Typewriters, T-Shirts, and Pins—Oh My!

Abstract

In a 1951 article for The American Archivist on applying documentary research methods to historic sites and buildings, Samuel Porter wrote of the need to expand our ideas about what constitutes a documentary source, even to those “perhaps never utilized by the historian before.” In particular, he points out that “artifacts... are also documents and should be used together with written documents to give the complete historical picture.” Another author, writing ten years later on how artifacts and archives can mutually enhance one another in the context of an exhibit on the history of a business, expressed the hope that the “close relationship between exhibit and archival materials may, in a very general fashion, provide archivists with an angle of attack on the problem of what to do with museum items that find their way into [their] collections.” Despite the passage of more than half a century, the question of artifacts in archives continues to vex and challenge us at every point of the archival life cycle. From a physical standpoint, “archives typically do not possess the environment, supplies, and space suitable to properly preserve artifacts... [and] because a three dimensional object’s content, context, and structure may not be as easily determinable as traditional formats of archival records, archivists are at a loss for applying appraisal theories to artifacts.” From a technical standpoint, processing artifacts is more time-consuming and description more difficult. While “[p]roviding bare-bones traditional metadata for these items is analogous to delegating them to the backlog shelves of yesteryear... neither the library management system nor the third-party catalog enhancement market currently provides a good solution to this problem.” Finally, from a personal standpoint, as archivists we simply prefer dealing with material in the aggregate. We are confident when confronted with fifty boxes of papers and photographs, but fifty cartons of plastic artifacts ranging from flatware and toys to auto parts, lawn flamingoes, and medical equipment is likely to fall well out of our comfort zone. And yet the integration of artifacts into our archives is increasingly recognized as important, not only for historical context but also for the researcher experience. Since “archives privilege written documents, we also can see how quickly ‘primary [source]’ becomes equated with textual archival documentation, which is certainly only one approach to historical memory and representation.” Archival theory, too, has wrestled with this question in the past decade or so. Helen Samuels has suggested that by emphasizing form over substance and by ceding non-paper formats such as artwork, music, objects, and published materials to other types of institutions, archives have missed the opportunity to create a richer documentary record; indeed, Duranti and others have argued that the concept of the “archival bond,” defined as “[t]he interrelationships between a record and other records resulting from the same activity,” can and should be extended to artifacts. When we perform the activities of selection, appraisal, and preservation we are deeming some items archivable and others unarchivable, a conferring of status that has too often relegated non-paper-based formats to the latter category. By deliberately choosing to archive the ‘unarchivable’, we have the