Monday, March 18, 2013

The Archivist's Dilemma: Choosing What to Keep

                                                                                           by Juan Carlos Sanabria

                                                                                                    March 18, 2013



           By now, I've drawn a decent mental map of the Floridian Federal Writers' Project collection in the +Florida Historical Society 's archive. Although it covers major time periods in Florida, I cannot help but feel that there is more to the collection as compiled by FWP editors. But this is a constant in the field of historical study. The whole story is never complete. Yet I have no doubt that this is the source of the excitement that historians experience when digging through boxes of files in search of that overlooked quote or photograph. For them, and anyone else dedicated to the honest study of history, there will be no end to the search. No end to the excitement. But there's a problem.

           Part of the reason the entire story won't be completed is because there is a practical selection process by which professional historians and public historians choose the “history” they will study, interpret, and communicate to the public. Professional historians, like those at the university, usually specialize and therefore value the historical people, places and periods most closely tied to his or her focus. The more material on a item, the more publishing that he or she can potentially accomplish. Public historians strive to get “history to work in the world,” as the National Council on Public History's website puts it on the “What Is Public History?” page. This means that the history that will be preserved, interpreted, presented, and/or recorded will be dictated by the public's “consumption” of history. Ultimately, because there is a demand for a history of a particular time, place or thing, there will be a greater focus on that subject rather than other subjects. Also, a demand for a particular interpretation of that history can leave certain historical subjects uninterpreted or even undiscovered.

           If both types of historians select the histories they cover on account of interest and therefore “profit,” many histories will rarely be covered or covered truthfully – especially given the tight budgets many historical societies and university departments possess at this time.

           Still, it's important to remember that being completely objective in the selection of history is impossible. Historians of all kinds are people and people have passions and prejudices. They also have appetites and mortgages, so focusing on subjects like Native Americans, American Slavery, and Civil War may be a better idea than focusing on the Spanish-American War, early Catholic missions in Florida, or the United Fruit Company's political influence in Central America. There is demand for books on the latter three, but my experience is that more people show up at the archive to research Native Americans, Slavery, and the Civil War. The other big hit is local history, which demonstrates how demand for history is much like the demand for any other product. Different places and people will have different demands for the field of historical study.

           It comes down to the archivist to decide what to keep and what to give away. If the archivist wants the archive/research library to stay open, he or she must balance professional opinion on what ought to be kept with the demands of the patrons. Of course, this can produce dilemmas. Sometimes a whole box of material that would be incredibly valuable to some researcher somewhere gets neglected by patrons and eventually transferred elsewhere because of the lack of space. Documents that, as far as he or she knows, cannot be found elsewhere must leave the archive to make room for more well-known or demanded documents. The archivist can only hope that the material that departs will be taking care of, lest a whole chapter of history be lost, and the larger historical narrative left more incomplete than before.

Until next time,

JCS