Instead of holding a lecture at our normally assigned meeting place, last Wednesday our class had the opportunity to visit the Special Collections Research Center located at Fenwick Library and study firsthand a number of artifacts within this collection.
When our class began, we were introduced to the the collection’s research services coordinator Brittney Falter. During her presentation, Falter provided our class with information on archives (the locations where permanent records are held), archivists (those responsible for organizing, maintaining, and digitizing artifacts), and the politics that surrounds archiving records and artifacts.
Falter, informed our class that archivists hold priorities for archiving and maintaining artifacts. She stated that those artifacts of greatest priority are those which are deteriorating but these artifacts (although of great importance) may be given lesser priority based on outside factors. These factors include the ambitions of well-known or influential donors and the donations that they provide to the collection.
Prior to this event, our class was asked to read several articles pertaining to the subject of archiving. In an interview between Thomas Padilla and Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez entitled “Bias, Perception, and Archival Praxis,” the two discuss the biases that exist within archives. Arroyo-Ramirez informs Padilla that much of the bias that archivists struggle with is their own (much of which has developed from their own Western culture)1. To help eliminate this bias, Arroyo-Ramirez suggests that archivists must learn to recognize their own biases and work to eliminate them from their work.
The artifacts that our class examined during our class period were from the FTP. Our small group examined flyers for a production of Hamlet that was performed in Chicago, Illinois, in 1939. It was interesting to consider the effects of digitizing these artifacts, as some flyers contained notes that were not present on others. Our small group wondered what information would be lost had only one of these flyers been digitized.
In her article “The Artifactual Elements of Born-Digital Records, Part 1” Susan Manu states that some of the appeal of artifacts is viewing them from our own time period.2 In the case of our small group’s flyers, I wonder how an archivist would go about archiving the large, digital displays advertising performances in Times Square.
Our class visit to the Special Collections Research Center was a wonderful experience. Seeing these artifacts in person and analyzing them gave me a unique perspective into the work that archivists perform and the challenges that they face.
