Archives & Manuscripts Post #12

Yesterday, in class, we discussed various “Archives in the News” stories that we had found over the course of the semester. I brought up the Freedmen’s Bureau Project. This project was spearheaded as a joint effort by the Smithsonian, National Archives, the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, and Church of Latter-Day Saints and aims to digitize 1.5 million slavery-era documents produced by the Freedmen’s Bureau. This digitization project is being established in hopes of allowing for new genealogical and family history projects to flourish within the black community.[1] As I mentioned in class, these documents, comprised of government records on former-slaves in the Reconstruction-era South created in order to gather information on black communities in order to provide welfare services and assist communities in their adjustment to free life, do not necessarily represent the intimacies of black life that the project claims. Rather, they remain more indicative of interpretations of former slaves by white, Northern government employees of the Freedmen’s Bureau.

Nonetheless, this project represents a significant archival outreach program. As I learned in my interview with NARA archivist Patrick Connelly, genealogy represents a huge portion of archives users at the National Archive, trumping the usage of materials by academic researchers. Timothy Ericson discusses in his article, “Preoccupied with our own Gardens,” projects like the Freedmen’s Bureau Project that stimulate interest in archival holdings amongst non-academic users remain a necessity in the archival profession in their ensuring of continual use of the archives.[2]

Regardless of how this project is being presented historically, its creation will allow for black communities to be further involved in genealogical work and archival usage. Due to the lack of historical documentation regarding black thought and daily life under slavery, it will still unfortunately more difficult for black genealogists to assemble their family trees than it is for white genealogists. Yet, this accessible nature of this project marks a significant step in engaging the larger American public in the capabilities that archival institutions offer its users. Furthermore, on the project’s website, organizations have called for volunteer help with digitizing documents. Volunteers are encouraged to pull up documents and enter the names and dates in spaces provided.[3] The information assembled by volunteers will eventually be incorporated into the archives’ digital database. Thus, in a sense, this volunteer effort will in a sense expose the public to the tasks of an archivist, furthering public awareness for the profession. My only hope is that this project gets more publicity, so that more people can benefit from the wonders of the archives.

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[1] “1.5 Million Slavery Era Documents Will Be Digitized, Helping African-Americans to Learn About Their Lost Ancestors,” Open Culture, June 24, 2015

[2] Timothy L. Ericson, " ‘Preoccupied With Our Own Gardens:’ Outreach and Archivists”, Archivaria 31 (1990): 115.  

[3] “Home Page,” The Freedmen’s Bureau Project, accessed November 19, 2015, http://www.discoverfreedmen.org

Archives and Manuscripts Post # 11

In my Social History class last week, we discussed public reaction to works of art during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of my classmates brought up the architectural styles of buildings that encompassed high society spaces like art museums, university lecture halls, and archives resembled fortresses. My classmate posited that during an era of increased class conflict and radicalism, these cultured spaces provided refuge from the despondency of industrializing America for the aristocratic class. By design, these spaces aimed to keep working-class peoples out by only opening during peak working hours and providing access only to members of the institution.[1]

Randall Jimerson makes a similar point in his essay, “Embracing the Power of the Archives.” In this essay, Jimerson represents the archive as a site of power in its decisions to preserve certain documents over others and potentially only allow access to certain types of people. The notion of scholarly objectivity has long been rejected, dispelling myths of the archivist as a neutral observer.[2] In fact, scholars like Michel-Rolph Trouillot have pinpointed archival preservation as a key moment in historical silencing, a process that entails the privileging of certain peoples and perspectives in the construction of historical narratives. According to Trouillot, because archivists select certain documents for preservation and neglect others, their selective processing techniques shape history to reflect certain perspectives and negate others. As one might imagine, the perspectives preserved by the archives have often been those of the powerful.[3]

While archivists of the past, whether consciously or not, favored the documents of the elite for preservation, the blame for such historical silencing cannot solely be blamed on them. Oppression is structural and sighting individuals for the wrongs of the past misses the point. What is archived is not solely the reflection of what the archivist deems historically important, but also a product of whom had access to literacy skills or political power at a particular time. For instance, to my knowledge, there is no archival document detailing the experiences of African-American slaves in a manner not obscured by racial power dynamics. Even the 1930s WPA interviews with former slaves remain scholarly problematic because of the lack of trust and uneven relationship existing between the black sharecroppers interviewees and the white government worker interviewer. Sadly, there are certain archival collections detailing marginalized experiences that will simply never exist.

However, there is a glimmer of hope! Since the 1970s, archivists have been preserving more and more collections detailing subaltern experiences. Furthermore, the increasing literacy and political participation of the twentieth century by oppressed groups provides archivists with an actual shot at preserving these often ignored histories. Unfortunately, There will probably always be silences and manifestations of power within our historical narratives. Yet, it is important to realize that the archive possesses the power to potentially write these wrongs if the researcher so chooses.

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[1] Michael Kammen, Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 152-3.

[2] Randall C. Jimerson, “Embracing the Power of Archives.” American Archivist 69 (2006): 21.

[3] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 28-30.

Archives & Manuscripts Post #10

I often think about what history will look like in the future. What types of sources will Historians use and what will they use them to say? In my mind, the Internet is a mixed bag when it comes to History and Archival work. I like that I can now listen to Alan Lomax’s amazing 17,000 song sound recording archive from the comforts of my bedroom and I think that examining facebook statuses could be an interesting way of understanding how people create identities for themselves in the twenty-first century. But, I don’t like that researchers demand more and more digitized archival collections without really understanding the difficulty and legal liabilities involved in doing so. I’m not sure there’s any resolution be had, but it’s definitely worth thinking about.

In his 2003 article “Scarity or Abundance: Preserving the Past in the Digital Age,” Roy Rosenweig illustrates the potential gains and pitfalls of historical research and archiving with digital sources. Many researchers do not realize the difficulty involved in the historicization of the digital age. For instance, internet sources raise significant provenance issues. With many pages, it is difficult to identify a creator or the origins behind an Internet website. Furthermore, many cites, like blogs and other social media platforms, can be instantly deleted or edited with little trace of such an action.[1]

Rosenweig also illuminates how digitized sources like e-books are licensed and not sold to libraries, making it impossible for archival users to make copies. As Rosenweig shows, not offering ownership of materials to archives makes it ultimately impossible for archivists to preserve those materials.[2]

However, digitizing materials will also allow archives the chance to expand its users and possibly, even expanding the pool of persons interested in historical research. There are undoubted hurdles involved, but large-scale, interactive digitization projects could serve as a significant outreach tool. The future presents many possibilities for archivists and historians.

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[1] Roy Rosenzweig, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.”

American Historical Review 108  (2003): 740.

[2] Rosenzweig, 744.

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.