Every so often I escape the bubble of my life and am reminded that my experiences and interests, both personally and professionally, may not be understood by those around me. The latest occurrence was the last Saturday before the 2013 Academy of Certified Archivists test as I returned a University of Maryland Libraries book, Kate Theimer’s Web 2.0: Tools and Strategies for Archives and Local History Collections via the United States Postal Service. The book, only recently acquired on my behalf by a friend with borrowing privileges, was recalled moments after the hold was placed and due the 13th. I would not be at the College Park campus until the 14th so I shipped it.
“I didn’t know they still had those,” the postal worker quipped as I removed the book from the unsealed package to demonstrate its media mail worthiness. Since there was no one behind me in line, we talked for several minutes. As one would expect from someone in the paper-based delivery service he was aware the Internet had a profound effect on existing information paradigms like libraries. He appreciated my remark that the book was about using the Internet for organizations that, to him at least, hoarded analog materials not disseminated over the Web. Clearly he was a little unclear about what exactly archives do. The line at the Post Office is hardly the place to have this discussion and, doing what I could in limited time, I do not think he appreciated the nuances between libraries and archives or how they use the Internet.
For the past two months I spent much of my time studying for the ACA test. Since I was educated in a program with classes devoted to entire domains of the examination, I studied for the domains in which I was weakest and reviewed my old lecture and reading notes. In these notes I remembered the marveling, almost reverential exposure to a previously un-nuanced interpretation of what archives were. This was especially true for the first classes I took as a special student to grease the wheels in my library school application. It was obvious, even through reading my notes, that I was undergoing a transformation.
Sadly, it is impossible and undesirable for everyone to have the experience and skill-sets to understand what archives really are. True enough there are communities of social media savvy archivists on Twitter, Tumblr, facebook etc (including the erudite Kate Theimer) outside of institutional profiles but only other archivists find them funny. A great example is the #whatshouldwecallarchives Tumblr of captioned GIFs expressing common joys, fears, and general snarkiness most of us experience at some point.
What does that leave for the rest of the populace? The only concise article on this subject that I’m aware of us Arlene Schmuland’s The Archival Image in Fiction: An Analysis and Annotated Bibliography in American Archivist, Spring 1999. Armchair popular geopolitics is a hobby of mine. Whether it is spotting Samwell Tarly in A Clash of Kings reading in the Night’s Watch library (really an archive) and geeking out over ledgers that could be used to determine Castle Black’s population hundreds of years ago, or Gul Dukat using B’joran records to prove a point on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, I really enjoy seeing how archives are presented to the masses anecdotally or as major plot points. What is more common however are archives reference in the news.
Most recently my girlfriend Esther enjoyed an article circulating on social media. It was a Guardian UK piece from March 2012 concerning forgotten or alternate versions of fairy tales of the variety the Grimm Brothers (and subsequently Disney) popularized. She thought it might please me but I could tell just by the title—“Five hundred new fairytales discovered in Germany”—that it would be unpleasant. It seems these fairy tales were “locked away in an archive…for over 150 years” in a collection by a local historian named Franz Xaver von Schoenwerth. It seems Herr von Schoenwerth more faithfully transcribed the works he collected and published them in a book of all things from 1857 to 1859. Unfortunately the volumes were not popular and the man faded into obscurity until perhaps 2008 when a cultural curator named Erika Eichenseer founded a society dedicated to propagating his work and re-publishing/translating his work.
While I am not one to discourage words like “discovery” or “hidden” to describe previously buried or unnoticed facts or crucial documents in archival collections, I nevertheless wonder if the materials were ever truly was “locked away” as the article claimed. The manuscripts were published in three, albeit unpopular, books, and stored in “an archive in Regensburg, Germany.” Given the 150 year chain of custody I suspect the archive was public or semi-public or else the article would talk of a private library instead of an archive. And although I am not familiar with German pre-Internet archival and rare book guides and catalogs I suspect the collection of books were at least indexed decades ago just waiting for a researcher. Instead, or at least as the article would have us believe, a curator named Eichenseer was attracted to the published collection and is bringing its content to the masses.
Whether out of genuine affection for the work, a compelling outreach motivation, or both, Frau Eichenseer is building off existing materials and in so doing promoting her institution. It is all very brilliant and surely Herr von Schoenwerth’s contribution to preserving folk tales with little to no artistic license should be commended if not celebrated. This is a manufactured re-discovery of material that was not lost physically or intellectually—it simply slipped society’s mind that these three volumes were useful because (perhaps) the fabulous Grimm Brothers were better marketers.
As well it should the article spends a fair bit of time describing examples of fairy tales contained in the title but not enough asking the question of why these treasures might have been forgotten in the first place. Would that the postal worker musing about the state of books, ignorant of the efforts of archives and libraries to adapt in an exponentially growing digital age, and the Guardian reporter, unwittingly perpetuating the image of archives as places where potentially valuable information is “locked away,” the state of archives in the world would not be so Grimm.
Counterfactual Archivist 