Lost Documents: The Case of the "Declaration of Sentiments"

          About two weeks ago, the Washington Post published an article entitled "White House is searching for the origins of women's rights." Reported the article, the White House chief technology officer Megan Smith wanted to track down the "Declaration of Sentiments," the document passed at the 1848 Seneca Falls convention organized by and for women in the pursuit of equal political, social, and economic rights. You can read more about it here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/10/14/the-white-house-is-searching-for-the-origins-of-feminism/.

          The only problem is: the document is missing and seems to always have been.

          We know the exact contents of the document because it was published by The North Star and undoubtedly a part of contemporary national media discourse. Smith attempted to track down the original Declaration at the National Archives, but because it's not a federal document, it was never housed in any NARA institution. So, Smith is essentially going on a national hunt to see if anyone knows where it might be housed.

          Is the Declaration housed in an archives? Is it owned by an individual? Or, is it gone forever? The value of the document is obvious, but its absence speaks volumes. For me, the issue is more than just that its missing, but who will house it if it's ever found? David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, explicitly stated that it was not currently housed at NARA. However, I wonder if the federal government would ever take possession of it. Perhaps it would be appropriate for the document to be housed in Seneca Falls, New York, but to accession it as a federal document would also make a watershed moment in women's history central rather than peripheral to the American historical narrative.

          Either way, I hope it's found one day. And even though the document itself is lost, its central concept of equality for women has certainly not been lost on us today.

Still Defending Archivists

                At the beginning of the semester, we were introduced to the question “What is an archivist?”. I wrote my first class blog on this very topic and defined it that first week, where I wrote “An archivist processes, manages, and makes available a variety of media that serve audiences in their pursuit of knowledge.” Now that we’re about halfway through the semester, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on my first definition and see d since I initially wrote it.

                In the last couple of weeks, though, I’ve noticed that my own definition is a scant coverage of what archivists actually do. Archivists are also grant writers, budget managers, negotiators, preservationists, timekeepers, researchers, exhibit builders, digital developers, social stewards and communicators, etc. etc. and the list goes on infinitely. It’s certainly a far cry from “the archivist in the stack” image I had before going to college.

                While that captures the nuance, importance, and challenges of the archival profession, it still doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. Why are the archives themselves important – and how would I articulate that value for someone in an elevator speech? We’ve seen over the weeks, as has argued David Bearman in his chapter on “Access and Use” that archives are only reaching small portions of the population. About one in four people will access the National Archives at least once.[1] Archives are important because they are the sources of information that promote a stake in society, both in the past and the present. Perhaps the sooner archives are introduced in our educational lives, the more people are aware of their value. This isn’t a new argument, but if there is more an investment archives from beginning educational ages with programs such as National History Day, archivists might have to spend less time defending their profession and their collections.

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[1] David Bearman. "Access and Use." Chapter 4 in Archival Methods. Pittsburgh: Archives and Museum Informatics Technical Reports, Vol. 3, no. 1, Spring 1989. pp. 39-48. http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/archival_methods/#ch4.

 

Disaster Management: 1973 Fire in St. Louis at the Military Personnel Records Center

In this week's class, we discussed several different topics including audiovisual and photographic preservation, as well as the difference between conservation and preservation. What I found to be most interesting was our discussion on disaster management. Having worked at several institutions where disasters have occurred, I've witnessed firsthand the implications of unexpected events, even if the institution was properly prepared. 

This past summer, I interned at Independence National Historical Park, where a fire broke out in the basement of the Second Bank of the United States. I worked on the conservation effort helping to mitigate soot presence on over 10,000 artifacts. However, it is intriguing to see how the cleanup and conservation effort is handled in an archival setting where not only the physical copies can be damaged, but the actual information contained within them can be permanently erased. 

A particular case study is the July 1973 fire that erupted within the Military Personnel Records Center (MPRC) just outside of St. Louis. The MPRC held over 22 million records that documented the service of Army, Army Air Force, and Air Force veterans between 1912 and 1963. You can read more about it here: https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2013/spring/stl-fire.pdf 

While the fire damaged over 70 percent of the MPRC's records, the incident proved fundamental in sparking new disaster management protocols. This included installing fire suppression sprinklers, as well as new strategies for conserving damaged documents. The first thought that comes to mind, however, is: how are veterans and their families to access records that relate to them if they've been damaged? The Records Reconstruction Branch helps to make the information in burned records available to those who seek it, though some information is undoubtedly lost forever. It is certainly a loss of power for an archives, but it also affects veterans' access to important benefits they are eligible for through the state. 

Disasters within archives, such as this one, are detriments to larger archival functions and purpose. However, they established precedents that demonstrated the importance of preparedness for possible disasters and protocols for appropriate response. 

The Power of Archives

This past week, our classmates took the floor to discuss various topics in the archives world that pertained to our particular interests. I noticed that the nature of the archival focus was split between the class. While half of us focused on individual archives, others spoke about local archival institutions or an online archival presence. About half of us spoke about federal records site, which was an intriguing opening to a conversation about the inherent power of the archives. 

The focus on U.S. government-owned archives is not surprising. It often has the most visibility, as it documents a "grand sweep - type" history of the United States. It is one of the biggest sources of historical power. As Mark Greene explained in "The Power of Archives", the power of the archives and the archivist comes, in part, from "shaping the historical record." (Greene 20). As the visibility of government archives is often more apparent than private ones for its roots in authority, it seems to represent those who are powerful and neglects the powerless.

So, how do you represent groups that are all but absent from the archives? Keith brought up in last week's class some of the readings that we had consulted our first year of graduate school that delved into this issue. The historian Saidiya Hartman, in "Venus in Two Acts" wrestled with properly documenting the experiences of enslaved women in the Atlantic world. Hartman articulates the ultimate struggle, "Is it possible to construct a story from “the locus of impossible speech” or resurrect lives from the ruins? Can beauty provide an antidote to dishonor, and love a way to “exhume buried cries” and reanimate the dead?" (Hartman 2).

Historians can't transcend what does exist in the historical record. That would violate the virtues of our profession and some semblance of truth that exists. Even so, archives hold all sorts of documents that can lead us to historically oppressed groups, but it sometimes takes being a little creative. I've had friends tell me they search all kinds of archives for store registries for purchases made by women, or journals, and any other number of ways to document the experiences of those silenced by the archives. Government archives hold power, but local archives do, too. It just takes a little bit of searching.