Slides from Monday, Jan. 29
Everyone should read ALL of the articles. However, spend more time on the articles assigned to your group (below) and spend 15-20 minutes exploring the digital archive you were assigned to. What do you notice about it? How is it organized? Post your quote, comment and question and consider the digital archive in your post.
Post-Custodial Approach: James, Lauren, Will, Zack, Liam and Alyssa
García Márquez Archive: Jesse, Jon, Al, Noa, Anya, Rose
Check out this Q&A: The U.S. Has Way Too Many Secrets
Quote: “Although the Ransom Center has released the sales prices of literary manuscripts in the past, it is common practice for both public and private universities not to release such information. Colleagues have in fact criticized the Ransom Center in the past for sharing the sometimes considerable prices it has paid for collections because they feel it has driven up costs for other repositories. Purchase price certainly is information of a sensitive nature, possibly both to the authors and the universities. To date there has not been an indication of whether the source used was public or private funds. If the funding is from a private donor(s), UT may be seen as behaving ethically towards the donors who gave them the resources to help them build their collections.” (SAA Statement)
Comment: I chose this quote for a number of reasons. First, I think it considers the dilemma the Harry Ransom Center faces in releasing the price in a fair view. Second I think it poses an excellent ethical question of who funded the purchase of the archive and whether that justifies the Centers decision to not release the price. These are both excellent and relevant points from the perspective of a professional archivist in America. Lastly, I picked this quote because I think its ironic and a little sad that there is a huge debate about the transparency of a purchase price in Texas of an archive of personal belongings of a foreign renowned author who the New York Times described as a “strong critic of American imperialism who was banned from entry to the United States for decades” and a “friend of Fidel Castro.”
Question: How has the Ransom Center tracked the provenance of the collection?
Quote: “Project staff… provided consultation, digitization equipment, and archival training in preservation, arrangement, description, and digitization of vulnerable archives. Partner institutions prioritized the collections to be included in the project, conducted the digitization work, and provided descriptive information about the materials” (Polk).
Comment: I like how the Latin American Digital Initiatives website really puts the documents front and center in their digital archive. Without even having to click on a specific collection, the website immediately tells readers about the documents’ physical repository, format, inclusive dates, and geographic area. Just one click on each collection will provide the reader with more information about the languages and extent of the collection. In fact, anyone on the website cannot access a collection without first seeing information about the documents themselves. This really shows the creators of this archive were thinking archivally and placing the documents at the center of their work. It is also notable that the website has a Spanish translation which is accessible from the homepage. This increases the archive’s accessibility.
Question: Why did UT decide to physically transport Garcia Marquez’ collection to the United States rather than take a more post-custodial approach?
“According to the Society of American Archivists, the post- custodial theory of archives envisions that ‘archivists will no longer physically acquire and maintain records, but that they will provide management oversight for records that will remain in the custody of the record creators.'” (LLILAS, 2)
I think that for the most part this should be the goal of modern day archivists. While maintaining the original owner’s custody of the sources, filling the purpose of what I believe an archive, making the information available to the general public ideal. The converse argument, which I think has a lot of validity, is it that the owners may not have the resources to keep the primary sources in environments that ensure their longevity. The consent of the producers of the sources to release the information included to anyone that wants to access it is also important. The text also discusses providing the sources in the context they they were produced in becomes difficult when separated from that context. However, I believe just copying the sources actually gives more opportunity to place them in original context because you are not limited with which physical copies you have on site.
Who do you think has the most responsibility to produce an accessible archive, the original producers and owners or a outside entity that has the resources to produce and potentially fill its potential? How does original ownership come into play in archives, especially in marginalized communities where ownership of history is even more emphasized?
“According to the Code of Ethics, archivists demonstrate professional integrity, ensuring trust in their decisions. Secrecy in archival processes such as acquisitions may be harmful to the public’s trust and in turn, raise doubts regarding an institution’s professionalism.” (SAA Committee on Ethics and Professional Conduct Report)
This quote comes from the Committee on Ethics and Professional Conduct of the SAA in response to UT’s Harry Ransom Center not initially revealing the price or details of the contract in acquiring the Gabriel Garcia Marquez archives. I thought it was fascinating to see a discussion of secrecy within archival processes at the highest professional level of archivists, particularly given our class discussions today. It was cool to see that these conversations are very much still alive within the archival field today. This quote seems to say that secrecy on the part of archivists, the collections, or the institutions that hold them can delegitimize the archival documents themselves.
Is secrecy *always* dangerous in archival situations? Even Gabriel Garcia Marquez said at one point that he didn’t necessarily want all of his personal writings to be available to the world. Perhaps there is something to be said for secrecy on the part of cultural figures whose archives we so desperately want access to, if not for secrecy in their holding institutions?
“Other collection additions include a carbon typescript of García Márquez’s ‘El coronel no tiene quien le escribe’ (‘No One Writes to the Colonel’), handwritten notes on personalized notecards, typed letters and a copy of ‘El general en su laberinto’ (‘The General in His Labyrinth’) with more than a dozen emendations in the author’s hand.
‘Archives are very organic things that evolve and grow,’ said Enniss. ‘Implicit in that is a responsibility to continue to add successive material that complements and extends the archive. The opening of the García Márquez archive on the UT Austin campus is not the end of the story; it’s just the beginning’” (Gabriel García Márquez Archive
Opens for Research on October 21).
The two of these paragraphs placed next to each other made me think about the evolution of an archive, and how there are differences when the author creates the evolution rather than the archivists. I think in the case of Marquez, we have so much material that just by sheer numbers of documents, Marquez has been given the opportunity to write his own story: with more items to use for corroboration, it’s less likely that researchers will have to scramble to tie together loose ends than if they had fewer documents.
This quote also brings to mind education for me: my junior year of high school, we had to read “El coronel no tiene quien le escribe” for Spanish IV, and while it helped my Spanish, I really didn’t get what was happening save the fact that their son was unfairly killed for being a rebel. Despite that, I think getting broad idea education about global issues from multiple disciplines helped a lot in terms of creating curriculums that can teach archival thinking. I thought it was really cool to hear Anya talk about how Chile and Argentina’s treatment of dictatorships in education, and feel like it’s a shame to discuss archival thinking as something that can only start in college.
How could these documents (and others like them) be used in elementary/middle/high school education curriculums? What disciplines could use them and why?
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s online archive through the University of Texas can be accessed by anyone with internet. The collection is filled with pieces ranging from photos of the author to his letters to pieces of his writing. Altogether, the archive is 39 pages of documents. According to tonight’s reading, only about half the Marquez’s pieces are in the online archive. The collection is very well labeled and categorized. One may guess that this organization is due to the fame that the archive bears.
“When Gabriel García Márquez’s archive was sold to the University of Texas two years ago, some decried the fact that the literary remains of Latin America’s foremost novelist — and a fierce critic of American imperialism — had come to rest in the United States.”
When considering the placement of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s archive, I believe that it makes the most sense that his writings were placed at the University of Texas. By making a large portion of the collection accessible to the global public, one is able to infer that Marquez’s family believed that the author’s writings were created to live well past their lifetime. Because Marquez was such a harsh critic of American imperialism, I believe that it is fitting that an American educational institution can use his ideas to further educate the author’s points. Do you agree? What would be a better place for this archive?
“Furthermore, human rights documentation is particularly sensitive.” (LLIAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, 2)
I’ve often wondered what my reaction would be to be upon seeing a familiar name in a human rights atrocity record of some kind. It is very hard for me to imagine something like this, because whenever we read anything for class the names and the places seem far off. As a reader, I couldn’t be more disconnected from them. As a result, I have to say I’ve never really given enough serious thought to the idea of protecting victim’s identities when they appear in the record.
For example, I remember reading, in class, a series of reports about victims killed by the government of one of the South American dictatorships we studied. The report was published by UNICEF and listed all of the victims’ names and the ways which they died. I’m not sure how I’d react to seeing one of my family members names in a report of that kind. Ultimately, I do see the importance of publishing the names like that and publicizing the crime. However, all of this is getting to my question of: Is/ should there be some kind of system that searches for family members approval upon publishing their names and the record of how they died?
“When Gabriel García Márquez’s archive was sold to the University of Texas two years ago, some decried the fact that the literary remains of Latin America’s foremost novelist — and a fierce critic of American imperialism — had come to rest in the United States. But now, the university’s Harry Ransom Center has digitized and made freely available about half of the collection, making some 27,000 page scans and other images visible to anyone in the world with an internet connection.” (Schuessler)
I took this quote directly from the first couple of lines in the NYT article by Schuessler (which I found to be generally well-written, aside from what I’m about to write about) because I think that they point to a systemic issue in archival science that we haven’t even come close to addressing. Inasmuch as now, more than ever, it is possible to conduct an entire research project without ever leaving your desk, we tend to think of digitization as something that can transcend concerns of physicality: Of location, of condition, and even of access. Once something’s online, its electronic and fundamentally nonexistent format takes precedence over its physical existence. This, I think, is the trap that Schuessler falls into. If you look carefully at her writing as I have pasted it above, it’s clear that there’s a change in tone when the topic turns to digitization. This change in tone is made even more dramatic by the fact that, in the original article, there was a paragraph break. Indeed, Schuessler seems to treat digitization as a phenomenon whereby even basic archival concerns such as provenance can fall by the wayside. She starts her discussion of digitization with the word “but,” as if refuting the all-too-real concerns of neo-imperialism embedded within the decision to relocate the documents in question to America. I will grant that the article does go on to discuss some issues with digitization–namely estate claims–but these opening two paragraphs just left a bad taste in my mouth.
Question: It is true that digitization expands access and does a better job of publicizing a document than any physical institution ever could. With that said, what risks do we run when we treat digitization as an unequivocally positive, all-mending force?
“Project staff encountered challenges and sensitivities that led us to think through how to adapt our work to particular contexts, and highlighted the value of keeping the post-custodial methodology flexible” (LLILAS Benson 6).
This statement encompasses the purpose of this piece to explain how the company has have adapted and changed the archival process. They have attempted to stay as flexible as possible in order to find the best solution in maintaining each archive. In trying to build a method while still staying flexible, they found some questions that were persistent with all of the archives. One is that they have to build a significant amount of trust with any organization they are working with since their material is still vulnerable. Building this trust allows them access and allows them greater freedom to do what they need with the archive. They also learned that since they are working with human rights organizations, they have to know some documents still should not be open to the public and therefore will not be open to the public. However, there has to be some give between both the organizations and the archivists in order to make an agreement like this work.
Question: What types of documents are these human rights organizations still holding back? Do they ever actually plan on releasing them?
“García Márquez, like many writers, claimed not to bother much with reviews, especially negative ones. But the archive includes a number of scrapbooks which carefully compile — and sometimes privately respond to — reviews of his work in many different languages” (Schuessler).
I went onto the archive to find this compiled scrapbook of critiques. The archives here tell us a story contrary to that that García Márquez constructed of himself, in whatever small way.
My question mirrors James’s: “Why did UT decide to physically transport García Márquez’s collection to the United States rather than take a more post-custodial approach?”
UT has an astounding collection of archives of a variety of authors, and their acquisition of García Márquez makes sense: an expansion of their already impressive archives, in an institution that presumably knows how to care for them. How significant is the fact that the university lies within the US? Does the value of the institutional knowledge and resources outweigh the tensions with the US throughout García Márquez’s lifetime? Did he leave instructions for his archives? It seems as if they may have been a possibility due to his foresight in keeping records (or lack thereof). How can the institution ensure they provide an unbiased, not skewed view of the archives in their innate American-ness?
Quotes: “In other words, rather than the traditional archival practice of physically taking custody of records and maintaining them in a distant repository, archivists provide consultation and support on archival practice, allowing records to remain where they are created and used.” – LLILAS, Identifying Post Custodial Partners in Latin America, 1
“When Gabriel García Márquez’s archive was sold to the University of Texas two years ago, some decried the fact that the literary remains of Latin America’s foremost novelist — and a fierce critic of American imperialism — had come to rest in the United States.” Schuessler, 2017
Comment: The first quote listed above is LLILAS’ succinct description of post-custodial theory, while the second exemplifies one of the problems of “the traditional archival practice of physically taking custody.” On the Latin American Digital Archives, I noticed that the University of Texas Libraries is attributed as one of the leading sponsors of the project. Their participation in post-custodial practice through the LLILAS archive is at ideological odds with their purchase of Márquez’s archive, the purchase of which indicates ulterior incentives for archivists–or, at least their administrators–to continue to strive to physical possession of artifacts and that would undermine efforts at post-custodial theory. In the video on the Márquez collection, this point of the benefit of physically having artifacts is elaborated on as Texas staff describe the artifacts’ ability to attract visitors and to build prestige. Perhaps post-custodial theory and traditional archival practice are not completely exclusive in the interest of increasing access–but there’s definitely a matter of money and power involved in saying who gets that physical access, and I would argue that simultaneously practicing both is not really practicing post-custodial theory.
Question: Is it possible/not hypocritical to combine archival theories?
“Even with these additional criteria, we learned that scaling the exercise to collections documenting human rights in the Latin American region still remained too conceptually broad. A preliminary pass at developing an inventory of human rights collections in Guatemala alone, based on scholar recommendations, secondary literature, online research, and staff knowledge of the local context, yielded a list of well over 500 organizations holding collections of potential interest. ”
The sheer volume of human history is astounding. Being the major global influence on the world in terms of species, everything we do leaves a footprint on the pages of history. The only problem being, how can we narrow down our criteria for what is included in the documentation, and thus the legacy, of the human species. Clearly, it takes plenty of man-power, perseverance, but also a sense of knowing why you are preserving history.
Question: what is the single-most impactful event on modern day that was never recorded?