SAA 2014: integrating history

 One of the advantages of paying my own way to SAA is that I don't have any reservations about attending at least one session that interests me but doesn't have anything to do with my work responsibilities. Yesterday morning, I passed up two interesting-seeming electronic records sessions and sat in on session 309, "Integrating History: A Search-and-Recovery Effort in Alabama Archives." I'm glad I did: of all the sessions I attended this year, this one was my favorite. (N.B.: I was really ill on Friday, so what follows might be a bit hazy.)

Two of the archivists who participated in this session are employed by repositories that have traditionally reflected the experiences of white Alabamians, and two work at historically black universities. All of them spoke with passion and nuance about the challenges of comprehensively documenting their communities and institutions, and in the process discussed a host of things familiar to archivists working in a variety of settings:

• The ugly way in which an ever-growing processing backlog reduces institutional visibility and makes it ever harder to obtain the resources needed to tackle the backlog.
• How differences in power and perspective fuel tensions between small, resource-starved archives and large, well-funded collecting repositories.
• The importance of and hard work involved in winning the trust of donors, particularly those whose experiences have in the past been under-documented.
• How efforts to document previously under-represented groups may force one to confront the unsavory past of one's own community, one's own uneasy relationship with that past, and anger and fear in those who have a vested interest in maintaining certain archival and broader societal silences. 
• The importance of intimately knowing one's own collections and working collaboratively with repositories that hold related materials. 

Rebekah Davis (Limestone County Archives) discussed the importance of collecting materials that not only documented the history of the county's black community (e.g., programs distributed at community members' funerals) but also what that community had to live with (e.g., color photographic prints of a Ku Klux Klan rally that took place in the 1970s). Quoting fellow presenter Susannah Leverman, she emphasized that even though she and her colleagues at times felt deeply uncomfortable about accessioning and furnishing access to some of the materials in the latter category, "to pretend things didn't happen is to take away the victory of those who overcame it." Davis also stressed the importance of making sure that older white volunteers who expressed distaste when they encountered collections documenting the county's African-Americans understood that they could privately believe whatever they wished but needed to understand that bigoted statements reflected poorly upon the archives and to keep their opinions to themselves while working there.

Susannah Leverman (Huntsville-Madison County Public Library) highlighted her institution's efforts to build relationships with her community's African-American inhabitants. Although the library has collected materials documenting African-American art and education, segregated city directories, church histories, portraits, information about black-owned businesses, and other aspects of African-American life, Leverman was convinced that the documentary record was incomplete. She began going to black churches and civic meetings, hosted a traveling exhibit relating to Lincoln, created a public history exhibit commemorating 50 years of school integration and a related sub-exhibit concerning the Ku Klux Klan, developed a phenomenally popular exhibit relating to African-American sports history, and tries to ensure that other exhibits accurately reflect the community's diversity. The library also hosts talks focusing on Huntsville's black business district and other topics and posts recordings of them to YouTube. She described her approach thusly: "we need to provoke people into thinking instead of forcing them to remember or memorize." It seems to have paid off: the library has recently acquired collections documenting civil rights activism and a substantial collection of African-American sheet music.

Veronica Henderson (Alabama A&M University), who is relatively new in her position, discussed her efforts to tackle a decades-long processing backlog, create finding aids, sharpen collecting efforts, and sort out some custodial issues. The Alabama state legislature established the State Black Archives and Research Center in 1989 and charged it with acquiring, preserving, and providing access to materials documenting the state's African-American history. Henderson determined that the collection included some materials that didn't relate specifically to the history of black Alabamians, and she has sought to refocus the collecting scope. She's also trying to smooth relations with alumni of a defunct black high school who are questioning why the university archives has some of their memorabilia; the university doesn't have a deed of gift, but it did have a longstanding and close relationship with the school's administrators. Fortunately, at least some of the alumni are satisfied with digital reproductions.

Dana R. Chandler (Tuskegee University) also discussed his university's efforts to tackle a large processing backlog and to identify and recover items that have gone missing. He also recounted his repository's efforts to right an old wrong: in 1943, the Library of Congress (LC) took possession, with the university's consent, of a body of materials that it called the Booker T. Washington Collection but which were actually the early organizational records of Tuskegee University. Chandler found that the agreement that enabled LC to take custody of these records specified that the university would receive a microfilm copy of them. However, LC filmed the records only after Chandler pushed it to do so and maintained afterward that it retained the copyright. and I've held them to this; LC had to spend approximately $69,000 to microfilm the records. LC tried to maintain that it held the copyright, but Chandler's position is that these "papers" are in fact the records of a public university.

Chandler then profiled two phenomenal collections that came to light when Tuskegee addressed its processing backlog:

• Records of the Southern Courier, 1965-1968. The Southern Courier was a civil rights newspaper run by Harvard Crimson volunteers. It was unprocessed for years, and Chandler and his colleagues discovered that it contained detailed accounts of the dangers and difficulties that staff faced, including mad dogs, beatings, and death threats. They also found evidence of young black and white people working together toward a common goal -- a story not commonly associated with Alabama. 
• George Washington Carver Notebooks. Scholarly biographies of Carver published to date conclude that he did not make any significant scientific discoveries. However, Tuskegee has six notebooks containing Carver's scientific notes, drawings, and observations, and Carver's work must be reassessed in light of these manuscripts. 

I was particularly heartened to learn that the longstanding informal collaboration between the presenters and other Alabama archivists seeking to ensure that the state's documentary record is equitable and balanced may give rise to a multi-institution Web portal centered on archival materials documenting the lives of black Alabamians. Alabama archivists have a long track record of working together and accomplishing amazing things with modest resources, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if this proposed portal is a rousing success.

Image: anemone buds peek out from behind a bench on the grounds of Washington National Cathedral, Washington, DC, 16 August 2014. Anemones symbolize, among other things, anticipation.

MARAC: There and Back Again: Nazi Anthropological Data at the Smithsonian

I wrote this post during a long layover at the Detroit Metro Airport on 21 April 2009, and finished around 8:35 PM, but simply wasn't prepared to pay $8.00 for the privilege of accessing DTW's wireless connection.

I attended this session simply because the topic seemed interesting, and I’m glad I did: the records at the center of this session are inherently interesting (albeit in a disturbing sort of way), have a complicated, transnational provenance, and processing them, reformatting them, and determining where they should be housed posed real challenges. Although most of us will never encounter a situation quite as complex, many of us eventually encounter records of uncertain or disputed provenance, materials that lack discernable order, or multi-stage reformatting projects. The decisions that the Smithsonian made and the lessons that it learned thus ought to be of interest to many archivists.

The records in question were created by the Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit (IDO; Institute for German Work in the East), which the Nazis created in 1940 to settle all questions relating to occupation of Eastern Europe. Edie Hedlin (Smithsonian Institution Archives), Beth Schuster (Thomas Balch Library), and Ruth Selig (Smithsonian) took turns discussing the records’ complicated custodial history and the Smithsonian’s involvement with them.

The IDO had many sections, including one that focused on “racial and national traditions” and researched Polish ethnic groups; however, apart from one study completed in the Tarnow ghetto, the IDO’s racial and national section did not study Jews. The section gathered or created data forms (e.g., personal and family histories), photographs of people and objects, and bibliographic and reference cards and published articles based on some of this research.

U.S. and British troops captured the IDO’s records in 1945, and the U.S. Army brought the records to the United States in 1947. The War Department’s intelligence division and the Surgeon General’s medical intelligence unit went through the records (in the process destroying whatever original order may have existed) and then offered them to the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian accepted the records, but then transferred some of them to the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, and the Pentagon (which then sent some of the records to the National Archives). As a result, there are small pieces of the collection all over Washington, DC.

The IDO records held by the Smithsonian were not used for research until 1997, when a cultural anthropologist reorganized some of them, created the collection’s first detailed finding aid, and eventually published a book based on her research.

In 2003, the Polish Embassy requested that the IDO records be returned to Poland. It took the Smithsonian about five years to figure out how to respond to this request, and its response was the product of repeated consultation between various units of the Smithsonian, the State Department’s Holocaust studies unit, and the Library of Congress, which had received competing requests from the German and Polish governments for materials that had been created by German authorities but which concerned Poland; the State Department, which noted that the Smithsonian’s decision might set a precedent, wanted the governments to reach some sort of agreement concerning the materials in LC’s possession.

In order to determine how it would respond to the Polish government’s request, the Smithsonian set up a task force that examined:

• Accepted archival principles and guidelines;
• Whether the U.S. Army had acted legally when it took the records and gave them to the Smithsonian;
• Whether the other Allied nations had any legal claim to the records;
• The Smithsonian’s authority to acquire, hold, and de-accession archival collections;
• The records’ unique characteristics and potential research uses;
• Whether various other parties—the U.S. Army, the Bundesarchiv and other German government agencies, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Polish government, and the U.S. State Department—had any interest in the records;
• The impact of any precedents that the Smithsonian’s actions would establish upon the Smithsonian itself, the Library of Congress, the Hoover Institution (which holds most of the records of the Polish government in exile), and U.S. government agencies.

The process of determining whether other parties had any interest in the records required tact and discretion. However, the Smithsonian eventually determined that neither the U.S. Army nor the Bundesarchiv objected to returning the records to Poland, and the State Department, which was extremely helpful throughout the process, determined that the German government had no interest in the records.

In September 2005, the Smithsonian decided that it would make copies of the records and then transfer the originals to the Jagiellonian University Archives, which agreed to make them publicly accessible. It opted to digitize the records and then produce microfilm from the scans, and needed to raise a lot of money to do so. It initially requested funding from a private foundation, which deferred giving an answer for approximately a year. When the Polish Embassy inquired about the status of the project, the Smithsonian seized the opportunity to cc: approximately 20 other people and institutions in its response. As a result of this e-mail exchange, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum offered funding for digitization and for conservation and allowed the Smithsonian to use its standing digitization contract; the Polish university to which the records were headed also offered some support.

The Smithsonian engaged Schuster, an archival intern fluent in German, to process the records and oversee their digitization. Schuster humidified, flattened, and cleaned the records, which were trifolded and covered in coal dust and other contaminants, and rehoused them in boxes suitable for A4-sized paper. She imposed order upon them, which was no small challenge. The anthropologist who prepared the initial finding aid had attempted to arrange the records geographically; however, she was chiefly interested in the IDO’s Tarnow ghetto and Krakow studies, and as a result most of the collection was unarranged. Schuster ultimately organized the records by type. In order to preserve the initial arrangement of the records (which was reflected in the anthropologist’s published citations), she created an Access database that tracked the original and new order of each document in the collection and generated container lists that contained crosswalks between the two arrangements.

Schuster also shared a couple of lessons she learned during the digitization phase of the project:

• Digitization should begin only after a collection is completely conserved and reprocessed. Project deadlines led the Smithsonian to start digitizing as soon as possible, and as a result, the image files had to be renamed after processing.
• Do not underestimate the amount of time and effort needed for good quality control. The Smithsonian needed accurate, complete surrogates and to ensure that every original had been scanned, and as a result Schuster needed to examine each image and count the number of pages in each folder. She had to send back to the vendor many originals that were scanned crookedly or were missed, and she has a jaundiced view of outsourcing as a result.

The project wrapped up in late September 2007, when the records were sent to Poland via diplomatic pouch; however, Schuster continued to rename the image files and correct the finding aid, and the Smithsonian finished producing microfilm from the digital surrogates in April 2009. The transfer deeply pleased the Polish government: within a few months of the transfer, it tracked down people who had taken part in IDO studies as children and completed a short film highlighting their recollections.

Ruth Selig concluded by making a very important point: the transfer was successful because the Smithsonian committed to working through a complicated process in a very deliberate, step-by-step manner. Many different institutions were brought together in interesting and unanticipated ways, and everyone was pleased with the outcome. Even the State Department was pleased; the initial request was technically issued by Jagiellonian University and directed to the Smithsonian, which is not a government agency, so the Smithsonian’s transfer decision really isn't precedent-setting.

All in all, a good session full of practical tips for dealing with a wide array of complex issues.