After our visit to the Special Collections, I felt like I better understood the role of archivists and their importance. I obviously knew who they were from our class discussions, but actually hearing the archivist talk about what they do and how much politics go into it, I was surprised. It makes sense that some people pay to get their item archived first, but that isn’t really a problem I would’ve thought of on my own until she explained it. I also had no frame of reference for how long it takes to archive these items, but hearing that it took 12 full time staff and 14 part time students 6 years to digitize 60,000 pictures gives me a whole new idea of how long this can take. Archivists protect a lot of history and I’m sure after hearing about the wide range of topics that the GMU Special Collections has that they’ve saved countless professors, grad students, and undergrad students in their search for items that help with their class or thesis, or papers. The general public could also use archives to learn more about a specific part of history or to learn more about a niche subject. Archives can help anyone find out more about their topic. However, in a lot of cases government records only include people or events they believe should be remembered so that affects who is and isn’t seen in the future, as well as that evidence being historical itself because it reflects the time period and the policies of the administration 1 . Unfortunately this means that a lot of history has been lost to us because a lot of minorities and their accomplishments of the past weren’t recorded as significant, even if they changed a lot of lives. It could also mean that their identity was left out, which changes the meaning of the work, or someone else took the credit, and the real creators name is lost.
The archivist we met with talked about how they mostly archive photos, because it’s harder to digitize things like costumes or diagrams since those are more physical, and it’s harder to digitize documents, like the plays from the Federal Theater Project we looked at, since the paper is delicate and might rip or affect the materials it’s made of. However with all archivable items, the archivist also talked about how they have to be careful with copyright issues because those can be very complex and not always straightforward. Another issue with digitizing is how archivists preserve born-digital records-texts, images, and data created digitally 2 3. In the past they’ve been able to recreate the software and hardware that the items were originally created on, but as technology advances at a faster and faster rate it’s getting harder to emulate these archives and they’re going to have to figure out another way to preserve these important items.
After looking at the archives from the Federal Theater Project I feel like I understand more about the play we looked at than before. My group analyzed the playbill for the play “The Revolt of the Beavers” which is a play for children about sharing, but many were concerned that it had communist undertones. We were able to learn a lot about the play and from each other’s analysis. One person in my group pointed out that there were pig names, and that the pigs might represent the capitalists, while the beavers represented communists and were the protagonists of the story. We also talked about how they were definitely hand folded and most were made of cheap paper which reflected the economy of the time. If we can learn that much about a play just from the playbill, it’d be interesting to see what we can learn from even more archives and more analysis.
- Padilla, Thomas. “Bias, Perception, and Archival Praxis.” Dh Lib, Dh Lib, 24 Oct. 2017, https://acrl.ala.org/dh/2017/09/13/archivalpraxis/
- Bailey, Jefferson. “The Artifactual Elements of Born-Digital Records, Part 1.” The Artifactual Elements of Born-Digital Records, Part 1 | The Signal, 28 Nov. 2011, https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2011/11/the-artifactual-elements-of-born-digital-records-part-1/
- Bailey, Jefferson. “The Artifactual Elements of Born-Digital Records, Part 2.” The Artifactual Elements of Born-Digital Records, Part II | The Signal, 28 Nov. 2011, https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2011/12/the-artifactual-elements-of-born-digital-records-part-2/
