Audio
About this recording
- Topic
- Introduction to Archival Procedures Part 1
- Speaker
- Kathy S
- Date
- 2001-09-28
Transcript
Source: Kathy S – Introduction to Archival Procedures Part 1 – 2001-09-28.mp3 File: kathy-s-introduction-to-archival-procedures-part-1-2001-09-28.mp3 Duration: 00:38:14
============================================================
Suggested that we start with a moment of silence and a serenity prayer. How about that? God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I want to thank you all for getting up very early this morning. And my name is Kathy Smith, and I'm an alcoholic. And there's just a few things that I have been asked to say, is that if you have a question, which is, questions are great, if you just go up to the microphone and say it, that would be great.
If not, if you just want to ask it, I'll repeat it so it can be recorded. And if you have any cell phones or anything like that, if you would turn those off because those get in the way of the reception. So, like I said, this would be your course on advanced techniques for archival conservation. Actually, it's introduction to techniques in archival conservation. What I want to do first is get an idea of what you're all interested in doing. I know most of you have a really good interest in archives, and that's why you're here. And what I would like to do is get some idea of the questions you really want to get answered today and the things that are important to you.
And I'm going to go over a lot of stuff, and, you know, a lot of it may be just not interesting to you. But I want to hear from you what you all want to hear. And what I'll do is I'll write some of these points on the board. So is there anything in particular you all want to hear about? Has the coffee not kicked in yet? All right. Go ahead. My name is Paul St. Ger, and I'm from the California Northern Coastal Area.
I'm the alternate chair for the Archives Committee. What I'm interested in—is this on?—what I'm interested in is triage techniques. In other words, when you come into a group of material that is in such poor condition that you don't even have the time to deal with all of it, how do you approach a problem like that? In other words, ten boxes of things, you don't have unlimited time to deal with it, and you're really just trying to save what you can. Thank you.
Okay, that's great. What to do when you first get a collection, how to deal with the condition of it, and how to deal with arranging it probably, or doing some basics. Yep. I'm Cindy Mill. I'm an alcoholic from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Hi, Cindy. And as I told you last night, I'm interested in hearing mostly about indexing and ordering things and how to do such. Okay, arrangement. Great. I know you're probably not all going to be able to read this because my handwriting is really bad, and you can't really see it.
I've made some of the other ones I've made a little thicker so you can read them. I'll also be repeating them in case you need. Will you combine accessioning with your arrangement? Are you going to talk about it with your arrangement? We're going to do appraisal, accessioning, arranging, describing, reference, outreach, and preservation. Any other things? All right. Oh. That's okay. I don't know. I don't know if this is on.
Is it? Okay. I'm interested in what is confidential and to whom. All righty. That's a good question. Confidentiality. Well, it's a big word. There's another one. Okay. What I wanted to start with first was I've given you a glossary of some basic archival terms. Now, those things aren't necessarily my perfect definitions, but they are definitions that I have found useful over the years of different aspects of archive processing.
I sort of tailored it to what we're interested in doing in AA archives. Every archives is unique unto itself. If you have an archives of manufacturing equipment, that's going to be unique to that archives. So the topic and the subject matter is what makes an archives really unique.
[00:05:03]
And now, an archives is many different things. An archives is the building. An archives is the actual material in that building. And lately, computer people have usurped archiving, and now you archive your computer files. And so it's a little confusing sometimes when you look at archives. It's like, well, what exactly is an archives? What consists, what makes an archives? And— I had written out, and you probably once again can't see this, but I've got some questions. What is an archives?
What constitutes an archives? Why have an archives? Where do you have an archives? And how do you start an archives? And those are some of the things that I'd like to talk about today. Like I said, what is an archives? An archives is an assemblage of materials that you think is important. An archives can be one box underneath someone's bed, and that's how a lot of archives start. Or it can be the National Archives, which is thousands and thousands of cubic feet of material storing information on all aspects of American life. And so there's a wide range of what is an archives.
What's important, I think, to me, as both an alcoholic and an archivist, is that for AA's purpose is that we save the identity of what our AA is in our area. GSO has the GSO archives, and they save things that are important to the trustees and all the trustee papers, and they save all the reports and the findings and committees, and they save information on our groups and the group number changes, and they save a wide variety of materials.
Now, for me, I work, I volunteer at the Tennessee AA archives, which is Area 64. What's important to us is Tennessee archives and Tennessee alcoholic history. And so what we try to do is we try to focus on that aspect. Now, we do have things about Kentucky. We've got things about California. We've got some stuff about Texas because, you know, different members have gone different places and brought stuff back.
But our main focus is our area. Just like if you had a district archives, your main focus is the district. But all kinds of things get taken into archives. And so, you know, there's a process that we're looking at is what constitutes an archives. Well, like I said, it's an assemblage of papers and documents that you feel are important. What is important is a little bit of a subjective kind of thing.
And so an archivist, or a person who is the guardian of the papers, so to speak, is a person that has to be a little subjective. And we can't say, Oh, well, I don't like this group. We're not going to save their stuff. You know, or this person really ticked me off. He's a real butthead of a delegate. We're not going to save his papers. And what we've got to do is we've got to look at things and say, Okay, what's important to the area?
We need to save things like area reports and delegates' materials and group reports and group histories and personal histories and things like that. And so what I'm hoping to do today is talk a little bit about how you go from getting that material to processing it to storing it. And it's going to be a bit of a whirlwind because there's a lot of things that we can talk about. And I think in some of the handouts, especially Getting Started: What Is an Archives, it's going to be able to talk a little bit more in depth about what you want to do while you're thinking about starting an archives.
The first thing that theoretically you need to do with an archives is you need to start, you need to have a mission statement, which is why do we want to save this stuff? Who are we? And basically, it's as easy as saying, you know, we're AA, we're AA people. We want to save the history of our organization so that future generations can look back and see all the mistakes that we made and all the good things we did.
So that's a mission statement. The second thing we need to look at is a budget. How much money can we budget towards these things? You know, and the thing is, is that money doesn't come easy anymore. Never did, not for me at least. And, you know, from my
[00:10:05]
personal experience has been that you're not able to start out from a box of archive material to a building in a month. It's a slow process of working through the groups and the area to get support, to even have money to have paper and paper clips and things like that. And I'm sure you've all done that already. And I know for Tennessee, it was a long road of people storing things in their basements, and then when they got tired or they had too much material, moving it to someplace else. Ended up in a storage locker, ended up in the basement of a memorial auditorium, and then finally it ended up in a small little office that they could rent for a relatively small price.
After many, many years, they managed to get a building. Now, I think it's a great building. You know, having a building for an archives is, you know, a lot of cities can't do that. So if you've got a building, and how many folks here have a building that's dedicated to an archives? That's wonderful. That's wonderful. You know, not a lot of folks do. And so you all are way ahead of the game, and that's great.
Now, we're talking about budgeting. There's expenses. And for me, the most important thing to do when you're looking at what you have in front of you, which could be T-shirts, buttons, all sorts of things, is that you look at it and you say, okay, I don't have that much money. I can't afford to spend all my money on one thing. I've got to get a stable environment for my archives, which may be my house.
My house is air conditioned and it's heated, so that's a relatively stable environment. Now, the ongoing expenses of an archives, obviously, if you have a building, you've got to pay rent, or you've got to do electric, and you've got phone and everything like that. But there's also archival supplies. And the more things you get donated to you, the more money you're going to have to spend on supplies, i.e., folders and boxes and filing cabinets and acid-free paper and paper clips and, you know, pencils, stuff like that. But the more things you process, the more people will see, and they'll give you more. And it's sort of a never-ending cycle.
You know, someone had mentioned before that they have a big backlog of unprocessed material. Welcome to my world. You know, I work in a university setting. We have hundreds of cubic feet of unprocessed material. That is just a fact that it comes in faster than you can do it, especially if you're volunteer archivists, like we all are. You know, we don't have 40 hours a week to devote to processing. You know, you could, I mean, I know my personal experience has been that I've processed in archives and, you know, processed a collection, and I had it all done, and I was like, Oh, I'm all up to date. And then someone walks in with 40 boxes and says, Look what I found.
You're just like, Oh, that's great. You know, okay, you know, I'm back to ground zero again here, and we'll start all over again. And we call that job security. So if we're lucky, we'll keep getting materials. You know, all the things that you're going to get from this conference, if you keep them long enough and you stick them in the archives, they're going to be archival materials. Now, if you have 40 copies of the same thing, they're probably not going to be archival materials because we're going to take a couple and we're going to pitch the rest, you know, or we're going to offer them around to other people.
So I sort of, I've digressed a little bit, but let me see here, where was I? Oh, one of the other things, and people who have buildings, do they, do you all have, like, space for researchers? We have four rooms. One room is set aside. It's attached to the stack room, and it is for research purposes. Great. Great. That's an important thing too, is because if you get your archives up and running, even if it's in, like, you know, Bob's house, that kind of thing, people are going to want to see stuff. They're going to know that you have the archives, that you've got the materials, and they're going to say, Hey.
But you've got the materials, and they're going to say, Hey, could you find out when
[00:15:00]
my group started? You know, and a lot of stuff you can answer over the phone, or nowadays you can answer through email. But sometimes people are going to want to come in and look at stuff and sit down and listen to some tapes. You know, and that's sort of one of those things you've got a budget space and time for. If you've got a storage space where you're storing all your material, do you have a place that you could take some of the material that you need to research to a location where it can be used?
That's something to think about. I mean, you know, a lot of folks who don't have buildings, you know, it's something to think about. It's like, okay, if a question can't be answered by the person storing the materials, and someone wants to come in, say there's a researcher, a non-AA person who wants to come in and look at the history of AA in Southern Tennessee. If you feel comfortable letting them work on your kitchen table, you know, and serving them coffee or whatever, that's great.
But it's something to think about because when you start getting an archives up and running, word of mouth goes out among the community, and before you know it, you're getting calls from all over, from different states. Hey, do you have any material about us? You know, we're a border state. And so that's just one of the things that I didn't think about right away. It was like, oh, okay, we're going to have to set up some sort of reference process. And what I've done here is, I think you all got some, I've given you some samples of a registration form.
That you can use if people come to do research. Now, it's pretty detailed. Yours doesn't have to be as detailed. It could be as simple as a three-by-five filing card. You just ask people to put their name and address on it and what topic they're interested in. But it's a good way to keep a record of what's being used in the archives. If someone sends an email question to you, save the question, put the answer on it or staple the answer to it, and then keep that so you know, hey, this year I answered 64 questions.
You know, put that in your annual report. You know, let people know that the money they're putting towards an archives is going to good use. It's, I think, it's validation. And sometimes I know that—well, not sometimes, but I do know that people like to see that their money is being used for a good reason. And so what I try to do, and what we try to do at Tennessee, is we try to keep a listing of everyone who's been using the stuff.
Sometimes you can't because all of a sudden you get 15 people from East Tennessee coming into the archives real fast, and you can't get all their names, and they're over there looking through everything and trying to get a hold of everything. We just say, okay, the Let It Be group from East Tennessee showed up on Saturday, and there were nine people or ten people, and keep a record of it that way. There's a reproduction form in there.
Once again, it's kind of elaborate, but if you have things photocopied for someone, you know, are you going to charge them or is it going to be free? That's something that you need to decide. Is it a service to the community, or do you charge them ten cents a sheet? I know upstairs they charge ten cents a sheet. So it's something to think about. I won't say that again. Okey-dokey. Buy your own copy machine.
That's right. You know, it's little things like that that sneak up on you. You know, some folks will, you know, they'll give you a donation. What do you do with the donation money? Do you plow it back in? Do you use the funds for, you know, for a rainy day? The other sheets I have are a list of rules here, rules and, you know, good regulations. Use a pencil. Walk this way. Okay. All righty. I've been immortalized. You know, our rules and regulations.
Do you let people sit down with a hot cup of coffee next to your letters of Bill W., or do they already have three or four coffee rings on them? You know, it's a question.
[00:20:01]
Do you let people smoke? You know, that's a very volatile issue. In Tennessee, at the Area 64 archives, you're supposed to have covered drinks and no smoking. Now I'll be damned if I don't smell smoke in there nine times out of ten when I come in. It's because it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks. We've got some old dogs out there. So the thing is, is that looking at how you're going to use the things, you want to preserve them for future generations.
You know, and preserving the entire collection is doing those basic things sometimes and looking at them. So once we get to, we've done what is an archives, what constitutes an archives, why have an archives? Because we want to. Because we want to save our stuff. Where to have an archives? Buildings are great. If you have, I know I've heard of my district having experience where they've stored their archives in someone's house who only had about three months clean.
Guess where those went. You know, think about where you're going to have someone store something. I'm not saying that someone with 20 years isn't going to go out and use if they're crazy as hell. But the thing is, is that you've got to look at some stability. Can you get space in an intergroup? You know, can you store things there? You know, will they charge you five bucks a month or something like that for a filing cabinet's worth of space that you can secure?
Are you going to have it in a basement? Do you want stuff in a basement? Not any basements I've been around. You know, this is a basement. This is real nice, but they've got lots of HVAC. Yes. Steve, Central Western Washington Area 72. In the 70s, we were required by GSO to have our own repository because GSO would not send us, continually send us material after every archivist rotated. So we had to have a repository set up.
And that might be something that people might consider doing, is having your place in a permanent environment. Because if you want material from the General Service Office, they just won't send it to you on a rotating basis. Yeah, we have lots of stuff in our archives, and I keep going, where do we get this stuff? It's all this photocopies. It's from GSO. Charlie? How can I, Charles? Would you see people stand up?
I didn't hear a word he said. He's talking into that table. Gotcha. Would you repeat? Would you please? That's Mike. David Cantrell, Area 72. In the 70s, General Service Office required the Washington Area to get a repository, because every time we had an archivist that rotated, we'd ask them for the same material. Obviously things would not be kept with the archives, and so they got tired of sending it to us, so they told us we had to have a permanent repository for our material so we would not continually ask them for the same material.
And that is a valid point. GSO is busy. Now, their duty is as an archives also. So if someone does call up and say, Hey, you know, do you have any information on Tennessee? Well, they're probably going to look through it and say, Hell, I've sent you copy this, copy that, copy this. Now, nine times out of ten, archivists are very nice people. But I know from personal experience that if you make a copy for someone over and over again, we get a little snippy.
But the thing is, is that it is important to have a central place. Like I said, whether it's Bob's house in Destin, Florida, and we know that Bob's going to be there. He's got, you know, he's got a spare bedroom he doesn't use. That sounds to me like a good space if he's willing to give it, you know, if he's willing to have that space used. I know that I've stored stuff under my bed, you know, behind bookcases, things like that. And it's hard to get access to that stuff when it's stored two boxes at this person's house, four boxes at that person's house.
The past four delegates still all have their records. That it's very hard to do any sort of contiguous research. So, like I said, if you can get it in one spot, you know, some people can't. It's just a fact of reason. You know, you've got an area that's an entire state long. You know, you got one side over here and one side way over there. You know, why am I going to give stuff to this part of the state when I got to drive six hours to get there and look at it?
[00:25:03]
Make yourself a copy. Then you have it. So I think it's important if you can sit down with your area, if you're going to have an area archives, and think about where do you want to put it. Now, Tennessee, we were lucky. Murfreesboro volunteered to house us for the past couple of years, and it just happens to be the geographical center of the state. Now, I was lucky. Who could have planned something like that?
And I don't know if you have a geographical center of your state. I was surprised that there is one in Tennessee. But we were lucky enough to have a group supporting us and willing to offer us a building, which Area 64 pays for. And that's a lot of willingness right there. Turn that all over. Now, our archives has expanded from about four or five filing cabinets to, I don't know, a couple hundred. Okay, I'll admit it. I haven't finished processing everything yet.
We all haven't finished processing it, so I'm guesstimating. We've got like, I don't know, 400 tapes, 500 tapes. You think, Charlie? Something like that. We've got about seven or eight filing cabinets worth of material. We recently have started collecting one of the—we're holding the records of 202, which is the Friendship House. It's a meeting house. Now that's a different set of records. We just recently started holding those. We've got Ticky Paws, which is Tennessee Youth and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah archives, and we've got a filing cabinet of their records.
So our archives has grown by attraction. And I'm sure there's something in the literature we all know about attraction rather than promotion. And that's what we're doing. We're attracting things to us. So, anyway, I digress. How do you start an archives? You just jump in the middle, you know, and swim like hell, you know. And people who have been given archives, it says, Hey, look at you. You've got a year clean. I'll be damned if you're not the new archivist, you know, here, and your sponsor's going, Service work, service work, service work, you know, and all of a sudden there you are with three boxes of material that you don't know what people are going to do with, what to do with.
So, you gather the material. Say it's four T-shirts, 25 tapes, a bunch of baseball hats. You know, some group reports, some group histories, some books, a couple of wooden plaques. You know, just a mess of material. How do you start processing it? Now, processing is a word that I'm going to use a lot, and it's sort of synonymous with arrangement and description. But first, I think we're going to start off with how do we get to that point? Well, we start with the basics.
Where's that person with the camera around here somewhere? And I didn't give you out one of these sheets, but my lovely Vanna is going to help me. This is the sheet that I call the basics. And it's going to be, the basics are AA drop. And first A stands for appraisal. And when you get a bunch of materials sent to you, given to you, walked into you, you know, FedExed to you, dropped off in the middle of the night by your door, what do you do with them?
You appraise them. You look at them and say, what are these things? Are they pertinent to my AA archives? Are they pertinent to AA? Are they the records of, you know, the Second Jehovah Witness down the street? If they are, they're not pertinent to AA, pretty much. If they are AA material, say it's the third delegate for your state, he recently passed away and his son dropped off all these records.
All this stuff, you know, 15 boxes of things. Some of it looks like it's pertinent. Some of it are just old books that the son didn't want to deal with. Some things are— One didn't want to deal with. Some things are, you know, financial records from the man,
[00:30:00]
you know, his financial statements, a couple tax forms. You look at it and you say, okay, we'll call this the papers of Ed Smith, the third delegate to the Isle of Puerto Rico. And let's look at them. Look at each box. Open it up, knock all the flies and the dust off of it, and say, okay, box one, two, three, four, all the way to fifteen. Box one, don't go through every piece of paper. Look at it and goes, okay, box one, four T-shirts, two plaques, a Big Book. Box two looks like GSR reports from the years he was there, '59 to '61, something like that.
And you go through each one. Then you have a list in your hand. You look at it and you go, okay, well, it looks like boxes one through thirteen have to do with AA stuff. The last two boxes, the son just didn't feel like dropping them off at the dumpster, you know. And so you, okay, well, hopefully you will have gotten a deed of gift, one of the forms I gave you, which you will have the son fill out thoroughly, and you will photocopy it on your photocopier, Bob, and you will give him a copy.
You keep the original, or vice versa, whichever you feel like doing. And it will say on there, if we do not want this material. You check one. Do you want it back, or should we dispose of it? And make sure the person checks that. That's a great thing, because then you're not liable to come back and for him to suddenly say, Hey, you threw two boxes of my pop stuff away. Well, you checked right here.
If we don't want it, we can toss it. Now, you know, a lot of forms, I mean, if it's a midnight run, which we've had in the past, where someone drops by stuff on their way through Tennessee going to Georgia, they go and, Oh, look, it's a box of stuff. What is this? Well, it looks like one old ratty big book, 50th edition, you know, something. Yes, ma'am. I can speak up. We can get the doors closed. Maybe that'll help some too. Yeah, yeah, come on down.
Or up, whichever way you're looking. What? Oh, that's what, Bob Barker? Okay, I'm not Bob Barker. I have a recommendation. I know most groups have plenty of them, but if you actually stood in the center, like over here, each side could hear you a little better. You know what? I'm willing to take suggestions today. Oh, I stepped right into that one. Thank you. Well, I'll just run back and forth. Okay, so we're at appraisal.
We've appraised the stuff. We've got a great idea of what is in the collection, and we're just hot damn, this is good stuff. You know, next thing you want to do is accession it. That's also my first aid, is appraisal and accession. Now, what is accession? Accession is taking legal control or formal control over the materials. Once you get that deed of gift, then you're set. And you've appraised it, you've decided you want it, you're going to keep the materials.
It has been accessioned. It's a great way of tracking materials. Like I said, you know, like many people, we can live and die by statistics. You know, if you could say to your area at your, you know, one of your quarterlies, you could say, Well, the archives has accessioned 24 feet of records. That's impressive. You know, they don't know what that means, but it sounds good. Now, what it is is a way of you recording how much every year you're getting.
You could say, We've got 24 feet of records, we've got 40 books, 12 of them are Big Books, two are Living Sobers. You know, you can do that kind of stuff, and it helps people know what's out there. And they'll say, Hey, you've got Ed Smith's records. I want to see what he's got in his papers, because I was his great-grand sponsoree, and he was one of my favorite guys, and I want to
[00:35:00]
see if he wrote anything about me. You know, then you can go look at that kind of stuff. With an deed of gift, you also get something about restrictions. Someone said something about confidentiality before. That's an issue. You know, I can guarantee you that if they ever get my records, I will not leave my fifth step in there. You know, if you're donating records, don't leave your fifth step in there.
We actually had two fifth steps in our material that was turned over to the archives from the families of deceased members. Is that restricted? Put it this way, it immediately got destroyed. That was an instant decision. That's the things you've got to look at. You also want to think about anonymity. Anonymity is spiritual foundation. Yes, it's important. You know, you've got to look at this stuff.
When you're writing your mission statement and you're getting your goals set for your archives, you've got to look at the anonymity. What if, you know, AA in Montreat, North Carolina, is so fabulous that the local newspaper wants to write an article on it, and all of a sudden you get a phone call saying, so-and-so newspaper guy wants to come by and look at your archives. What do you do? You've got to look at things.
You've got to say, okay, are we open to the public? If we are, what can they look at? Because last names are used. Anonymity is an issue. You know, do you let people who are AA look at everything? Yes, Charlie. I'm an alcoholic. My name's Charles Miner. Charles. Our co-founder wrote a letter addressing anonymity, that we're to anonymous from within, and I believe that. I'm as anonymous as a fireplug at a four-alarm fire.
I don't care who knows I'm in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Till I get to the stage of press, radio, and film, and I guard that Eleventh Tradition. And you said we have to guard anonymity in the archives, and I question that. I've got a name tag from this event. They spelled my name right, thank God. I gave our archives something in this display case, and I'm from Area 64, and I bring you greetings from best group in the world, Primary Purpose in Memphis, Tennessee.
I gave them a book, and they gave me credit for that, but they misspelled my name. I want my name spelled right if I'm going to get recognition. And I'm an alcoholic. I'm an egoist, and I want recognition, so I don't feel at the level of archives that we have to protect anonymity. Let me clarify what I was saying about anonymity. He's absolutely correct. Within AA, even Dr. Bob said that we're allowed to use our last names, and I agree.
But outside of Alcoholics Anonymous, our anonymity must be protected. Well, you know, and the Washington area…