID terms to the notes field for subject searches. A few questions from today: 9.04.07 (1/9 etc.) has been pulled out and separated. Why? 9.04.11 4/8 & 5/8 are missing from box. What do we do with Coahoma County materials that have been separated from The Land Where the Blues Began materials? 6/17/08 Began the day finishing TLWTBB materials. I recommend that the Coahoma County materials that have been moved from TLWTBB project be moved back to keep original order. Most of my work today has been related to the writings in the collection. Much is mislabeled and improperly identified in the database. I am going through the writings box‐by‐ box to accurately identify the projects and the folders associated with each. Tomorrow I will continue with Brown Girl in the Ring and Rainbow Sign, as well as other folders currently labeled American Folk Song.


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Series; subseries; sub‐subseries; documuent types 2004/004 unpub manusc; writings; Big Ballad Book; drafts ______________; writings, books; Folk Songs of North America; drafts ______________; writings, books; Brown Girl in the Ring; drafts ______________; writings, articles; 16 Tons; drafts ______________; projects, sound recordings; Blues in the Mississippi Night; transcripts ______________; projects, moving images; American Patchwork, “Feet Don’t Fail Me Now”; financial documents 6/18/08 How do we deal with all the office materials that are appearing from the 1980s? They deal with multiple projects, both Folklore‐related and Performance Style‐related, e.g. a folder containing correspondence related to Choreometrics films as well as preliminary ideas for American Patchwork. I began a subseries category called, “professional activities”. Maybe these general folders can file into this category with descriptions in the notes field of related projects…. Trial 25.01.51 – [writings, articles] A Worldwide Evolutionary Classification of Cultures, 1977 “A Worldwide Evolutionary Classification of Cultures", by Alan Lomax and Conrad M. Arensberg, Current Anthropology, December 1977 Above changed to [performance style] …. Looking at the Caribbean material, there are two streams, the field work project and the publication projects – books and LPs (CDs). Do they constitute one subseries, or multiple? field work; Caribbean, 1962; transcripts; transcripts of taped songs projects; Brown Girl in the Ring; drafts; edited version of final drafts projects; Song Game Album (SGA); song lists; proposed sequencing for album or do they all fall under one category...? 6/19/08 Caribbean, again. Todd and I have been discussing use of Folder_Title_1 field to add more depth, e.g. projects, radio shows; projects, moving image; projects, sound recordings or writings, books; writings, articles; writings, unpublished


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What remains to be seen is how we will define and describe the majority of Lomax’s work that falls between the lines of the larger, well‐known projects. Lomax had a long and productive life. His work, ideas, and time were requested and given in many fields and under many projects. We need a high‐level descriptive field to organize these materials, e.g. Lomax’s work to revitalize cultural expression in many parts of the US in 1970s and 1980s (through NEH, PBS, Louisiana organizations, etc., etc.); Lomax’s work with People’s Songs; Lomax’s continuous correspondence and activity related to folk music (in and out of larger projects). It is also clear that much of what Lomax kept in his office (which is the collection of materials with which we are now dealing) was related to projects. In many cases, original source materials (Fisk transcripts, Caribbean field notes, etc.) are kept in files related to projects undertaken much later (The Land Where the Blues Began, Brown Girl in the Ring). In order to keep the authenticity of the collection and to maintain original contexts, it is important to keep the earlier materials imbedded in the later projects. Stripping them out would leave holes and gaps in the later projects and provide incomplete access to the earlier documents (which largely are not in comprehensive bundles). The context of the final state of the documents warrants an approach that uses descriptive pointers in the notes field to make necessary cross‐references for researcher access. What we are organizing is not an intended archive, but a stopped‐in‐its‐tracks production office of an extremely prolific individual. We need to remember the intent of the creator of the materials. He was busy. He was active. He was a writer. He thought on paper and on tape. He thought out loud and in correspondence to others. Words were his tools. What we are finding in this collection are the remnants of developed plans, communicated plans, executed plans, and all the source material needed for successful plans. I think we need an outline in order to see the progression of fields that we are creating:

- writings o books o articles o plays

- projects o radio shows o sound recordings o moving images o performances o cultural preservation

- personal o awards o biography o education o press o correspondence

- field work - professional activities


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o cultural preservation o conferences o presentations o research

- corporate activities o administrative records o finance o case files o indexes

- correspondence - performance style

o cantometrics o choreometrics o parlametrics/phonotactics

- collected materials 6/20/08 How about another field (not a notes field) for secondary folder_title_2’s? For instance, if Coahoma County material is included in the collected source material for The Land Where the Blues Began, the folder_title_1 would read “writings”, folder_title_2 would read “The Land Where the Blues Began, 1993”, and folder_title_2_alternate would read “Coahoma County, Mississippi, 1942”. The document type field and the note field would still describe the contents of the folder. This would provide a secondary sort option to account for the amount of hidden materials (yet important and desired) within this collection as it stands (the legacy of Alan Lomax in 1990, not the Alan Lomax of 1940). Would this be any different than including “see also’s” in the notes field? What we need is the opportunity to tag any one folder to any number of folder_title_2’s: a relational database versus a flat file database. Today we agreed to implement additional detail in the folder_title_1 field: Writings, books Writings, articles Writings, plays Projects, performances Projects, radio programs Projects, sound recordings Projects, moving image


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I’ve also added “corporate activities” and “professional activities” to try to account for loose and unconnected materials related to Lomax’s continuous work for folklore and cultural preservation. 6/23/08 American Patchwork today, beginning with Appalachian Journey. Tomorrow I’ll continue with work on the American Patchwork project. The system being established will work through major projects, field work, and other large groups. What will remain will be loose ends and groups of collected materials. I am a little troubled by the idea to separate all performance style. The more I read about Lomax’s work and the more I read Lomax’s writings in this collection, the more I understand that the idea of cross‐cultural analysis of performance style permeated Lomax’s work from the late 1940s and developed concurrently with all his work throughout the remainder of his career. Even American Patchwork is instilled with the underlying ideas of Cantometrics and Choreometrics. Lomax was looking at large traditions of American performance style and relating them to world folk performance styles. The separation has already been started, but it should be noted throughout the finding aid that, although they are separated, Lomax’s “folk” work and his “performance style” are fused and a continuously related throughout his career (even more so as time progresses). 6/24/08 Finished American Patchwork subseries today. A workflow is being established whereby large projects/writings/field work/correspondence/personal groups of materials can be identified, brought down from storage, evaluated, and properly described in the database. I think we have laid a good foundation (in terms of subseries headings) for continuing the work through to its fruition. The only glitch will be the arbitrary distinction that was made between Lomax’s “folklore/field” work and his “performance style” work. I think there is no clear divide between these aspects of Lomax’s psyche and it shows in his work. The collection will always show a scar where this separation took place. It must be accepted that Lomax developed into an anthropologist/ethnomusicologist and his folklore work developed with him. Lomax describes American Patchwork (in a 1990 letter to Brian O’Doherty of the NEA, pg. 5) as “the first field test of the systems for the analysis of performance style that have been developed in my lab in the last couple of decades.” The letterhead of this particular letter reads, “The Association For Cultural Equity / Alan Lomax & Conrad Arensberg, Co‐Directors / A Global Study of Expressive Behavior” and lists associated projects: American Patchwork Television Series; Cantometrics;


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Choreometrics; Global Jukebox. To properly understand this collection and its contents, it is important to recognize the seamlessness of Lomax’s work. Even the project to prepare 12 lps from AL and JAL’s early fieldwork for the AFS entitled, A Recorded Treasury of Black Folk Song, is laced with “performance style” elements. The project was funded through and overseen by Lomax’s Cantometrics umbrella; the goal of the project includes (expressly stated by Lomax) the desire to use performance style analysis to organize and arrange the recordings. In a letter to Erik Barnouw and Robert Carneal (12/13/1979) requesting support for the project, Lomax writes, “As you both know I have been studying performance style for a number of years. I thought it might be helpful if I reevaluated the Lomax collections of field recordings at the Library of Congress and prepared the best of them for publication—first of all in a series of albums, organized in a way that might help to show blacks and other Americans the beauty, the variety, the regional traits and the African characteristics of this great body of song” (emphasis added). We could compare the finding aid for “Performance Style” boxes to develop a system for treating finances and other corporate information found in the 2004/004 collection. New addition: professional activities, presentations There are presentations, however, that are a part of the “performance style” materials. Currently they are defined as “performance style” and the document type for the record denotes “presentations”. I think, since we are relegating all “performance style” materials to the sidelines in this current pass, that we should approach them as one group of materials (in conjunction with Nancy Johnson’s new PSC finding aid) after we have organized the remaining materials. The problems of labeling are still present. Is Black Identity Project a stand‐alone “project”, or is it part of Lomax’s work with “performance style”? In reality the answer is both. Unfortunately, we have now to struggle to describe it as its own project (which it is) and to keep it related to PSC materials. Also, within the Black Identity Project are writings, sound recording projects, cultural development projects, and all the typical administrative needs. It is a collection in itself. The workflow is going well. As any box is brought out, at this point, I go through the entire box and identify and describe each folder. There are enough subseries categories identified at this point that the majority of the time the folders fall into the current subseries. I create new subseries when necessary (but strictly according to the outline that Todd and I have been discussing, which is included in this report). 6/25/08 Progress report:


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Subseries are lining up as follows: Collected Materials not processed Correspondence not processed Case Files not processed Indexes not processed Performance Style not processed (to hold to integrate with PSC) Personal not processed Financial Lana processing Corporate Activities in process Field Work in process Professional Activities in process Projects in process Writings in process Regarding reprints and collected materials (of which there is a great deal in this collection), are we going to differentiate between reprints and collected materials kept specifically for “performance style” uses versus those kept for “folklore” uses, or should we include all reprints and collected materials in autonomous categories? If we tag a reprint as “performance style” it separates it from other collected materials. If we tag it as “collected materials” we separate it from “performance style” materials (since we are making the distinction). Many collected articles come from Lomax’s “reprint” drawers. They don’t all refer to “performance style” research. Most do, however. We could develop a subseries label for collected materials, e.g. “collected materials, reprints” or we could do the same thing under performance style, e.g. “performance style, reprints”. One way or the other, a consistent approach should be established to handle the massive amounts of collected material that appear in this collection. I spent some time browsing materials that are currently identified as “collected materials” and noticed that there are plenty of instances of misidentification. For instance, in 1968 Lomax participated in a conference at Atlanta University put on by the Center for African and African‐American Studies. He was invited back in 1969. The folders were titled “Black Studies” and given the identification of “collected materials” (I think it was assumed that these were articles on black studies). In this instance I created a new sub‐subseries (“Conference on African and African‐American Studies, 1968‐1969”) and placed it within the “professional activities” subseries; therefore, we know have: “professional activities, Conference on African and African‐American Studies, 1968‐1969” which includes (currently) two large folders with correspondence about the conference, reprints of conference papers, notes, and other collected materials from the conference. Worth mentioning, also, is that Lomax participated in this conference on the momentum of his work with the Black Identity Project (which has its own sub‐subseries heading under the subseries “projects”). Do these materials fold into the Black Identity Project, or do they stand alone as Lomax’s professional work?


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I write the above paragraph as an example of the workflow and the types of decisions and identification that need to be undertaken with the processing of this collection. Collected materials, personal, and correspondence files are going to be difficult to keep from getting messy. I think we may need to rethink our subseries categories here, or at least how we identify materials related to these subseries. 6/26/08 I broke the Georgia Sea Islands field work up into two categories: field work, Georgia Sea Islands Singers, 1962‐1974 field work, Bessie Jones, 1961 These are very different materials. In 1961, Lomax began interviewing Bessie Jones for a potential book about her life. He recorded many tapes of her life history (which are in the sound recording collection). The book was never written. Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, Lomax, his sister, Bess, and others (including Hedy West and Joan Halifax) promoted and publicized the Georgia Sea Island Singers on concert tours, on LPs, and in films. These materials are gathered in the Georgia Sea Islands Singers, 1962‐1974 sub‐subseries. However, I’m not sure they should remain under the “fieldwork” subseries. I broke the British Isles boxes into the following categories: [field work] British Isles, 1950‐1958 Scotland, Ireland, Wales, England, etc. Includes song transcripts, interview transcripts, collected materials (maps, programs, etc.), correspondence, notes, field notes, and other materials related to these years in the British Isles. Many of the materials also relate to Lomax’s work with radio, TV, and LP projects while in Britain; see also “British Isles LP project”, and “The Bonny Bunch of Roses, 1951‐1954”. There are also many related radio programs; see also “projects, radio programs”. [projects, sound recordings] British Isles LP projects Includes work related to “Folk Songs of Great Britain”, a survey of folk music of the British Isles recorded in the field and produced by Alan Lomax and Peter Kennedy, 1950‐1958. (Caedmon, 1961) – 10 Volumes: Vol. 1: Songs of Courtship; Vol. 2: Songs of Seduction; Vol. 3: Jack of All Trades; Vol. 4: The Child Ballads 1; Vol. 5: The Child Ballads 2; Vol. 6: Sailormen and Servingmaids; Vol. 7: Fair Game and Foul; Vol. 8: A Soldiers Life for Me; Vol. 9: Songs of Ceremony; Vol. 10: Songs of Animals and Other Marvels. Correspondence, indexes, clearances, song transcripts, and manuscripts for publication. [writings, books] The Bonny Bunch of Roses, 1951‐1954


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Proposed book by Alan Lomax and Seamus Ennis. From a preliminary manuscript about the project: “this is to be an anthology of folk song and ballads from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, recently recorded from living singers in all parts of these islands by myself [Lomax] and Ennis, who is the principal authority on the music of the Gaelic speakers of these islands. It will contain the words and music of two or three hundred songs, the number depending on cost problems. But beside the songs the anthology will have a commentary which will explain the songs and set forth the working of folk traditions of the islands, which for a folklorist are a bonny bunch of roses. The book takes its title from a ballad of the Napoleonic period, still current in Britain, American and Canada, in which Napoleon discusses his intention to pluck ‘the Bonny bunch of roses‐o.’” Includes correspondence, song texts sent from contacts throughout the British Isles, drafts of manuscripts, and song transcripts. As the time winds down for this first two week session of establishing a workflow for processing the Lomax manuscript materials, I feel that a good amount of progress has been made. Currently, in terms of subseries headings, we have the following: case files 206 folders collected materials 414 folders collected materials, reprints 8 folders corporate activities 1 folder corporate activities, administration 8 folders correspondence 547 folders field work 249 folders financial 837 folders index 849 folders performance style 346 folders personal 112 folders professional activities 21 folders projects 12 folders projects, cultural preservation 43 folders projects, moving images 347 folders projects, performances 3 folders projects, radio programs 146 folders projects, sound recordings 116 folders writings 4 folders writings, articles 27 folders writings, books 316 folders writings, plays 5 folders unidentified 20 folders empty 5 folders


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items in bold have been processed items in italics are being processed remaining items are not processed “Collected materials” and “correspondence” are the next big groups to process. After working through those groups, much of the complexities and questions about the collection will have been answered. I am not sure how we will describe the “collected materials” sub‐subseries headings. This is a question that we can ponder over the next three weeks. I would like to keep a running conversation about this project while I’m in Kansas. I think that will make the next two week period of work (at the end of July) more fruitful.

writing archives crafting order a critiq

Documents

records archives pp

introduction pp

readings pp

references pp

conclusion writing archives

archival collecting

overview situation pp

introduction archives