[Personal_archives] Arrangement discussion - original order: frivolous

[Jane Britton]

Caveat: this from home, after wine.

I started thinking about "original order" in an entirely different way after closely observing my mother and her "records". I realized that the context and the order of all her "stuff", no matter where she stored things, were actually in her brain. The file folders, drawers, shoeboxes were simply places she stashed things. Having once stashed them, she did not refile them with what they logically "belonged" to, because then she would forget where they were. (I'm familiar with this; it's starting to happen) The physical order and contiguity of items and files have nothing to do with the actual "order" or relationships. If you were to ask her about something relating to  a person in the family, she would go to six separate places in the house, haul out a bunch of files and boxes, and after we were were done, she would replace them in six separate places with other files and boxes The places had no significance other than physical storage locations that her brain had memorized. Her order is not perceivable without intimate knowledge of her habits -- so as archivists, how well can we be expected to do with strangers?

We are used to private archives of authors and academics who usually institute some sort of filing system because of the volume of records they generate. In the case of truly personal archives such as my mother's the "original order" would have to be intuited -- so I would agree that a "creative" approach cannot be inappropriate. As long as we retain a record of how things were physically placed, so the original physical order can be reconstructed and explored, there is no harm in drawing relationships between things that have been physically separated, or were never together physically in the first place.

On the other hand, at my place of work we have a voluminous fonds of an anthropologist who died suddenly, in mid-career. We received her library and her archives, from her house and her office. Fortunately when clearing the house the boxes were described according to the location they were taken from -- In her house there was her office, her library, the hall, the attic, and at work there was her office. All the threads of her research interests in various aboriginal populations (series) were evident in all locations; however the flow of her research, and the contextual relationships of one series to another at a certain time were expressed by the physical location of the files. So, tempting as it may be to describe all the files on Australian aboriginals as one series, it ignores the fact that some were in the attic (done with) and some were in her office beside similar materials on the Sami people, indicating an intellectual relationship in the subject matter. I lean more and more towards the chronological or time-line view of such records as being expressive of an individual's intellectual life.

Now I'm going to my basement to do some archival re-ordering of my wool and fabric. I'm sorting it into series by colour, and then sub-series based on whether it is patterned or solid. Hmmm -- Perhaps I should also sub-sub sort it into whether it is wool, cotton, or polyester and whether I intend to make a garment or a rug out of it.

I probably have more to say (whether it is a contribution or not is a moot point) later in the week, when I am closer to the notes I have taken and the highlighting in the articles. Part of the difficulty is in the definition of "personal archives" -- what sort of person?
Regards
Jane Britton
Sometime archivist
________________________________
From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] on behalf of Rodney Carter [rgscarter at gmail.com]
Sent: January 30, 2012 3:46 PM
To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Personal_archives] Arrangement discussion - original order

Hello All,

The one, immutable Original Order seems like a mythical ideal to me.  Only the most organized individuals will have strict, logical systems for ordering records over time. As Powell suggests, anyone looking at someone else's system will be “faced with numerous inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies.” (262) These will be amplified as the documents pass through hands of heirs or other custodians. However, as Hurley and Swift both demonstrate, that is not reason to throw up our hands in despair – where an order can be discerned it is best to follow it (reconstructing it as best as possible, if necessary) and where there is chaos, make reasonably informed decisions should be made based on the nature of the records being arranged.

Archival intervention even at its most basic, the move from a creator’s home or office into archival boxes, disrupts the “original order.” All the other abuses and indignities records can suffer in their journey from the hands of the creator to archives compounds the difficulty in discerning the methods and intentions of the creator. The best we can hope for is an approximation, based on the evidence at hand.  Ideally, the events and decisions that shape the arrangement will be documented, even if only for internal archival use so our successors can understand why things were arranged as they are.

Given the transformation that necessarily occurs when records are subjected to archival processes, I think arrangement is, to speak to Heather’s question, a creative act even when modeled on an identifiable pre-existing organization.

Certainly, Jeremy’s ‘recent discernible order’ is a very useful idea here. If we acknowledge that the records have a history, and we are trying to capture a single iteration of their arrangement, then we leave room for others to speculate how else the records may have been organized at other points in time.

Jeremy asks why people file but it is also important to look at the impact of recordkeeping technologies (in the broadest sense) on how people arrange their documents. Correspondence kept in files or letter books will have different arrangements and, as a result, the interrelations will create different meanings; how photographs are kept - in albums, loose in shoeboxes or framed - can speak to significance placed on them by owners.

Looking at the digital world, is this segregation of material based on size or medium breaking down? While it is simple to interfile all types of documents, we still tend to arrange items into “folders” as we do in the paper-based world. In Windows, there is a default folder for “My Pictures” and “My Videos” within the My Documents folder reinforcing the idea that these items should be kept separately, whether or not people use them. Will we get to the point where systems of arrangements are abandoned in favour of key-word searching? If so, what will archivists have to do to make the relationships between files meaningful? Perhaps there will be a technological solution to that and we can focus on writing detailed fonds level descriptions.

Rodney


On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 11:30 AM, Jeremy Heil <heilj at queensu.ca<mailto:heilj at queensu.ca>> wrote:
Greetings all!

One of the first ideas that struck me as I read through these articles was truly how much we have relied on the practices governing arrangement of institutional records, adapted for personal archives.  We've had the discussion many times in the past on the concept of "original order" and what it really means.  Is each accrual a puzzle to be pieced together, or is the puzzle already complete?  Perhaps each accrual represents one side of a three-dimensional puzzle, and it will only be completed with the last accrual on a closed fonds? Is original order what was originally, or what was recently?

I think our greatest problem stems from the nomenclature.  We've been tied to the concept of "original order" for ages, but it is a concept that can only properly apply to institutional records.  The Regitraturprinzip is, by definition, how records fit within a classification scheme (registry).  To continue with the puzzle analogy, piecing records back together in accordance with this principle is more akin to completing a wooden cut-out puzzle - each piece has its place according to the rules of the registry.  Where this concept obviously fails is that few, if any, private individuals create file registries.  So the question is, why do people file? In short - so we can find things. Sarah Kim quotes a study in her PhD proposal indicating that individuals organize their records mainly for easy retrieval for later use. At the institutional level, file schemes are implemented so multiple people over time and space can find records in the same way (whether or not employees adhered to these systems, and the problems in arrangement that arise as a result is another question entirely). On an individual level, we each file according to how we can best find correspondence, notes, random thoughts, etc. This is an intensely personal activity, and can change on a whim (New Years' resolution to organize our house! Watched High Fidelity and decided to arrange files by our past relationships!).So, without a registry for personal archives, what are we left with?

Jennifer Meehan writes that "in order to better contextualize personal records, archivists must strive to interpret and represent personal records on their own terms, rather than imposing conventions or schema based on either user expectations or analogies with organizational records." I would take this idea further and propose that the Regitraturprinzip is to institutional archives as what I will term the Gedächtnisstützeprinzip - the principle of mnemonic devices - is to personal archives.  Individuals arrange files according to how they can later find them.  Stemming from this, there is one key concept that must also be acknowledged - that arrangement is mutable over time and space, as creators arrange based on how they are using the material at any given time.  Then throw into the mix the role of custodians in further rearrangement (Meehan p. 40), we are left with multiple possible orders, none of which are necessarily clear to the archivist.  Thus "original order" in personal archives is often a false construct, no matter how we try to define it.  We would be better served if we simply acknowledge this limitation, and perhaps rechristen the term "recent discernible order" (or something far more elegant).  "Original order" sounds powerful and authoritative, and I think it leads many archivists to believe that it truly exists in all fonds and accruals.  The truth is less ideal.

I look forward to an invigorating discussion on this and much more!

Cheers,

Jeremy
--
Jeremy Heil, BA, MAS
Technical Services Archivist

Queen's University Archives
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