SAA 2017: Local Government Records Section

Water lily in Lake Zither, Lan Su Chinese Garden, Portland Oregon, 26 July 2016.

Greetings from Portland, Oregon and the 2017 annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists. Thanks to a happy accident of scheduling, this afternoon I was able to attend the meeting of the Local Government Records Section, which consistently punches well above its weight. Today's meeting focused on documentation of citizen activism in local government records and featured Mary Hansen (Archives and Records Management Division, Portland, Oregon), Christina Bryant (City Archives and Special Collections, New Orleans Public Library), Jamie Seemiller (Denver Public Library), Anne Frantilla (Seattle Municipal Archives), and John Slate (Dallas Municipal Archives). Local government records don't always get a lot of respect from researchers, the public, or -- sadly -- some archivists, and this quintet highlighted just how varied and compelling they can be. Key takeaways:

• Activism often involves some form of engagement or interaction with government, and local government records are a particularly rich source of such interactions. In addition, they contain information about local groups and local topics of concern and citizen perspectives (e.g., those of homemakers or street musicians) that might not be well documented in other collections.
• During the middle decades of the twentieth century, urban police departments created surveillance files detailing the activities of suspected communist groups, labor unions, civil rights organizations, women's groups, and other known or suspected radicals. Although many of us might find the fact of their creation objectionable (and late twentieth-century courts in many states ordered the police to stop creating such file), they are a rich source of information about activist groups.
• City council minutes are an excellent source of information about local and grassroots organizations. Members of these groups offer formal testimony at meetings, and some city councils have "open mike" times that enable any citizen who wishes to speak on any topic to do so. Council records also include citizen petitions and other materials submitted by local activists.
• Localities' efforts to manage demonstrations are documented in records created by city, town, and village councils and boards, mayors or city managers, police departments, and departments of public works. Commissions established to study the aftermath of demonstrations in which participants clashed with police or caused substantial property damage also generate significant records.
• In some instances, local government officials and local government bodies are themselves consciously activist, and their activist work is reflected in the records. Council minutes, for example, may document female members' efforts to combat discrimination against women in municipal employment.
• Evidence of activism may pop up in the unlikeliest of places. For example, records maintained by parks departments in localities that practiced de facto or de jure racial segregation may contain letters and petitions from African-Americans seeking improvements in parks situated in their neighborhoods or seeking equal access to municipal recreational facilities.
• The records of historic preservation commissions and zoning boards amply document grassroots support for and opposition to preservation efforts and land use policies.
• Some local government archivists proactively solicit donation of materials documenting activist activity -- and discover that doing so means shifting from a focus on researchers to a focus on donors that may be a bit disorienting. Such shifts require proactive efforts to secure deeds of gift and quietly cull donations in ways that avoid offending or injuring the donors. Archivists working in collecting repositories are accustomed to doing these things, but those working in government repositories may be less adept at doing so.

Update, 28 July 2016: post title changed to reflect content of post. ("Day two" is not a compelling title.)

Larkin Building: business processes and the built environment

Newsweek recently published an intriguing article by Cathleen McGuigan that contrasts Frank Lloyd Wright's first and last major buildings: the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, which he began designing in 1902, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, which was finished in 1959.

The Larkin Building was demolished in 1950, and to this day preservationists, architectural historians, Wright buffs throughout the world, and civic-minded Buffalonians mourn its loss. As images (here, here, and here) of the building reveal, Wright masterfully extended his Prairie style, which he developed while designing private homes, to a mammoth commercial space. In keeping with the company's unusually open corporate philosophy, the building's interior was dominated by an airy, well-light atrium, and Larkin Company executive sat at desks situated on the ground floor; as a result, clerks and other workers stationed on the upper floors could readily observe their bosses at work.

However, from an archivist's or records manager's point of view, the most fascinating things about the Larkin Building is that its design consciously reflected the business processes of the Larkin Company, which made soap and other laundry and bath products and sold them via mail order. McGuigan emphasizes that Wright's design ensured that the building "worked like a machine": the masses of orders that arrived each day were sorted in the basement, taken to the uppermost floors, and then distributed -- in some instances by workers on roller skates -- to the army of clerks who worked on the lower floors.

Wright's workflow-specific design was both innovative and extremely influential, but I wonder whether it helped to precipitate the Larkin Building's demise. Re-engineering such facilities can be extremely challenging, and some corporations and communities -- particularly those experiencing long-term economic contraction -- may not have the resources needed to do so.

As one of the Wright experts McGuigan interviewed noted, many of the day-today tasks associated with processing mail or Internet orders can be performed by a single person using a desktop computer. Given that there is no longer a pressing need to accommodate the physical movement of paper records, it's possible to configure employee workstations to meet the space available -- and physically separate the workers who process orders from those who pack and ship the boxes containing the desired goods. Such infinite flexibility might ultimately produce some great architecture, but for the most part it's likely to produce a vast number of charmless cubicle farms. However, given the utilitarian nature of many 19th- and early 20th-century mail order facilities, the cube farm trend might not be as objectionable as it might first seem.

Wright himself apparently took the destruction of the Larkin Building in stride: Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, a former student of Wright and the current director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, told McGuigan that Wright was deeply pleased that three contractors were needed to demolish the building.

Readers interested in the history of the Larkin Building, Buffalo's industrial past, or good Web 2.0 content should be sure to check out the second reader comment that appears at the end of the article. It politely and knowledgeably corrects a couple of factual errors that crept into McGuigan's article. (Why can't all reader comments be this well-written and well-informed?) It will also take you to submitter Chris Hawley's superb blog, The Hydraulics, which focuses on the history of Buffalo's oldest industrial area. The Hydraulics is a great source of information about Buffalo's industrial past -- and a great example of how to blog about local history.