Terry Abraham
Removing paper clips and other fasteners from the records is a basic preservation technique. Some archivists have become entranced with the variety and ingenuity displayed by the paper fasteners that pass before them. One processing supervisor began to collect examples of each kind and encouraged the processors to keep their eyes open for new ones. He had accumulated over a hundred different kinds of steel paper clips when I chanced to describe to him the exhibit of nearly a thousand paper clips I had seen among a group of occupational collections at the Smithsonian. Rather than encouraging him in his pursuit, as I had hoped, it caused him to lose interest in the quest as he realized he was no longer a pioneering collector.
It is an axiom of processing that you go through each collection three times: first, to get an idea what's there; second, to bring all the parts together in the right order; and third, to refolder and relabel. Attempts to consolidate these stages, or skip one, invariably result in surprises. I was told of one large archival collection where the folders were numbered by the office of origin upon creation; but individual folders had no relationship to each other aside from the sequential number. The processor, recognizing this fact, decided to rearrange the collection alphabetically in order to draw related files together. She asked my advice and I could see no alternative short of retaining the original order and preparing a massive index. I don't know how much of the rearrangement she had completed when she opened a box and found the original index ledgers.
The worst case of of disruption of original order I have heard about was the records of a small and defunct copper company in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. The company had gone out of business in the Thirties and all the buildings, incluing the main office, were abandoned. For thirty years, neglect, deterioration and harsh winters swirled around the cabin where the records were stored in letter-cases on shelves against the wall. Eventually the storms and winds (and probably pic- nicers and vandals) broke the windows and doors and ripped the shingles off the roof. The shelves collapsed, the boxes fell onto the floor and broke open, scattering their contents about. In the early seventies, this dismal sight was entered by a history professor at a local junior college. Recognizing the mound of moldering paper as the copper company's archives, he returned with a group of students and some plastic garbage bags. They shoveled all the paper into the bags and took them back to the school where they dumped them out on the floor and spread them out to dry. Once dry, they tried to restore the original order; or, at any rate, any order at all.
One day, one of my novice processors grabbed my sleeve as I walked past her desk. She had been processing the correspondence of one of the senior professors in the English Department, now deceased. She was upset by a small group of letters written during the war from the not-yet-an-academic sailor on tedious shipboard duty to his wife in a far-off port. They were, the processor reported, quite romantic in tone and they embarrassed her. Further, she didn't think they belonged among the papers in a public repository; she felt they should go back to the family and be kept private. I tried to suggest to her that the author's need for privacy was long gone and that a scholar might find them of particular research value. I was thinking of scholars of the war-time period as well as those studying the relationships between men and women over time. In short, I saw them as evidence; but the processor wasn't buying that argument; she felt they were private and should stay private, she didn't want them in "her" collection. She urged me to call the donor, the man's widow, and arrange to have them returned to the family.
I realized at last that we hadn't really talked with this processor about the ethical dimensions of processing nor had she studied the accession file on this collection. When it was pointed out to her that the widow had donated the papers with a specific restriction on that part relating to the war years, she agreed with retaining them in the collection.
January 1999 / sidebars.htm / tabraham@uidaho.edu