Audio
About this recording
- Topic
- GSO Assistant Archivist 7th Archives Workshop
- Speaker
- Erin L
- Date
- 2002-09-01
Transcript
Source: Erin L – GSO Assistant Archivist 7th Archives Workshop – 2002-09-01.mp3 File: erin-l-gso-assistant-archivist-7th-archives-workshop-2002-09-01.mp3 Duration: 00:46:13
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Hi. Hi. Thank you. Can everyone hear me okay? Yes? Okay. If not, please just— yes, I'm talking. If not, just feel free to yell out at any moment in time. Before I begin, I just want to say two things. Jack Keck and Johnny Lortz, I saw your name on the notepad over there. Just do me a favor, write down what it is your request is and what you're interested in, okay? There are, as everyone can see, I put some things on the table.
Feel free to take whatever you want, however much you want. The more you take, the less I need to bring back. That's great. And I did put a couple notepads down in case there are things that we don't get to discuss, and if you have any kind of questions or requests, be as detailed as you want, and we will get back to you. It may take a few weeks, but I promise someone will get back to you. So, with that, my name is Erin Lang, and I'm the assistant archivist at the General Service Office. Hi.
I'm not an alcoholic, but I have family members that are, so there are no secrets to me when I came to the GSO. And I do want to thank you all for coming tonight, and I'd also like to extend my appreciation to the workshop organizers, who have been extremely helpful in giving me tips and things as I planned my trip, and I really am appreciative for inviting me to this event. So, tonight I'm going to talk about the collection management at the General Service Office archives, and pretty much that is my fancy way of telling you I'm going to talk about the different types of archival work that influence the way we maintain the collection at the GSO. So, I know I have seen some of you at the GSO before, and I don't know if everyone's gotten a chance to come or not, so I thought I would begin by taking you all on a virtual tour of our department. If you come to the GSO, this is the hallway after you get off the elevator, and the entranceway into our department.
And as you can see, we will now enter our exhibit space. There are four main components of the General Service Office Archives Department. There is our exhibit space, or the exhibit area. We also have a library. We have a locked storage room, and we have the workspace where we do our daily work. And this is the exhibit area. Some of the common or popular features are the couch. That was Bill's couch. It's been reupholstered, but, you know, it still has that feeling.
And right above the couch, we actually have a photograph of Bill's couch in his office, because a lot of people didn't really believe it was his couch. And then we also have our Big Book collection. And in the Big Book collection, you can see on the far wall, we have the first, second, third editions on display in the various printings. And throughout this area, we also have various photographs that show historical images related to AA's history. And the next part of our tour is the library.
Now, these are no camera tricks. That is the size of the library. It is a rather small space, but it's a great work area for our researchers, and it's also a nice place for the visitors who come, and they can have a spot to relax and read through some of the materials we have available, like the AA scrapbooks. We have some scrapbooks you may be familiar, that date from the late 1930s up through the 1960s. So that's a popular activity when researchers or visitors come to our Archives Library.
This is our secured storage room. And in this picture, you can get an idea of the types of boxes and things we use to store our materials. And again, now comes the moment of truth and my little confession. Do you know when people are coming to your house and you clean up really, really, really fast so that your house looks nice and neat for everyone? At least that's what happens to me. That's sort of what I did with this photo.
This photo was actually taken about, well, it was taken before I came to the GSO, so at least it was taken at least two to three years ago. And this room does not look like this right now. So right now, especially with our audio preservation project, all of these boxes, I mean, there are no empty, there's no empty shelf space. We wish there was. And also the floor is kind of littered with boxes at the moment. So for those of you that feel that same kind of frustration at times when you just don't have the room, we feel your pain too, and you're not alone.
And the last stop on our tour is our office space, our work area. And in this area, there's a part-time scanning assistant, Evie Montezinos, and there's the archives research assistant, Michelle Mirza, and myself. The three of us share this workspace. And off to the far end, you can see the door. That's the door to Judith's office, the GSO archivist. And also off that area is that secured locked room that we just saw.
So now what I'd like to do before we go on is kind of give you some definitions of what I believe to be the collection management that I'm going to talk
[00:04:59]
about. And my definition is the ongoing processes that are involved in maintaining the archival collection.
[00:05:05]
And the next thing I'd like to talk about is the term archives. Now I will be talking about archives with all of these meanings. Archives can be the materials themselves. They can also be the building that actually houses the materials. Or you can also use it to refer to the agency or the program that's responsible for maintaining those materials. So I'll be using all three of those terms interchangeably.
There are four primary functions of an archivist, and that would be first collecting your materials, then organizing your materials, preserving your materials, and disseminating information about the materials. And these are kind of the four things that I will use to guide us on as I talk about how we perform these functions at the GSO. Now, the GSO, when we collect materials, there are three main sources from which we obtain these. The first of which would be the GSO itself, both the past, records from the past, and also the present. Another place is from all of you.
We really would not have part of our collection if it weren't for all of you. We get a lot of things like local histories, and we get different things from area events, memorabilia, things like that, which are really helpful. And they help you all help support our collection, and we help build that as well. And the other part would be our donors. And from the donors, we receive various types of materials.
It can be photographs, audio recordings of oral histories or audio recordings of different AA, early AA recordings, and different types of literature. Now, when I talked about the types of materials that we collect from the GSO itself, these are the types that we have, such as Bill's correspondence. We have records from the Works Publishing and Alcoholic Foundation, and those were the forerunners or the precursors to the GSO. We also have the General Service Board and the AAWS minutes.
We have trustees' records, early group correspondence, which dates back to the late 1930s, and we also have various types of literature. And these are the examples of materials received from the members. We have the compiled accounts of group histories, and we have accounts of current area group events, which will, like anything, become part of the historical archives one day. So that's something important. I do just want to point out right now, one thing, you have these great events, and you get all excited, and you want to disseminate all your information about this, and then you look and you think, Uh-oh, I don't have any left for me. So that's one of the things, you have to remember that today's events are tomorrow's historical activities.
And I did, by the way, collect. I'm collecting two copies of everything to bring back with me to commemorate this event. And then the other types of materials that we receive from members are results of their own research on different types of topics, whether it be their own local histories or if they research a particular topic and they share that with us afterward, that's definitely something we'd like to maintain and we have to share with other people later on.
Now these are types of materials, like I mentioned briefly, that we receive as donations. We've gotten photographs and the memorabilia and the audio recordings and various printings. Sometimes we received a first printing of A.A. Comes of Age not too long ago, a signed copy by Bill. So we have gotten quite a few remarkable things, actually more than a few, a lot of remarkable things from members. Now this is an example of one of the donations we received, because the thing about donations, the item is magnificent.
It's wonderful to have the actual material, but sometimes the story that goes along with it and how the person obtained that is just as interesting and just as amazing. So I wanted to share with you one donation that we received about two years ago. In fact, it was right after Minneapolis. And this photograph, some of you who've been to the GSO might already know, it is of the American Medical Association dinner that took place in 1935 in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Now I see a lot of people nodding. That's a good sign. So for those of you familiar with the story in Dr. Bob and the Good Old Timers, right after Bill and Dr. Bob had met in May of 1935, Bill started living with the Smiths for a while. And during that period of time, Dr. Bob stopped drinking. Well, he soon found out that this AMA convention was coming up. Now, he had not missed one convention in about 20 years.
So when he heard about this, he definitely wanted to go. Well, and Dr. Bob's wife wasn't too crazy about this. She's thinking, Oh, no, no, no, I don't think that's such a great idea. Bill, however, thought, Well, you know, I think this is great. It'll, you know, you've got to start dealing with these things.
[00:10:00]
It'll put you in a real situation. And in the end, Dr. Bob decided to go. Off he went. As soon as he started to go, he started to drink. By the time he got to this convention, he had been drinking, and in effect, he ended up leaving early. He, you know, really, he recognized what he was doing. He didn't want to embarrass himself, and he went back. So when we got this picture and we saw it, and it's the AMA convention, well, unfortunately, my photo didn't come out, and I apologize.
At the very bottom—I'm going to yell loud. Can everyone still hear? Okay. At the very bottom is the caption. Well, the real kicker of the caption is the date on the photo is June 10th, 1935. So we know this is the photo. So you're not going to find Dr. Bob in there. A lot of times when people see it, and they'll start to click, and they'll start nodding, and they'll say, Oh yeah, the AMA. Oh, where is he? And they'll start looking, and sometimes I like to have a little fun and let them look, let them look, and then finally I break the news, and then when they see that. So again, the story—I mean, that's the photo.
So that's pretty interesting in itself. Now, how we came to have this photo, a member who was an antiques dealer happened to find this at an auction, and he bid on it. But I don't think—I could be wrong, and if the donor's here, please correct me—but as far as I recall, they bought it for the photograph itself. It's not until they got home, saw what it was, saw the date, and then it clicked, Oh my gosh, this is the story from Dr.
Bob. And then they saw it, and they called us up, and they offered it to us, and we very gratefully accepted it. So like I mentioned, sometimes the story behind the actual item is just as great as the item itself, and this one has a pretty good story about how we came to have it. Now, when I, we've talked about the way we've collected the materials. I'd like to talk a little bit about how we actually organize these materials.
And I just want to say right from the start, I don't want to overwhelm anyone. I'm throwing out some words just more or less for awareness. Anything, you know, please, you may be familiar with it already. If you're not, that's fine. We're here to talk and help. I'm here till tomorrow night. Hunt me down. But there are four main areas that we organize our materials into: the area history files, and the subject files, the library, and the secure storage room.
Now, the area history files, as I mentioned before, those come from all of you. We, that was created by archive staff. It's not really done by any kind of natural generation of the records itself, and we've created that organizational system. And that's where we keep, when we get your newsletters, there they go, right actually in that drawer right there, and there's another set of drawers across from that.
And we organize them first of all by state or country. Then we have them organized by city within the states. And then we have subgroups like maybe newsletters or area conventions or conferences, things like that. So that's kind of how we do this one. The next type is our subject files. Now, the subject files, again, these were, this is a filing system and an organizational system that archive staff created on their own.
It's not because of any special reason about the records. But what the subject files help us do is refer, it's kind of like a vertical file in a library. And what they do is they help us keep information about frequently asked questions. Because I'm sure all of you can relate. Sometimes you get the same questions over and over and over, which is great, but it's good for us to maintain information about these common things that come up so that we can refer to it pretty quickly. And then anything, and when new things come up, we also, you know, add that to a subject file, and we might create a new file about that topic so that we have it for future reference.
And those, again, are our subject file. The other part is the library. And in the library, most of the books we have have been collected through members' donations. We're not like a lending library. We don't actively go out and collect or search for different books, and we arrange them alphabetically by author within the library. Now, the next part is the storage room, and I'm kind of going to focus on the organizational system that we have in our storage room.
In here is where we contain all of our original documents and materials. And Bob was talking about earlier in preservation about the importance of having a locked storage space. This is, we call it actually our locked room, and the only people that really have access to this are the archival staff. It's locked when we don't use it, and again, it houses our original documents. Now, the documents in this room are maintained in the order that they were created, maintained and used originally, and that's very important.
And the reason it's really important is it incorporates the archival principles of provenance, original order, and record groups. And organization is important not just Record groups. And organization is important not just to help you find where you put stuff.
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It's important because it also helps you reconstruct the history and the context of the events that actually happened. And that's where these concepts or principles of provenance, original order, and record groups are important when you're talking about maintaining your original documents in your archival collection. Now, provenance. The Society of American Archivists, is anyone familiar with them at all?
There are a few of you. Okay, I'm going to just mention it because I refer to them. The Society of American Archivists is the professional organization for archivists in the United States. They have a lot of different resources and guidelines, and that's why I'm just referring to them. Now, provenance, according to the Society of American Archivists, is the organization or— and I need my glasses, sorry.
It's a long definition. Okay, the Society of American Archivists defines provenance as the organization or individual that created, accumulated, and/or maintained and used records in the conduct of business prior to their transfer to a records center, archives, or manuscript repository. And this is important because, again, like I mentioned, it helps maintain the context of where the documents are representing.
I'm just going to put this simply. We maintain the records separately based on where they originated from. So, in other words, we don't interfile or intermingle any of the documents. And an example in our case would be like the records of AAWS or the General Service Board. And when you think of provenance, the best thing to think about is the author of that body of records. And in this sense, the AAWS is the author of all of the records for AAWS.
The General Service Board is the author for all of those records of the General Service Board. And the way we actually maintain that provenance is we physically separate them from each other. For instance, they may even have topics in common, such as conference-approved literature. That may be a topic that both boards would be discussing. However, we wouldn't want to just take all the stuff about the conference-approved literature and throw them into one new file and say, Hey, this is all the stuff about conference-approved literature, isn't this great? And the reason we wouldn't do that is because if a researcher were to come and want to find out what actually happened, they wouldn't be able to reconstruct the processes that went into making those decisions about the conference-approved literature at that point.
So that's the idea of provenance and why it's important that we maintain the records according to that way, in the order they originally generated. Now, the next principle that I wanted to mention is original order. And original order is the principle that archives of a single provenance should be retained in the arrangement established by the creator in order to preserve existing relationships and evidential significance and usefulness of finding aids of the creator.
An original order. Once you have your provenance maintained, original order pretty much refers to the arrangement of the records. So now that we have the General Service Board records and we have the AWS records, we're going to keep them in the same exact order that they were generated in. So a lot of times there's a lot of background material that goes into all of these minutes, the board minutes and things like that.
We wouldn't maybe, in the same sense with the Conference Approved Literature example, we wouldn't take out all of this background material. I mean, it's a common thing. You might think, wow, you know, this is getting really thick, and maybe it'd be better if I just take out all this background and maybe I'll make a separate background box. And we wouldn't want to do that only because, again, you wouldn't be able to reconstruct the events that led up to these decisions that are being made and developed at these board meetings. So that's why, in the sense of organization, provenance and original order are very important because, again, it's not just about the physical aspect of putting these things in a great place that you can run and grab real quick.
It's also about maintaining the actual history and the context of that history. And the next part are the record groups. And record groups include a body of organizationally related records established on the basis of provenance by an archives for control purpose. Now maybe some of you can guess what examples I'm going to use for my record groups. The AWS minutes and the General Service Board are examples of what record groups would be. And again, they're kept separately physically, and we maintain them exactly in the way that they were created and naturally generated.
So now that we've collected our materials and we've worked on organizing our materials, I want to talk a little bit about preservation. And the preservation, again, this is the Society of
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American Archivists definition, is the totality of processes and operations involved in the stabilization and protection of documents against damage or deterioration and in the treatment of damaged or deteriorated documents. Preservation may also include the transfer of information to another medium, such as microfilm. Now, the way I want to break down preservation and the preservation considerations for tonight is I want to talk about them in, first of all, preserving the physical integrity of the materials, and that's a lot of what Bob was talking about this morning.
The next aspect is I like to also include the materials' intellectual property in terms of preserving that, as well as the security of the materials. Now, in terms of physical integrity, there are three things that I've broken it down into: the environmental conditions that you have housing your materials in, the storage, how you're storing these materials, and also handling and how you're handling them.
Now, environment. A lot of this, for those of you that attended Bob's things, I'm very grateful because you went into a lot more than I did, and I appreciate that, is the storage environment should be cool and dry. That's your best bet. Also, the temperature should be approximately 7 degrees, plus or minus a couple degrees, or the relative humidity 45 percent or so, plus or minus a few degrees. But most important is that the temperature should remain constant.
Now, we all can't achieve these ideal settings, so the biggest thing, fluctuations and extremes in temperature can be very stressful and very damaging to records. And another idea and another thing to keep in mind is pests. You want to keep the pests out. So, you know, you might not want to put your room next to a kitchen or, you know, just something like that. Those are considerations. Or you may not want to have an environment that might be inviting to pests and things like that.
So that's another idea. In terms of storage, there are various types. We saw in the locked room picture that I have, and we're going to see that picture a lot, the acid-free boxes. They're available in a variety of shapes and sizes. The one that, the yellowish-looking one, for instance, we get that for our CDs. Right now we're doing a preservation project at the GSO where we're transferring reel to reels.
We're actually sending them out to be done. They're being transferred onto CDs. When we get those CDs back and when we eventually get around to cataloging them and marking down what we have, these are the boxes they're going into. So it just gives you an idea. Also, acid-free boxes, they come in all shapes and sizes. If you have oversized photographs, you want to lay them flat, things like that, or anything oversized, they come in a variety of shapes and sizes.
In terms of handling the materials, there are different things. There are cotton gloves. There's acid-free paper, acid-free folders, Mylar protective sheets, and plastic clips instead of metal clips or staples. And these are just some very basic elemental things that you can do when you're just getting started or when you maybe don't have a lot of time, and to just make sure you're doing the best you can to do what you can for the materials. Now, intellectual property.
It basically has to do with when you're talking about copyright. That's one of the big things and the big issues now. And it's respecting the copyright of written documents, audio and visual documents as well, and photographs. And I just want to point out, there's a lot of interest about posting things on the web today, and it's a great medium. It's wonderful. It reaches a lot of people. I just want to make mention that you need to remember that's also a form of publication. And you may be thinking you're doing this and you're helping your friend or you're helping other members maybe in your area, but there's someone in Malaysia who's not a member who's reading this letter. And that's just something, it's hard because you're thinking and you want to really do the best you can and you want to be helpful, but you have to remember there are not just legal considerations, but there are also anonymity considerations, privacy considerations, things of that nature.
So that's another important aspect of preservation that I like to throw in because it's a really important one. And at the end, it's such a complicated issue. There are attorneys. I attended a conference where there was an attorney who only specializes in intellectual property. She works for the Library of Congress, and she herself said it's such a gray area that they all are just up in the air all the time about how to deal with all of these issues. So at the very end, I'm just going to give you some websites and some suggestions from places where you can just read quick things.
Library of Congress is a good one. They have quick facts, things like that. So that's just something that archivists should really just be aware of these things more than
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anything and realize that these kinds of issues do exist and they do affect your collection. And the other aspect of preservation that I'd like to mention is security. For instance, we talked about having a locked storage room. You want to limit the access. You want to be able to know who's going in there, who's going out of there, and that really protects your objects that you have locked away. Another aspect of security, for instance, our research area.
And I really could kick myself for not taking this one photo to show you in the other direction. In our library, I don't know if you could see in the picture, it sort of looked like there were ghostly books floating. That was a reflection because between that workspace that we have and the library, there's actually a glass window that was put into the office. And it's just a way to make sure you know what's going on when people are using your original materials. And also, it's not just to protect against theft.
That's not the main thing, but it's also just to ensure that your researchers or whoever's using your materials are using them in an appropriate way. Sometimes not everyone realizes, you know, you have someone that comes in and they get so excited and they see that real letter with a signature and, Oh, look at this, isn't this great? And they'll wave it around and show whoever they're with. You want to be able to see that happening so you can kind of step in and say, Whoa, whoa. I mean, hopefully you'll explain some of those procedures before they actually get there, but sometimes in their excitement, all that goes over their head.
So you just want to make sure that you have an idea of what's going on with the use of your materials. And the other idea is to have established security guidelines. Simply, they can be something as simple as, like we said, limiting the access, knowing who has access to your locked room. And it can be something also as simple as just talking with whoever's working in your archives. What are the kinds of things that you want to have arranged when you have people coming from the outside to look at your collection?
And the last of those four functions I mentioned in the very beginning that I'd like to mention is the dissemination of information, because this is one of our goals. I mean, we have this information, we're keeping it, we're organizing it, we're preserving it. Why would we want to do this? Because we want it to share with everyone that we, you know, who is interested in it. And the way we disseminate information at the GSO, our biggest way, I have to tell you, is answering research requests.
On a daily basis, between the email, between the phone, we get faxes. Very rarely do we get a real letter anymore, except for unless it's international. We do get, which is great because we have beautiful stamps that come on these letters. So those are pretty much the only people that really write real mail to us anymore. But in any event, that's one of our, the biggest ways that we disseminate information is by responding to requests and answering questions that come from all over.
The other way is through the GSO Archives newsletter markings. And I really, really want to talk markings up. Can I just take a poll? How many people know about markings? Honestly. All right. Okay, that's good, because that means there's still some people I can tell and you won't be bored. So for those of you that know, you can help me encourage everyone. For those of you that don't know, I'm going to let you know.
This is the GSO Archives newsletter. And what it is, it's essentially a forum for sharing for all of us, for AA archives and AA archivists. A lot of times, and it also actually depends on all of you, because the number of issues that we get out every year of markings depends on how much information we receive from members. And the newsletter will contain area histories. It might be an area history of an old group.
It might be a story of, I'm trying to think, it might be a story of an event that happened, like a historical event that happened in someone's area. And it's a great way to share the information with other members and other members interested in archives throughout AA. Another way that we disseminate information is through the availability of different types of archival items. I wrote examples. For instance, we have two photograph sets that are available.
I have examples there if people would like to see them. There are also the scrapbooks, and we have the pre-publication manuscript, a copy of that of the Big Book, and we also have various copies of other types of articles and things that are popular and that people commonly request. And the last thing I do want to mention about that, we have the archives video, and the new one I brought here with me.
You are, if anyone's seen it, you're one of the very—you're the very first people to see it, except for the other people in Canada who are there today, because they have the only other copy that exists right now. So you and the Canadian people are—the people in the regional forum in Canada this weekend are the first to see this video, Markings on the Journey. It's the revised video. It will be available.
We were hoping it was going to be available now to members. There was a little glitch in the production, but it should be out within the next… in the production, but it should be out within the next—well, don't hold me to this. It should be available, I would say, within the next four to six weeks.
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But just keep checking with us. Take my card, please. I don't—you can call me as many times you want. I will not get mad. We'll let you know on its progress. And the other way we disseminate information is through the GSO Archives publications. The different types of publications and the printed resources we have are the GSO Archives workbook. I've brought examples of those as well, if anyone's interested.
It's now been translated into Spanish too, just to let everyone know. And there's also the guidelines for archives. And there's a service piece which came out not too long ago. And those are some of the ways that we disseminate information, not necessarily about the materials within the archives or the history, but about archival work in AA. And last but not least, what I really want to stress to you, another resource that we have at the GSO is us.
So if there's anything that we can ever do, any kind of questions you have, any kind of information, even just about what's going on in your own area, please, just—you can contact us by phone. We'll call you right back. You could email us, write to us any way you'd like, and we're there to help as much as we can. And if there's something we don't know, we will go to any length that we can. We're lucky.
We're at the GSO. We've got an office full of resourceful people, a lot of people there who've been there for many, many years, and it's a great resource that I hope all of you will tap at some point. And lastly, I promised you some information about different types of general archival resources. And some of these, the Society of American Archivists. I just want to point out they are a good resource, especially for just references.
If some of you are just becoming active in archives, or even for those of you that I refer to them all the time. I graduated, I think, 2000. So I graduated from graduate school in the year 2000. These are my Bibles. I mean, when there are things that you're just not clear on, they do a really, really good job of clarifying certain archival questions, and it's a good resource. They also have a website, and they have a manual series which goes over individual things like preservation, like arrangement, organization, things like that.
So it's a helpful resource to have. The other one I mentioned is the Library of Congress. That is the website for the copyright issues. And I also recommend if you have just general archival questions, look in your own area. I'm sure you might have a local archives, a state archives, a university archives, things like that. If nothing else, just to communicate with other archivists and see what kind of recommendations they have for just general archival issues, or even about resources.
They might have some ideas there as well. So with that, that is the end of my tour. I do want to leave—I wanted to make sure I left enough time for questions. And again, anything that we might run out of time for, I'm here until Saturday night. Please find me. I'm happy to speak with you as much as I can. I have pads where you can feel free to write anything down, and take my card because you can email me, call me, talk to me in any way, and I'd be happy to help as much as I can. Thank you.
…when they say that this National Archives seminar is on, and I believe we had a picture of it up there, it's the little Archives handbook. The handbook, yeah. That's great. And the pamphlet. That, yeah, I think I knew about the pamphlet. Yeah. We do. And, yeah, and I want to mention, with that whole idea about us helping you when you contact us, I promise we will get back to you. It just may take us a while, so.
No, but I will give them to you. In fact, I can switch. Let me go right back to there. Is that on previous? Okay. There you go. Yep, you're welcome. That I don't think I will be able to do. But what I can do is answer anything about it or email aspects of it or information about it. Offhand, I don't know, but you know where I'd look first? My subject files. So if you have, if that's a question you have, please write it down and, you know, or contact us after the event and we can look into that for you. Hi.
Yes. Yes, hopefully. Yes, I'm glad you asked that because I should have mentioned it.
[00:35:00]
Not at the same time, unfortunately. They have to do the English one first and get that done before they can do the production in Spanish. But I did actually talk to our production department before I left, and the event this question came up, and they said that in 2003 we'll start getting the Spanish out. But please keep checking. Like I said, I honestly don't mind. People keep calling me because I'm one of those people that likes to keep calling other people. So please keep checking with us, and I'd be happy to update you on the progress. You're welcome.
Uh-huh. You can write your name right down on the pad, and I will be sure to add it to the list as soon as I get back. You're welcome. Yes. You said that you had a copy of the new markings with you? Yes, the new video. Charles? That's me. I scared poor Charles, and I told him what a precious copy it is, and if I don't go back with it, I'm in a— no, I won't be in trouble, but it won't look too good.
Is it fireproof? I honestly don't— I don't know that it's fireproof. I do know that there's a sprinkler system, a water spray sprinkler system. We do have off-site storage, or I think— actually, I don't know if the water system's in yet or if it's something they're considering, but we have an off-site storage facility as well, and that's where we also have some of the materials that don't fit into our storage room. Anything else?
Nope. Ron. What it's meant to me? It's actually been great for me. As I mentioned, I do have family members that are in the program, so like my mom said, I don't think it was a coincidence I ended up here. And in a way, when I— I will tell you honestly that when I first read the job— read about the job application, it was an archivist that I was working for, doing an internship, that told me about it.
And all it said was AA World Services. She didn't know what it was. I didn't know what it was. I thought, what am I— is it like the animals of the Amazon? I mean, what am I getting myself into? I had no idea. So I looked all around. I had no idea. But I told my mom about it, and she said, Erin, that's AA. I know what that is. I said, Oh, okay, great. And so, in effect, in a way, it's kind of like brought my whole life full circle to this point, and it's been just a phenomenal place to be.
And especially one of the best parts for me is meeting all of you, and I'm really happy to be here only because I've talked to so many of you, I've emailed with so many of you, and it's finally great to start to meet some of the people. So it's been a wonderful experience. Ron, you're on. Tell us a little bit about the process of, let's say you're interested in looking at something, writing up a proposal.
What are the considerations? What's available? A little bit about the process. Sure. Yeah. What's on— is everyone here? What John was asking about is what is the process of people coming to the archives and researching and doing the research. We actually have a researcher's request form. I brought an example. It's somewhere stuffed in my box. And what it is, first of all, there's a policy statement, which kind of gives you an idea of the policy involved with researching at the GSO.
And you fill out that statement and you fill out the application. On it, you write what your interest of research is. You give some of your information, what the purpose of your research, whether it be something for a book you're writing, if it's area, just you're researching your area history, things like that. Then what you do is give it to us. We submit it to the Trustees Archives Committee, and they're the ones that decide.
It's all decided on a case-by-case basis, and they're the ones who decide on the approval of the research application. And I just want to mention the Trustees Archives Committee meets, I think it's three or four times a year. So if it's something that you're really pressed for time, your best bet to do is call us as soon as possible so we can try to expedite the whole process for you and get that information out.
What is the process that they go through as far as what is available and what's not? Well, the first thing, the reason for writing down specifically what you're interested in is because we have to know whether or not we even have it. It wouldn't really, it would be a disservice if we said, Oh sure, and we came in and we have, you know, maybe two sheets of something. In terms of how they base that decision, I really am not too clear what the exact discussion entails. I don't attend the board meetings, you know, but you could, I would ask you to speak with Judith because she's a very— and that's the other thing, anything I don't know, pretty much Judith does.
Judith knows just about everything there is to know at the archives, and she's a wonderful reference. The conference.
[00:40:07]
Yeah. Hmm. That again, I apologize. I'm not too clear on the actual committee work because I'm not directly involved in any of that. But any kind of clarification of that, I would recommend the secondary. See, you all have a better idea than I do. But secondary. Does GSO Archives accept strictly on general donations, or do you ever purchase? No, we, our collection, like the materials that we get, we don't actively go out seeking or purchasing particular items.
Like a lot of the literature, sometimes, I mean, if we do, we'll reimburse for postage if someone's sending us something, or if it's something relatively new, if someone just, you know, on the road maybe picks something up and it's something that they offered, then in that sense. But we don't actively, like, go out searching for Big Books, you know, for an example, and try to purchase those materials.
You're welcome. Anything else? No. Anybody? Last one? No? We limit it in the sense of what it is about. I mean, it has to be right about AA history. Some of the other limitations, for example, I remember right after September 11th, there was a group that formed. They called themselves the Ground Zero Group. Some of you may have read about it. There was a Box 459 article. And what it was, was a bunch of the workers who were down at Ground Zero and who were AA members had actually gotten a room together and they formed a group to meet so that during all of their work, they could actually get together and meet.
And one of the things they had done, they had a very large — I am answering your question, I promise. They had a large chalkboard in the meeting room, and they wrote various messages and they wrote different things on it. And they actually — I got the call, called and wanted to donate that chalkboard to us. And it was very sweet and very sentimental. First of all, it was a chalkboard, so it wouldn't be very practical to maintain something like that. But also the size is another big issue.
So we have photos of the chalkboard. But in that sense, that would be an example of where we would have to reject something. And sometimes we don't accept things because space is an issue, and other times because it just doesn't really have too much to do with AA itself. We do. I heard that this question came up some earlier this morning in one of Bob's sessions. We do have a scanning — I mentioned we have a part-time scanning assistant.
And right now what we're doing is scanning the original documents. We have Bill's correspondence scanned at the moment. We're hoping to start scanning early group records. And we scan it as a large flatbed scanner. We make sure to get it so that it's legal size as well for some of the oversized things. And the documents are being scanned into a database. And the database that we use is called Alchemy.
And through that, there's an optical character recognition component that actually is what makes the database searchable. So after we scan it, we perform the optical character recognition, so then the information is put into this database, and then you can actually search it. So right now, it's a preservation measure in the sense that we're definitely not getting rid of the originals. But it's helpful because it's a good way to search.
And it's also helpful because if you want to look at something quickly, that's one less time you have to touch that original document to read what it is. No. No, they're on their own. I think, in fact, they're on their own server, if I'm remembering that correctly. And it's only searchable within our department. They said they were going to put a lot of the archives on disc. The audio recordings. Will any of that be available to…
It's my understanding. First of all, we're not quite sure everything that we have, not until we get everything, so it will be several years. But I believe that the hopeful intention is to maybe take a sampling at some point and make it like we did with the photograph set, and maybe make a sampling somehow. But right now, please don't hold me to that because I don't know. I think our first step right now is just getting everything done, and it will take years for us to actually properly catalog it and make sure we have everything identified.
Properly catalog it and make sure we have everything identified. Many, many years ago, the Washington area asked for materials going to our area,
[00:45:02]
and at that time we were told that they were not going to be sending out anything to any area unless they had a repository to put things in. We have a repository. Are you still scanning material and sending it out, or how is that going? I guess first it would probably depend, first of all, on material. In terms of original correspondence, we don't make any kind of reproduction of that whatsoever, so that we wouldn't do. We're not sending anything out scanned.
In fact, the scanner is only hooked up to the database, so it's not hooked up even to, like, a situation where we could email attachments or anything like that. And in terms of getting stuff for your area about your area, I think that's something you'd probably have to tell us precisely what it is you want, first to see if we even have it, and secondly how that, you know, would be handled, because offhand I am not sure myself. Anything?