When we went a visited the Special Collections to examine different objects from the Federal Theater Project, I don’t think I’d ever really thought about how archives and collections acquire their things. Finding out that the archives are a bit beholden to what donors decide to send them made me slightly uncomfortable. It feels like they’re at the mercy of the donors, which really means that the public and scholars are at the mercy of the donors.
This is a problem because I feel it could lead to collections being biased in some way. Archives are extremely important, not only to scholars, but to the rest of the general public because they store large amounts of information, and sometimes even artifacts. In an ideal situation, archives wouldn’t have any problem acquiring pieces, but unfortunately they have to resort to donations most of the time.
The digitization of the archive is also very interesting. It was explained to us that there’s a hierarchy of digitization, so objects that are fragile, or that may be difficult to preserve are first. But what about documents that are already hard to read? I wanted to ask about this at the talk but the questions period was over so quickly. I was wondering this because our files had a memo in the front that the type was already fuzzy and a bit distorted. I wasn’t sure how well that would translate on a computer screen.
Speaking of which, I think that seeing the objects and papers from the Federal Theater Project made it easier to connect with. It was less of a hypothetical thing and a true reality. There’s also a lot of information that we don’t have access to online, and being able to see it and put your hands on it definitely makes it a much more interesting experience. I really admire the archivists for taking care of such important documents, and doing it so well. And learning about “portable theaters” was really cool too.
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