Finding the skeletons in your closets (and basements and desks and drawers)

Most collectors are accustomed to finding what they want in less than glamorous places. Archivists and manuscript librarians are no exceptions. The basement, the attic, the garage, the abandoned office building and the self-storage unit are work environs almost as familiar to us as the processing table and the reading room.

When I visit participants in this project to determine what they want us to survey, I find people will often begin by showing me sets of nicely labeled and orderly archival boxes in well-lit stacks. This is the "socially acceptable" portion of their backlog.

But when I press and ask "Is there anything else?" that's when the real adventure begins. Suddenly I'm being led into dark basements where towers of ancient liquor boxes and loose and often grimy manuscripts dwell. We're crouching under desks and pulling out keys for locked cabinets that haven't been opened in years. We're looking at items of unknown provenance brought in by predecessors and problem collections that have been sitting on the "I'll get to it someday" shelf for decades. As Rebecca Johnson Melvin, the head of the manuscript unit at the University of Delaware's Special Collections pointed out, oftentimes these collections have been around so long that we almost don't see them anymore. It's as if they're part of the furniture. (Funnily enough, we actually did survey a piece of furniture last week, a wooden cabinet with, what else, slides inside.)

Almost everyone in the project has found more for us to survey than what they originally intended, and often they uncover even more while we're onsite surveying. I think, and participants have told me, that seeing what we do, being "forced" to revisit holdings when selecting collections to survey, and having a few more hands and minds available to the cause makes facing this portion of the backlog more palatable. These are the skeletons in these institutions' closets, but they're not all that scary upon closer inspection.

For the last three weeks we've been surveying the most extensive skeleton yet. Samuel Moyerman was a Philadelphia manuscript and memorabilia dealer who sold collections up and down the Eastern seaboard. When he died, a good deal of his inventory remained unsold, and in 1972 the University of Delaware Library received two moving trucks full of it. Over the years the staff have been able to process a great deal of it, but significant unprocessed caches remained, including a pile of boxes that were on the floor in a corner of their vault whose only finding aid was a brief typed list taped to the wall. What made this particular pile so daunting was that it wasn't just one collection, it was over 100 collections, most with discrete but somewhat uncertain provenance, with dates ranging from the 18th to 20th century and subject matter that ran the gamut from wigmaking to the health of prison inmates. Given the press of other responsibilities and projects, finding a way to tackle this group of material had seemed challenging at best, but the survey project provided an opportunity to finally meet the challenge head on.

Thanks to the efforts of the intrepid Anita Wellner, Rebecca, the surveyors and a small band of UD interns and staff who were willing to get their hands dirty (literally), there is no longer a pile of Moyerman material at the University of Delaware. Instead there are 110 survey records and dozens of other materials which the staff plan to integrate into existing collections or process in the very near future. Information on the contents of that pile will soon be available in a publicly searchable database and ready to be included in MARC catalog records and collection-level EAD finding aids with the use of a few simple tools and macros. It's one of the most rewarding aspects of this project to me, seeing nagging problems addressed and "hidden" collections made more accessible.

So, what skeletons are lurking in your closets? Don't worry, you can fess up anonymously if you want.

But mommy, I don't want to look at pictures of shuffleboard again

In the past few months we've encountered a number of collections of people's travel slides out in the fields of surveying. These have ranged from small boxes with a few dozen slides a piece to an entire metal cabinet of 3D stereo slides.

I have to admit, my first, admittedly unfair, reaction to these collections is usually "Why??!!" I have visions of these collections' lives before they found archival homes, and these visions generally consist of generations of grandchildren being forced to sit in darkened living rooms, watching through the window at their friends outside playing, while Grandma and Grandpa recount all the meals they ate during their annual pilgrimage to Myrtle Beach.

But we've seen some pretty interesting travel slides so far, from people who didn't just hit the typical tourist destinations in their journeys or approach their travels in the usual way. There was the set at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society by an unknown photographer whose travels included cruises to Cuba, Panama, and the North Cape, and vacations spent documenting the people and places of Minnewaska, New York. (Elena Sisti, the Horticultural Society's Information Services Librarian, said she could see the makings of a whole Lake Wobegon-type narrative for these.) There was also the collection at the University of Delaware's Special Collections whose extensive indexing and categorization reflected an anthropological approach to the world, even though the travel was likely for pleasure, not business. Even the set whose accompanying narrative consisted primarily of descriptions of morning routines and dinner menu selections, also at the University of Delaware, was oddly compelling.

On a related (though more frivolous) note, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players have made a career of taking slide collections they find at garage sales and thrift stores and turning them into songs. (I've always thought they'd be the perfect musical entertainment for the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists.) Take a look at the video slideshow that accompanied the CD version of their song "Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959" for an innovative use of travel slides.

The survey of 33,000 linear feet begins with a single step

Here's a geographic representation, complete with commentary, of all the places we've visited in the course of our work, courtesy of the omnipresent Google's My Maps feature.

The Sites of the PACSCL Consortial Survey Initiative

Please visit regularly as we add survey stops and even some collection information to our very own pseudo-GIS system.

Can a "boring" collection have high research value?

We regularly host group training sessions for people in the institutions participating in the survey project to acclimate them to the survey method before we start work at their institution. One of the highlights of these sessions, for them and for us, is when we do hands-on surveying of some collections in small teams. This includes discussing and assigning ratings for the collection characteristics assessed by the survey: Condition, Quality of Housing, Physical Access, Intellectual Access, Documentation Quality, and Interest (these last two combine to make up the Research Value Rating, or RVR, for short).

We pick sample collections to use in these sessions both for their ability to be surveyed within a limited period of time by people with little previous experience of the survey method as well as because they demonstrate various challenges inherent in the survey process. One of the collections we've used in all of the training sessions so far is the Mary Bainerd Smith diaries, a collection of 64 diaries from 1894 to 1957 held by The Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The two-sentence description on HSP’s website sums this collection up quite accurately, if succinctly: "Philadelphia diaries of Mary Bainerd Smith on the domestic concerns of the Smith family and their friends. There is little commentary or mention of public affairs." This collection always provokes debate in our surveying teams -- and often amongst the project staff after the training session is over!

Each day Mary Bainerd Smith wrote a few sentences about her and her family's whereabouts and activities, generally in very dry (and adjective-free) language. Mary Bainerd Smith clearly wasn't giving contemporaries Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons a run for their money, as you can see in such archetypal entries as "Mother and father to church." "Rain almost all day." "Extension phone installed in bedroom." "May out to lunch and supper." (For most of the years, there's no "I" in the diaries, but the writer is "May.") When she wasn't available, a family member stepped in, writing in the same minimalist style (in fact, a family member records when May goes into a coma, and when she dies, in daily entries in the last diary); occasionally a household member writes at the bottom of an entry to note that the back heater has been turned on or that a household repair has been made. Every once in awhile, an obituary or wedding announcement is pasted in, and there's a list of Christmas gifts given and received in the back of many of the diaries, but otherwise there is little deviation from the established pattern. There's almost nothing about this woman's likes, dislikes, hopes, fears, or responses to the many changes in the world that took place over the seven decades spanned by the diaries, and we know little about Mary Bainerd Smith aside from what she wrote in these diaries. Unlike Ronald Reagan's diaries, which a recent New Yorker review described as also having a "quotidian quality," intrinsic interest based on the prominence of their creator is not a factor, so we must judge them on their merits alone.

Research value isn't the only rating we discuss, but it is the one that tends to elicit the most debate, so, from the perspective of surveying, what is the value of these diaries for research? On the one hand, we have dry, opinion- and detail-free entries about social calls, household deliveries, and the weather from a woman about whom we know very little. On the other hand, we have a comprehensive data set for over 60 years of a woman's (and a family's) life. Is the fact that there is so little insertion of personality itself of interest? Does that say something about women's lives during this period, or does it simply tell us that this particular woman was dull? Is this an unusually complete set of diaries, or was it fairly typical for each household to have such a recorder? Would more descriptive diaries kept for a shorter period of time, or correspondence between family members over a period of years that exhibits a range of viewpoints, be a richer source, or is this particular source plenty rich just as it is?

So far there's been little consensus in the training sessions about the research value of Mary Bainerd Smith's diaries. Groups have given the collection ratings across the spectrum, from those who think that the monotony of the entries and the insularity of the life they describe cancel out the potential value derived from their comprehensiveness, to those who see them as a rare and remarkable record of the life of an "ordinary" woman. People's take on this collection tends to be very dependent on what they know and value coming in, the types of research and related primary sources with which they are familiar, and what the word "diary" connotes to them. If they approach the collection with Samuel Pepys or Anne Frank in mind, they're bound to be disappointed; if they view Mary Bainerd Smith's collection more as a household log, they're often impressed by the indefatigability of her recordkeeping and various facts that might be gleaned from it.(Fortunately for the project team members and the preservation of harmony among us, this collection was surveyed during a previous survey project at HSP, so it’s not up to us to affix a number to it.)

We use this collection in the trainings not to demonstrate that it is impossible to come up with a meaningful research value rating, or to suggest that there's a right or wrong lens through which to view this particular collection, but rather to point to our understanding of the research value rating's inherent subjectivity and the importance of doing our background research and talking with the staff at the different institutions about the current and potential research use of their collections. The more information we have, the more confident we will be in assigning a particular rating. Not because there's one true rating that will definitively settle the everlasting research value of a collection, but because we want to make sure that the rating we give it reflects the values of the institution and the research community at large at the time we surveyed it as much as possible.

As in any appraisal task, we're making our best faith effort, given the information we have about current values and what we can predict about the future. We greatly appreciate all the assistance staff in the participating institutions lend us in this difficult task, and we feel fortunate to be involved in a project where such a wealth of knowledge and expertise is made available to us.

On Being “Stuff”-less

I’m an archivist. That’s my professional identity and I’m proud of it.

Yet in this project, there’s not a single collection for which I have responsibility. I don’t acquire papers and records. I don’t work with researchers. I don’t process or write finding aids. I don't digitize records or put together exhibitions. And I don’t supervise anyone who does any of those things. Everything I do is intended to help people who do those things, but it’s not quite the same as coming into work every morning and confronting my own personal mountain of boxes and folders or walking into a stacks area with the knowledge that as far as the eye can see it’s “mine.”

I spend a lot of time waiting for others to make decisions about their “stuff”: decisions before we survey, while we survey, after we survey. I can state my opinions, and provide information that will hopefully help, but in the end those decisions are theirs, not mine. In the meantime, I’m constantly thinking of ways we can do more with what we do have: more export formats for the database, more ways the data can be crunched, more potential linkages with other projects, more people to involve. Sometimes I feel like Jane Austen, with this project as my “little bit [two inches wide] of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush.” (On the plus side, to get slightly more contemporary with my references, I do have Lloyd Dobler's preferred kind of job, one in which I don't have to "buy anything, sell anything, or process anything.")

But I find that in many ways, what I do now is what I’ve always liked most about being an archivist anyway. Sure I miss rehabilitating a disorganized mess of papers or finding that one perfect answer to a researcher’s query, but there is plenty to compensate. In talking about and finding ways to help others find solutions for some of the challenges in their repositories, I get to think through those challenges from different perspectives, some of which closely mirror mine, and some of which are vastly different. I get to see the insides of and know 22 different libraries, archives, and museums (and even more wonderful library, archives and museum professionals) in the span of 30 months -- more than many people see in an entire career. And I get to think a lot about my field, and all the exciting changes that are taking place in it, and the kind of archivist I want to be.

So being "stuff"-less isn't so bad. It may be a "small" canvas, but I like it immensely.

Cleaning up

I've been working solo the last few days, mainly cleaning up records from some recent surveying. I'm fleshing out biographies and scope and content notes, checking dates and box counts, adding subjects. That sort of thing. The work can be a bit tedious at times, especially trying to sort out various family members when they all have the same name. I can understand the impulse, but I can't say I necessarily enjoy the result. But the work can be pretty satisfying as well, especially when you find information on someone that was playing a pretty good game of hide and seek. Genealogies and family histories help here, as do biographical dictionaries and of course the internet. In the end, though, there always seem to be one or two that continue to remain elusive.

I heard this on NPR a couple of weeks ago and it sounds pretty amazing. More here

No doubloons...

When I described this project to a friend, he said "Have you found any doubloons?" I was sad to report that we had not, as yet, found any doubloons. However, lots of other interesting things have turned up, including:

• A bottle that formerly contained water with special properties (the water came from a pool that is said to freeze in the summer and become hot in the winter);
• Instructions for the operation of a grenade-launcher (in German);
• A box of mauve neckties;
• A postcard from Wall Drug;
• Confederate "shin plasters";
• A brochure for the services of exotic dancers;
• A book of yarn samples;
• A baseball and baseball glove;
• And two ashtrays (in two different archives).

Most of these items bore little relation to the main focus of the collections, but they made their way into the boxes anyway. And there they remain, waiting for the lucky processing archivist who gets to puzzle out just how they fit into the picture of the collection. And we go on to other collections, maintaining the hope that we will eventually find those doubloons.