This week at The HistoryMakers, Skyla and I worked on the
special collections of Diahann Carroll, Dionne Warwick and Valerie Simpson.
Processing on a team has been especially beneficial when I find myself staring
at the same group of documents without a clue of where to put them, and she
steps in and gives me an idea in a few seconds. We get each other out of the
ruts.
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| Diahann Carroll |
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| Dionne Warwick |
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| Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson |
We also attended several lecture sessions this week. Dr. Salvatore talked
with us about reference services and different models of information seeking
behaviors. Dr. Reed lectured about the Harlem Renaissance and the Great
Depression. We had a treat when Dr. Goldsby stopped by with an additional
archival lecture. She talked to us about her “Mapping the Stacks” project and
the ethical concerns involved with modern archives. In preparation for my move
to California, I have secured housing in Koreatown, an ethnic enclave community
in western Los Angeles. The apartment is affordable, close to public transit
and available for my September 2nd arrival.
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| April Greiman's "Big Bowl of RIce" mural in Koreatown, Los Angeles |
Special Collections processing has been a challenge for the
fellows throughout this week. We have been trying to make decisions, asking
questions and talking amongst ourselves to no end on a wide variety of
scenarios. Thank you letters and in-kind donations have been a constant source
of worry. Add a category or elaborate on a folder title is also up for debate.
How do we organize the folders so that they will be easy for the outsourced
scanning company to understand? How are “An evening with…” program files
different or similar to the programs that Brad and Julie have been working on?
What is the purpose of this project? Who will be consulting these files in the
future? Does provenance or original order matter at all? I have found myself
torn between my reasonable idea of what could be done and a strict adherence to
the pre-established order. One thing that always drew me to archives as a
profession was a sense of autonomy. If we understand archival principles, the
mission of the repository, and the relative importance of the collection at
hand, it is virtually impossible to design an indecipherable organizational
schema. The email exchanges and the mini-meetings about the process do not seem
as important of an exercise as just making some decisions and seeing if the end
results are palatable. I highly doubt that this team of fellows would leave
anyone disappointed.
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| Surprises in a box |
Dr. Goldsby’s lecture was especially engaging for me because
of what she asked us to read before her lecture. Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in
Two Acts” was an amazingly well written article. It felt more like poetic prose
than a piece of academic writing. While I do not believe that it is in the
realm of an archivist or historian to recreate stories when certain historical
perspectives are missing from the collection, I can identify with the longing
to put something in the empty space. When I went to the Holocaust Museum in
Skokie, Illinois, and walked into a dark, old, wooden train car that was used
to transport European Jews to concentration camps, I imagined how I would feel
or what I would have done in that situation. The same thing went through my
mind when I looked at the steep staircase, designated for the slaves to take
the laundry up to the second floor of the Drayton Plantation house, just
outside of Charleston, South Carolina. Both of these exhibit spaces utilize our
senses and longing for a narrative to pull us back into history and care about
what happened to people that we have never met. As archivists we can never
forget the voices that have been silenced throughout history and strive to find
records of their existence, but when all else fails, we have to acknowledge
those empty spaces.
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| Staircase for slaves at Drayton Hall, South Carolina |
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| An example of a Holocaust train car |
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Fellow Fellows treated me to a root beer float for
my birthday,
cheers to turning 27! |
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