Article Review: Early Records of the U.S. Department of Agriculture
Article Review
Title: Early Records of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture
Author: Harold T. Pinkett
Publication: American Archivist, Vol. 25, No. 4, October
1962 (407-416)
As I start the process of writing my first scholarly
article, I understand that I will need a robust literature review. The paper
will be a case study about the process of defining and institutionalizing an
archive at the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum. Among many challenges, I
struggled with the process of incorporating accretions, meaning new deposits of
similar materials. With this in mind, I used accretions as a keyword search and
came up with several articles in the American
Archivist. I am a big believer in signs, so the fact that an article from
the prolific writer and first Black archivist at the United States National Archives,
Harold R. Pinkett, was in search results, I think that I am on the right track.
This article is about the state of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th
century and the laws that governed their administration. Pinkett wrote the
article in 1962 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the
department’s archives. Even though there are estimates of over 39,000 pieces of
correspondence going through the office per year, only a minimal amount of
original records were actually kept between 1862 and 1879. To the department’s
credit, they compiled comprehensive annual reports which captured the bulk of
information from the times, and many of their key intellectual contributors and
administrators had personal collections that were preserved by local and
private archival organizations. Into the
1890’s record retention improved so much that the department’s leadership cited
a federal statute from February 16, 1889 which allowed departments from the
executive office to dispose of unnecessary documents, in order to deal with the
abundant telegrams. On March 4, 1907, the Secretary of the Department of
Agriculture initiated an act to give special authority to the Department of
Agriculture to dispose of records without petitioning Congress, this was the beginning
of their record retention schedules. Both of these pieces of legislation were superseded
by the National Archives Act in 1934 which centralized federal record keeping
and established the role of archivist for the United States as the chief administrator.
Unfortunately this article did not give me any
information about dealing with accretions. However, I am pleased to have come
across it because it gave me more of a context about the historical trajectory
of archives in the United States, which will come in handy as I sit for the
certified archivist exam in 27 days, yikes!
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