Archives, Social History, and Money
Just so you’re not all like “…whut?” I’m going to go in a slightly different direction with this post than usual. I am studying History and Archives (I am enrolled in a joint History/Library Science graduate program), and while I tend to stick to the history side of things on this blog (because, you know, it’s a history blog), I thought it would be interesting to write a post about the relationship between some of the problems facing the archival profession, and how those problems affect written history.
This post is in equal parts an explanation of these problems, a discussion of how these problems negatively affect the writing of social history, an explanation of why these problems exist, and a discussion of why it is so hard to solve them. I hope through this post to shed light not on the way history is written, but on the problems facing the institutions necessary to the writing of history.
Though archivists are highly trained, highly educated professionals, it tends to be the case that their work is undervalued, and that their places of work are underfunded (for further discussion of this problem, see this blog). Meanwhile, their job requires them to perform a massive amount of tasks on a daily basis, the most basic and necessary of these being: to liaise with potential or existing donors, appraise collections and determine whether they will be accessioned into the permanent collection, determine if the collection requires conservation, arrange the collection into a usable order if the original order was not maintained, compose finding aids and descriptions for the collection, field reference requests, aid researchers, and conduct ongoing outreach programs and activites.
In addition to these core duties, archivists are expected by users to have the majority of their collections digitized and to maintain an up to date, professional web presence. It’s a huge amount of work, and most repositories simply do not have the funds needed to support a staff large enough to carry out the core functions, let alone the additional ones. Keep this in mind as you read the next section of this post.
Until about the 1960’s, archives—like history—existed primarily to document the financial and political doings of the dominant members of society; the records of these doings are found primarily in the form of legal and financial records. Because these powerful members of society exerted a control akin to ownership over non-dominant populations, it tends to be the case that the stories of these non-dominant populations may be found within the financial and legal papers of the power-holders. The archives collecting these records were created with the intention of preserving information about these powerful men for people who wished to learn or write about the doings of these men. The descriptions and finding aids composed for these collections reflect this perceived user base.
This manner of collecting and describing with a specific user-base in mind often leads to the sort of situation detailed by Randall C. Jimerson in his article Archives for All: Professional Responsibility and Social Justice: “…In conducting research on Indian women who cohabited with or married European men between 1760 and 1840, Durba Ghosh found that…in Britain, ‘ways of cataloging and listing the archive’s contents’ made her success ‘unlikely’ since ‘most of the documents are ordered by and collected under categories like revenue, judicial, foreign, political—all matters that likely barely touched these women’s lives.’”
This problem is also encountered by researchers studying the lives and family patterns of enslaved populations within the United States of America because the vast majority of the primary source material related to this subject is contained within financial and legal records (for more on this issue as it pertains to American slavery, check out this article: A Perspective on Indexing Slaves’ Names). More often than not, researchers inquiring into the lives of disenfranchised populations will run into this problem: that the vast majority of the archival descriptions of relevant collections will be described in terms of the record creator if said collections were processed before a certain point of time.
You may wonder why archivists don’t just re-write the finding aids and descriptions with this problem in mind. But remember that long list of basic archival functions, and remember what I said about insufficient staffing and funding issues. Now try to imagine the productivity level of an already over-worked staff served with the additional task of going through and re-describing every collection processed before 1965.
You may also be thinking that the archival community should be able to work together and use its combined force to raise awareness and funds. The problem with this line of thought, however, is that the archival community is not an organized, standardized, and fully realized professional community. To the contrary, it is only within the past 50 or 60 years that the archival community has begun to assert itself as an independent, unique profession with standardized infrastructure and expectations, and that standardization remains an ongoing process.
Professional dialogue takes place at conferences held by organizations like the Society of American Archivists and its international counterparts, but even as we work to develop a professional dialogue, we are hindered by the fact that many repositories simply cannot afford to send staffers to these conferences. This fact effectively shuts large sectors of the community out of the professional dialogue.
The problem, in short, is money, and that problem is so hard to solve because there are so few ways to acquire additional funding, especially in light of the global economic downturn. Indeed, funding has become so scarce that many repositories have been forced to freeze hiring, halt all collection endeavors, and shut down reference services. The only real long term option archives have for the time being is to focus on their outreach efforts.
The internet, specifically social media, is making it possible to conduct outreach activities when funds are tight. Take the National Archives; if you are following this blog, you are probably also following one of the tumblrs maintained by the National Archives. Through those tumblrs, the National Archives is using social media as a platform for outreach, and they are using that platform to show the public not just what they do, but what they are capable of doing. Through this kind of outreach, archives will hopefully be able to make a dent in public perception of their profession, which will hopefully translate into increased funding in the future.
And as for you, if you have the economic ability and free time to do so, I’m sure your nearest repository would love to have you as a volunteer. With a few hours of your time on a weekly basis, you can do your part to help to solve the problems outlined in this post…which is now is officially longer than any of the essays I wrote for my Intro to Archives final exam.
