[Personal_archives] Arrangement discussion - another lead balloon?

Wed Feb 1 14:50:46 EST 2012

Hi Everyone,

I've been hanging back for a bit and the discussion has pointed out a myriad of concerns and interests that I have about original order and interpreting arrangement.  So my comments come out of how I seem to be using these concepts these days....

First, I think that original order, rather than being a unicorn is behaving in our sights like many other concepts are behaving within other professions after postmodern debates.  It is not totalizable, it can have loose or non-existent boundaries and we're not using it as a crutch so much as a provisional and contingent way forward.  We might say that equally for the fonds.  The fonds has fluid boundaries in the way that individuals and organizations are interlinked and therefore archival fonds overlap, recombine and co-ordinate in very dynamic ways.  So, orders are created, overlap, recombine, change direction according to personal choices (these may include a will to memorialize, or to archive or simply a decision to stash something someplace one cannot later find, or it may be the unconscious ways in which people operate toward their documents and their documents retain orders that were unplanned but still tell a story (in the paper world, this might be a massive and heterogenous folder of stuff loosely related... ... bit still related)). So, as we've spoken about before, it seems that archivists need to foreground their process in terms of this contingent way forward.

I agree with the direction that Jane was taking in that that interpreting personal archival arrangement is very different when you have access to the live individual.  In that situation, the archivist has the chance to "get it right" with respect to interpreting the fonds-to me this is not "get it perfect"  because understanding an arrangement or actions or behaviours will always be partial and subject to the flawed memory of the creator.  So, "getting it right" is rather "What can the archivist do at this stage in the game to "do right," however incomplete our efforts might be?"  

There are threads of order which are intellectual and ones that relate to physical arrangement and multiple arrangements at any one time and changes or ends to these orders through time.  I do try, whenever possible to take site visit photographs and I think that they provide many non-verbal cues to the materiality of the original situation which we are (hopefully) trying not to supersede.  To follow on from Heather's comment about finding aids making all fonds look homogenous, I tend also to worry about how archival description and our professional practices might efface the personal and tidy people up, in fact make them more public than in fact they are or were perhaps in the initial situation of creation and keeping.  I think that attempts to document original order work against that impulse of our professional terminology and practices and that archivists have to negotiate this (both in terms of creator's comfort and in terms of how their institution views itself and its practices).

In the context of the presentations I am going to do shortly at UBC on Digital Personal Archives, I've adopted the idea of "orders of personal meaning," rather than tying this to origin (which implies teleology and linear progress).  The way I'm thinking about this now makes it flexible and accommodates different media, platforms and devices as well as different technological ages which the individual undergoes in his/her own way.  I still think this is essential to interpreting personal fonds because if we ignore this context, we have something more akin to data, than personal archives.

Yeah, I have the most trouble with the concept of the series.  There have been times when these were very clearly delineated for me because of the physical arrangement (i.e. on writer's early stuff was stored in a cardboard drum with relatives and acts as a time capsule of her early development).  There have been times when the creator has described to me some of the series arrangement in correspondence and I have adopted his/her own terminology.  I think it would definitely help researchers to know when an arrangement was imposed by the archivist.  And it seems to me there is some reticence on the part of archivists to fess up to this.  Series are the most constructed level of archival arrangement so if they are not immediately apparent, why truss it up?  I fantasize sometimes about finding aids with only series relationships where and when they can actually be determined, which can evolve, end and recombine at will.  Gets us back to the virtues of modeling relationships and shows up the weaknesses of straight hierarchical conceptions.....

Well, I don't know if we're going to go all the way toward the Madame Toussaud's of original order/site of creation here, Heather, but the convergence of archives and digital humanities projects does make me think that a lucky few may receive the full treatment in terms of linking the site of creation, to images of the documents in situ, to the archival description, to the museum objects, etc. etc......  

Catherine

-----Original Message-----
From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Heather Home
Sent: February-01-12 10:49 AM
To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Personal_archives] Arrangement discussion - another lead balloon?

The article that most spoke to me was the Hurley article. His method of describing what thoughtful arrangement is and what it isn't, his stressing of the obligation of the archivist to the record, his acknowledgment of the the inability to nail anything down still seems very relevant in current practice. Yes, even within the digital realm. 
The article makes clear that arrangement is not a set of rules, but a set of guiding principles. Like a notation system or musical score, there are notes to hit, actions to take, but how it sounds or looks in the end depends on the combination of the record, the practitioner and the interpretation.  This score is what the NSARM policy seems to be trying to convey, though whether it has all the notes I think is still up for discussion.

I know from my own practice that my arrangements of archival fonds do not all "look" the same in terms of levels of arrangement or description, yet they visually and physically present themselves to the researcher or donor in a consistent or similar way because they are all in acid free file folders and acid free boxes with numbers and stamps conveying order even when there is none, or it is very loose, or idiosyncratic. In imposing this meta-level of order, even when trying to do no harm but indeed protect the record, we have of course altered it . 
It brings to mind the current practice in archaeology which is to leave it all in the ground, document it, cover it up, protect it but leave it in context (when and where this is possible). Obviously we cannot seal off the offices, kitchen drawers, or bedrooms of our donors but it makes me wonder how many people are documenting sites of creation on a regular basis (when that is a possibility) or photographing material in the state in which they receive it? And how this documentation informs arrangement?

Heather

--
Heather Home, B.A., M.A.S.
Public Services/Private Records Archivist Queen's University Archives, Kathleen Ryan Hall Kingston, Ontario, Canada, K7L 3N6
t: 613.533.6000 x74456
f: 613.533.6403

** Donations to the Friends of the Archives fund are always appreciated: www.givetoqueens.ca/archives **

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