Quote
“Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever. For what is the time of a man, except it be interwoven with that memory of ancient things of a superior age?” – Cicero
“Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever. For what is the time of a man, except it be interwoven with that memory of ancient things of a superior age?” – Cicero
I almost didn’t make it this week but I couldn’t already fall off the resolutions bandwagon!
Well the semester is in its first week and things are officially gearing up. I definitely didn’t end up with a super easy last semester like I originally planned a when I first started grad school, but I would definitely say this is all the good kind of busy. I told the professor I do research for that I’m taking Database Management this semester and his response was “Aww, Mt. Everest!” I thought that kind of summed things up well.
What I’d really like to talk about tonight though is the start of my volunteering at the Erie Canal Museum. I’ve volunteered at quite a few institutions in my time since discovering this field and I’ve got to say that this is already my favorite. I have not one criticism of them. They really care about their collection, they really care about representing the true history of Syracuse, and everyone really seems to be truly interested in what they’re doing. Plus the fact that my project is all about manuscripts, primarily from the the 18 and early 19 hundreds, certainly isn’t hurting! I can’t remember whether or not I’ve expressed my love of manuscripts before, but let me do it (possibly again) now. I LOVE manuscript collections. Rare books have their magic, artifacts can be truly fascinating, but nothing pulls me back to a time in history like a handwritten letter or diary by a real person going through the true everyday life of that time. Mixed with the posters, ads, pamphlets, papers, records, what have you that also pop up in manuscript collections, what better way to understand the truth of history?
My job at the museum is to pick up where someone else left off (actually a friend of mine who doesn’t have the time anymore but knew it would be right up my alley) taking the existing manuscripts collection and cataloging/updating the existing catalog records in the museums database using PastPerfect. Along with my cataloging, I’m also keeping notes about condition and focusing on finding provenance. If time permits, I may also be doing some rehousing for the materials since their existing housing is older than most of the museum staff. The existing records in the database are really a prime example of the problems facing many cultural heritage institutions today. As with many repositories, keeping a standard quality method of cataloging was not always a priority in the past in the light of limited resources. Although sometimes this is a result of people who didn’t care enough, more often it is the result of different times and different priorities, or even just different people with different ideas. I in no way criticize this second possibility, it’s just an unfortunately confusing reality sometimes and a strong argument for keeping a standard policy and for keeping communication a priority.
During a semester of stressful classes and even more stressful job applications, having a volunteering opportunity for something I really believe I will have a great time with is going to be a huge relief. I just might stay sane.
Well it’s officially the last week of my internship at SU’s Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) and I’m sad to say it’s official that we won’t have enough done in time for me to do the finding aid. I’m not going to lie, I’m pretty disappointed about that for a few reasons, the first being that I really would have liked to have shown that to everyone from my friends to future employers to really show the extent of how much I did in this project. The second reason though is simply that I would have really liked to have gotten the experience with EAD. I have a little, we created a finding aid for a personal collection for one of my classes using EAD and at the beginning of this internship I updated an existing finding aid in EAD when part of my collection was temporarily unavailable. But the additional time with it would have been really beneficial and I think could have really helped me out in the long run. Still, I did get a lot of this internship (which technically spanned the time of two internships) so I guess I can’t complain. C’est la vie and all that.
What I did get from my time at the SCRC was a just about everything else that goes along with processing a collection. We started by surveying the entire collection (and seeing as I’ve put in 300 hours and we still aren’t done, it’s clearly a pretty big collection). Although I wish we’d used the lists we made during the survey a little more later in the process, I did find it gave me a very good idea of the kind of collection I was really dealing with. Next I moved onto tackling the organization and foldering of the extensive personal correspondence that had been donated (something I’ve discussed at length previously so I won’t get into it much here). Although I did hit a point of frustration with this part of the job because of the time it took, I very truly enjoyed the detective role I got to play in comparing handwriting, searching content for continuity, etc in order to identify correspondents. In the end, four months later, I ended up with 10 linear feet of neatly alphabetized and foldered personal correspondence and a really extensive understanding of the kind of man who created the collection and what his life was like, at least in part. Passionate is the best word I can come up for him, with all the good and bad connotations that come with it.
In the last month or so, I finished my stretch of this internship by first organizing the rest of the contents of the collection into reasonable series and began organizing, foldering, and boxing as much as I could and creating lists of their contents in Excel. I have sadly only had time to complete five series in this entirety (including 22 linear feet of programs that we decided just to put in chronological order and box without folders). But that disappointment in and of itself is really a lesson because I learned how long this process really does take. Plus, I at least got a lot of satisfaction from those five series once they were all neatly boxed and labeled and put back on the shelf. There were frustrating days and there were fun days, but that too is part of any job and overall I’d say I enjoyed my internship very much. Now I just need to graduate and find a position a little more permanent so I can make another collection my baby and have the chance to see it the whole way through.
In class this week we had a guest speaker from the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and she brought up an idea I hadn’t really thought of before but immediately understood and supported whole-heartily. It’s incredibly easy as archivists, curators, preservationists, whatever your field may be to dive into a collection and try to figure out how best to save each item in pristine condition (think of that kid you knew growing up who refused to take his/her toys out of the box instead of playing with it like everybody else). But the thing is, that may show what the item was, but it in no way preserves the culture of the people associated with it. Showing a doll with perfectly pressed clothes and beautifully styled hair isn’t nearly as telling as the doll whose hair is messy and matted with her clothes wrinkled or torn, the doll who was carried along on every outing and cried over when it temporarily went missing. That’s where the story really is and that’s where the focus of cultural heritage preservation really needs to be.
In regards to the NMAI, this fact is especially important. As explained to us by our guest speaker, what’s important about Native American artifacts and culture is that the whole point is for everything to be from the Earth and to return to the Earth. Preserving items in a way that prevents them from completing this cycle may be in line with our traditional ideas of preservation, but it entirely disregards the culture of the Native American communities. It may go against everything we are trained for in many ways, but our obligation is to the culture of the peoples we are representing.
Of course, at the same time, we can’t completely ignore the importance of the artifacts either. Without them, what do we really have? This creates a conflict with no easy answer and one that has to be resolved in many ways on a case by case basis, or at the very least an institution to institution one.
This question was posed to my cultural heritage preservation class a few weeks ago (I’m a little behind on my blogging again). Preservation is important to me because I believe it’s extremely important to maintain a source of history beyond the history books. Time has proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that the history books are always skewed, be it for the favor a leader, the favor of the victors, to save face for a country, etc. But more than that it’s easy to forget that history isn’t just a story or a list of facts we need to remember for a test. When I read letters from the Civil War, I remember that these were real people with real loved ones and real lives to get back to. When I flip through a book from the early 1900′s I get a glimpse of what were the real norms of their every day lives, the kind of stuff that doesn’t make it to the history books. By preserving manuscripts, artifacts, rare books, etc, we are keeping the lives of the little people in history. And isn’t that just as, if not more, important than the leaders and politicians?
