Return to Origins: Processing the Museum’s Early Administrative Archives
by AMNH on
Overview
The Early Administrative Archives is a seminal collection of official correspondence preceding the foundation of the Museum through its first decades (1864-1905). Together, these letters resound with the nascent, elastic energy of the Museum’s early life. Now researchers can discover for the first time letters from anthropologists reporting from expeditions, impassioned negotiations with contractors and city officials, vendors advertising furs, gems, and other “curios,” scientists and scholars inquiring from abroad, budding museums looking for guidance, and endless requests from curious New Yorkers seeking free lecture tickets.
As with most archival processing projects, the effort is to create an intuitive, browsable catalog which patrons can peruse online and request to consult in-person. And, as is typical of these sorts of projects, the collection did not arrive resembling anything close to this neat archival ideal. Instead, it existed as two physically distinct, unprocessed collections of uncertain provenance. These two parts would ultimately need to be reconciled to create one concise, browsable whole.
On one hand, the Early Administrative Files comprised around 7,500 individual letters that Museum volunteers logged on a spreadsheet over the course of decades. For each item, a volunteer had noted the sender, receiver, date, letterhead information, and a brief description of the letter’s contents—a rich amount of data given the heft of the collection. However, like all new acquisitions, these items arrived at the archive lacking much of the physical support that protects a fully processed archival collection; as such, many of the letters were under threat of becoming severely warped, frayed, and curled. Moreover, roughly 1,000 of these items appeared first to be missing (but were eventually resolved to be simply misfiled or duplicated in the spreadsheet).
The second half of the collection was referred to as the Early Administrative Archives. These items were organized by year and then, within each year, alphabetically by sender’s last name. (For instance, a letter to John H. Winser from Franz Boas in April of 1897 would be in the “1897 — B” folder). Many of these folders were over-stuffed, and there was no digital inventory listing the senders or receivers of these letters.
There was no evident distinction between the types of content that lived in Early Administrative Files and Early Administrative Archives; the division appeared to be arbitrary, and it was our hope to discover information on the records’ early provenance and custodial history to reveal how—if at all—they related to one another.
Either way, the task would be twofold: to offer physical support for these items which were in imminent need of care, and to gain intellectual control over the collection by describing its contents and adding that information to our database.
Physical Support
The first task was to address the precarious physical state of the collection. Most of the “missing” items were found in what was colloquially dubbed the “chaos zone” (that as-yet unprocessed middle ground on our shelves) and returned to their proper place in the sequence. Next, the entire Early Administrative Files collection was rehoused into acid-free folders marked with item number ranges and then nestled securely within fresh, numbered boxes. The collection spreadsheet was updated to reflect their new locations.
Arrangement
Every archival collection requires some sort of arrangement. This might closely resemble how the materials looked when they arrived at the archive (for instance, their former owner might have had their own filing system with labels like “Drafts of essays,” “Financial records,” or “Family photographs”) or be imposed by an archivist if no organization is apparent. Still other times, as is the case with the Early Administrative Archives project, the archive’s current arrangement is the result of previous archivists’ intervention and decisions.
Taking into consideration previous work on these collections, and our own one-year time constraint for the Early Administrative Archives project, the decision was made to keep the two collections physically separate but merge their metadata into a unified, browsable catalogue. This would ensure that the collection was not further broken from its original order, should any additional clues about its provenance emerge; it would also enable the addition of future deeper description.
As such, a subseries was created for every year included in the merged collection; within each subseries are nested folders with ranges of sender names (borrowed from the Early Administrative Archive collection). Finally, within some of these folders, the “items” imported from the Early Administrative Files spreadsheet data are nested. The result is a complete collection, easily browsable by year and sender’s last name, with some items described at the item level.
Looking forward
Tough decisions must continually be made by archivists as they carry out their work. What is retained; what should be offered for return or discarded? What’s the most logical structure for a collection so that a user can intuitively browse it? What’s important enough to digitize or emphasize with more elaborate description? In the case of the Early Administrative Archives, the toughest decision was to not read and summarize every letter—in no small part because of their compelling content! Given the one-year timeline of the project, this sort of treatment was unfeasible. Importantly, however, the stage has been set for further, deeper iterations of work on the collection.
Stay tuned for future posts featuring dazzling letterheads and curious threads uncovered in the collection. The Early Administrative Archives will go live