Archives & Manuscripts Post #9

This week I wrote my site visit paper based on my experience interviewing archivist Patrick Connelly of the National Archives at Philadelphia and my exploration of the archival facilities. The function of the National Archives is to provide the public access to the documents of the United States government that possess significant research value. Through this access, the National Archives hopes to foster an environment of increased democracy and government accountability. In this sense, the National Archives’ purpose extends well beyond the needs of academic researchers, but also provides valuable information to those pursuing more practical ends such as gathering information for a potential court case. These ideas of archival access and purpose remained on my mind throughout the week.

Yesterday, I listened to a radio broadcast of the California Report that dealt with the restoration of 1911 sound recordings of Native Californian Ishi. While Ishi is less famous in Philadelphia, he remains a well-known, yet myseterious figure of California history. Ishi was the last surviving member of the Yahi tribe, an ethnic group decimated by white settlers in Butte County, California. After Ishi wandered into downtown Oroville, CA naked, unable to speak English, Alfred Kroeber, an anthropologist at UC Berkeley, eventually took him under his wing. Kroeber housed him in UC Berkeley’s anthropology museum where he performed arrow-making demonstrations for tourists during the weekends. It’s a very sad and strange story, really.

However, Kroeber recorded hours of the Yahi songs and stories, creating the only archival recording collection of the now defunct Yahi language in existence. Until recently, the recordings remained so badly damaged that researchers could not listen to them. Yet, UC Berkeley physicists are currently working to restore the recordings. What I found interesting about this story is that when the restoration process is complete, Ishi’s descendants will be consulted as to what material can be used for public research and what should belong to tribal communities. These recordings possess great potential for restoring the songs, stories, and language of the Yahi for other California tribal communities with a common lineage. In my mind, this story communicates how access to archival materials has the potential to facilitate much more than academic research. Archival material can be a tool of community and cultural restoration.

Here is a link to the article:

http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/10/25/restoring-the-long-lost-sounds-of-native-california

Archives & Manuscripts Post #8

The last post I wrote ripped pretty hard on e-books and their role in separating scholarly ideas from the work’s larger context. Luckily, we’re discussing other aspects of digitization this week, so I get another chance to write about the potential pitfalls of posting archival material online. This week’s reading primarily focuses on the liabilities that accompany digitizing archival materials. While scholars seem to be pushing more and more for the digitization of materials, making archival research easier and more accessible to a wider audience, many do not realize how difficult posting materials online is in actuality.

While many archives make a point of gaining the legal rights to collections after their accession, many materials still remain the intellectual property of other individuals. As Dharma Akmon shows in her article “Only With Your Permission: How Rights Holders Respond (Or Don’t Respond),” some documents might possess as many as ten copyright holders. Because archival institutions do not always hold the copyright to the materials they preserve, it is essential that copyright holders are contacted before materials are posted online. Due to the tedious nature of this process, archivists often prioritize digitizing materials with only one copyright holder when possible.

Obviously, determining who owns copyright information, not to mention tracking down that person, has the potential to be extremely difficult. Many materials possess few clues in determining a document’s creator and where to contact a creator in the present day. These documents are often referred to in the archival profession as “orphan works.” Occasionally, orphan works are still digitized and posted online, but archivists must document the steps taken in their search for the copyright holder, in case of potential lawsuit.

After learning this information, I can’t help but sympathize with the archivists. I’ve worked numerous customer service jobs where customers have no conception of how much work goes into something seemingly simple like making coffee or selling clothing, but still manage to complain about how things aren’t getting to them fast enough. Now that I know how much effort goes into releasing digitized archival material to the public, the research who’s complaining about how it’s hard for them to access materials because so little is featured online just reminds me of a whiny customer. In the twenty-first century, we increasingly crave convenience and speed within our every day lives. I think it’s important to realize the incredible amount of stress and hard work that goes into creating this convenience for others.

Archives & Manuscripts Post #7

This week in class, we talked about the preservation of archival materials. The deterioration and destruction of archival materials can occur in a number of ways, be it in a natural disaster as occurred in Hurricane Katrina, or simply by sealing a document in a plastic laminate. In the minds of many archivists, the solution seems to be digitization, especially for archival photographs.

Photographs comprise an important part of archival collections and remain a fragile historical source due to the photography development methods of the past that often lead to deterioration in the present. As we’ve discussed, Temple’s Special Collections Research Center has digitized thousands of photographs from the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and other newspapers. Yet, digitization poses problems to the archival principle of provenance. The digitization of these materials facilitates an easier, more efficient method of research that allows users to search for materials related to their topic. In theory, this new technology eliminates the dreaded act of digging through files and files of material to find an appropriate photograph or document that often comprises archival research. But, convenience isn’t everything. Digitization in instances like the SCRC’s online collection of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin photos partly does away with the context that placing photographs alongside the article that the picture is meant to accompany, not to mention other articles printed in the paper that might help to frame a particular article or photograph in a larger historical context, provides.

Being the twenty-six year old luddite that I am, I couldn’t help but apply this same principle to e-books and large-scale digitization initiatives (LSDIs), as discussed in Oya Y. Rieger’s “Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization.” Initiatives like Google Book Search and Microsoft Live Books gives users access to thousands of e-books, and even allows them to search for terms within the book. The article does not deal with issues of provenance, but I think the topic is relevant. Provenance is usually a concept applied to archival collections, but I think the concept could similarly be applied to material printed in books. The idea of being able to search for terms and words within a book seems to make separating ideas and phrases from the larger context presented in the work an issue in a manner similar to the concerns associated with the digitization of archival photographs. This issue seems worthy of conversation in our digital era.

Editor's Note: Here's a goofy example of the threat that e-books pose to provenance within written materials taken from the satirical internet celebrity, "Edgy White Liberal." In this instance, "Edgy" has re-arranged the writings of Italian Communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci to create a quote celebrating capitalist entrepreneurship, using the search function on the Google Books app of his new Apple Watch! He calls this innovation, "Hack History." This is obviously an extreme example and meant to be humorous. Yet, it still reveals the capabilities of searchable, digitized materials to erase both scholarly context and provenance. 

Archives and Manuscripts Post #6

This week, I read an article in Library Journal by Lisa Peet entitled, “ British Library Declines Taliban Archive, New Host Set Up.” The article details an attempt by three researchers to donate archival materials collected in Afghanistan between 2006 to 2011. The collection, known as the Taliban Sources Project, sounds pretty incredible. It includes transcriptions of radio interviews with Taliban members, documents describing Sharia laws, and even poetry written by Taliban soldiers. Yet, despite the obvious scholarly value of such a collection, the British Library refused to preserve the Taliban Sources Project within its holdings.

Interestingly enough, the British Library turned the collection down because of the liability of potentially aiding terrorists by giving the public access to the collection. The 2006 British Terrorism Act makes it a criminal offense to collect material that might aid in a terrorist act. Although, the collection did not contain any such material relating to the making of bombs or weapons, the British Library did not want to take the risk.

In my mind, this speaks to the conversation we had in our Archives and Manuscripts class about the politics of access and ethics in the archive. As we discussed, the collections of institutional archives are not solely decided upon by the experienced archivists who remain well aware of collections’ potential research value, but are occasionally accepted or rejected based upon the wishes of wealthy donors or bureaucratic forces. In the case of the Taliban Sources Project, the slippery language of British law remains responsible for this archival rejection, but the end result is the same. Examples like this ultimately reveal the archive as not a neutral, objective space, but one subject to the biases and hierarchies of larger society. While the Taliban Sources Project did find another archive to house its materials, this story of archival rejection remains pertinent.