|
Introduction:
|
Reflections
on Salvaging a Family Archives
by
Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse, State
Archivist
November, 2008, Revised June 23, 2010
This
series (series 13) was created with originals pulled as the
collection was being boxed for transfer to the Archives in the
first phase of salvaging the collection. It was intended as a
sample designed to assist in the virtual organization and
indexing of the collection. Once the collection was moved to the
Archives for the second stage of processing, this series was
supplemented by a sample of 1,000 images selected as the
collection was scanned and moved to its current series
organization in acid neutral folders and archival containers.
Both this series 13, and the image
sample of the rest of the collection, were then used to
assist in the design of the indexing and virtual organization of
the collection which is the ongoing final phase of providing
public access.
My introduction to the collection of historical
records at Poplar Grove Plantation in Queen Anne's County,
Maryland, came with a call from Adam Goodheart, Director of the
Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at
Washington College. He told me that a few years ago in the
course of a fascinating archaelogical field study of a Queen
Anne's county plantation slave cabin, family papers had been
discovered in the plantation house. At the time an
effort was made to assess the content of the collection, but time
and resources were limited, and not much progress was made.
Since then the owner, James Wood, had become
increasingly concerned about the collection, and welcomed
advice on what to do. Adam asked if I could spare a day to
visit the collection and offer some suggestions.
I met
Adam and James at Poplar Grove on a beautiful day in May, 2008.
It was clear from what we had time to sample that the
surviving records were a treasure trove relating largely to the
antebellum history of Maryland and the Nation, as well as to the
economic history of the region throughout much of the 19th
century. In one out building we even found an extensive
collection of records kept by one member of the family who
prospected for minerals in Guiana in the first half of the
20th century. The records were not in the best of shape
and called for immediate attention to prevent any futher loss and
deterioration.
I suggested a plan to James and Adam. If
the Starr Center could come up with matching funds for four
summer interns and recruit the interns from Washington College
and the family, I would devise a salvage and management plan,
provide a place to process and house the collection, and supply
half the money for the interns from the Archives of Maryland fund
of the Maryland State Archives.
We were exceptionally
fortunate in the selection of the Poplar Grove Project staff.
Washington College supplied Albin Kowalewski, who was chosen to
coordinate and manage the project under my supervision, James
Schelberg, who was drawn to the collection because of the
significant amount of material relating to a Civil War general,
and Jeremy Rothwell, who knows everyone in Queen Anne's County
and the surrounding area, as well as having a deep appreciation
of agricultural history. We were doubly fortunate in the
family's suggestion for the internship in Olivia Wood. She
not only brought a high level of enthusiasm and family knowledge
to the team, but also her close relationship with her
grandmother, author of an excellent book, My Darling Alice,
inspired by correspondence her grandmother found in the
collection, helped us all to better appreciate the cultural
and literary value of what we were finding.
In all the
internship was satisfying on all fronts. The interns
presented their findings at a well-attended conference at
Washington College on November 24, 2008. They moved the
audience with the high quality of their reports, as did James
Wood with his closing reflections on serendipity and entropy as
it related to his unexpected inheritance of Poplar Grove and its
contents.
The Poplar Grove project gave me the opportunity
to put into action ideas that I had formulated over many years
about how to most effectively process and make permanently
accessible a large collection of family papers quickly and
economically. Because the collection was in such disarray
and presented a wide range of conservation issues including mold,
mouse droppings, and even the presence of a decomposing dead dog,
it was clearly a worst case scenario fraught with a wide range of
challenges, perhaps only exciting to an Archivist, but definitely
worth the effort, especially as a model for the future of
collection management.
The first stage of processing was
to flatten, folder, and box the collection as quickly as
possible, removing the papers from the peach baskets, lard tins,
attic trunks, out building attics, and second floor heaps in
which they were found, and placing them in absorbent folders that
would remove any unwanted moisture and dry out the paper.
This
first stage was a simple, not a terribly pleasant one, yet
one filled with the 'aha's' of discovery that kept us going
through several days of the very hottest weather of the summer.
Thanks to James Wood, the owner, who installed an air conditioner
in the kitchen of the plantation house where we worked, it was
bearable. For the most part, we kept the papers in the
disorder they were found, placing them in highly absorbant
(cheap) folders, with as many as 6-10 flattened
documents per folder, and placing the folders in a standard, one
cubic foot, record center box, lined with a clear plastic
garbage bag. As we foldered and boxed, a limited
number of selected items that helped explain the character and
extent of the collection were pulled and placed in this separate
series for appraisal purposes. The sample here included the
first items in the collection to be addressed in the second stage
of processing, and among the first to be scanned and placed on
line.
To get to the comfort of our processing office as
quickly as possible, we worked at a fast pace. Adam joined
us as much as he could and was forever encouraging us to look
more closely at the scraps and nooks and crannies for more, when
we were sure that we had salvaged all that could be kept from
recycling. Generally he was right, but at last we did
manage to take under our charge almost every salvageable
scrap of record remaining at Poplar Grove. We were
pleasantly interrupted a few times by the press which took a
great interest in our work and gave the project national
publicity, which the Starr Center in turn reflected in a
very popular Project Blog to which we all, in some measure
contributed articles.
In the end we moved over
80 record center boxes and over-sized containers to
the Archives processing center (a commercial warehouse, the
address for which we do not make publicly available for security
reasons).
The rest of the first 10 week summer internship
was spent in the comfort of the warehouse office sorting,
re-foldering into acid neutral folders placed in archival storage
boxes, and scanning the papers in their sort sequence. The
collection was sorted into series that seemed, from the appraisal
selection and our initial boxing experience, to make the most
sense for the overall management of the collection. For
Poplar Grove that generally meant sorting by principal recipient
or person most likely to have been associated with keeping the
records. We did not intend to spend a great deal of time doing
more than making a best guess at series sorting and keeping the
results in as good chronological order as possible. Little
time was meant to be spent on refinement of sorting. The
idea was to provide a simple, logical framework for the gross
management of the collection, employing elementary conservation
techniques as we went along. For example, the cheap folders
for the intial boxing absorbed much of the unwanted moisture and
helped flatten the papers. The sorting and re-foldering was
accompanied by elementary cleaning, and scanning of as much of
the contents as the time of the ten week internship
permitted. The work of refined cataloging, description, and
indexing would be left to the virtual reality of the web based
inventorying, transcribing, and editing programs which I had
designed.
As part of the proof of product of the
internship, Olivia Wood had the dual responsibility of testing
our new approach to on-line transcription and editing of
collections, the pilot for which is http://editonline.us. While
the project staff did most of the scanning, the Archives
staff (in the person of Erin Cacye, a former MSA intern)
scanned the first series, a collection that was found very early
on in the bottom of a nearly empty trunk in the bee infested
attic of Poplar Grove. As discoveries were made by interns and
staff, stories were written for the Poplar Grove blog, such as
the entry
on the documents relating to the Eastern Shore Railroad. The
mouse eaten original map, it turns out, does exist in print and
has been placed on line in its
printed form by the library of Congress. Eventually all
the scans of the collection will be accessible through this pilot
editing and transcription project, enlisting as much free help on
line as possible in transcribing the contents of the collection.
Once all but the fragments of paper had been placed in
archival acid free folders and boxes, the Assistant Director of
Special Collections at the Maryland State Archives, Maria Day,
labeled the boxes, counted the folders, and described the
collection to the box or book level in our Special Collections
cataloguing system. Her cataloguing work can be found on
line at the Maryland State Archives web site as Special
Collections MSA SC 5807, the James Wood Poplar Grove Collection.
There it is linked to the ebooks of the papers themselves
which I produced in the evenings and on weekends on my home
computer as my personal contribution to getting the project on
line.
In doing so, I intentionally used a very simple
ebook approach written in Perl that I had devised for my own
electronic publications. The Perl programs produce a
static, as opposed to a dynamic, ebook. Dynamic ebooks are
generally created on the fly utilizing database/table driven
systems such as sql or Oracle and pose massively expensive future
problems of management and deployment. I believe that this
static ebook approach is all that an individual or
struggling historical society can afford, and that it makes the
product, the resulting html based ebook, as close to
platform and operating system independent as possible in the
rapidly changing and volatile world of electronic information.
The second summer's program (again in partnership
with Washington College) continued the processing and imaging of
the collection) and this summer one intern supported by
Washington College, is placing the ebooks for all series on
line.
By the end of the summer, 2010, all of the scanning
of the Poplar Grove collection will be complete and on line as
images. As a rule of thumb in 2010 dollars, it cost about
$250 an archival box usually called a clamshell (a legal sized
acid neutral box approximately 5" by 15") to
process, folder, scan and place its contents on line, and
about a cent a page per year to maintain it live on the web.
In all there are 83 clamshells plus 73 titles of books and
several boxes of unidentified scraps.
The next phase of processing, which will be begun
this summer, is to provide topic/index access to the collection
that leads directly to the images in the collection, and
transcriptions by anyone who wishes to help further access and
use of the collection through whole text indexing. As time and
resources permit, a virtual index and traditionally organized
access to the collection (topical, chronological, name, and
place) will be provided on line using such open source tools as
Zotero.
While this approach to processing and 'indexing' a
collection is the least expensive and most efficient way to
provide effective public access, it requires public support
beyond the meager resources of any historical society and most
public archives, including the Maryland State Archives. To
preserve and make accessible the archival treasures of the State,
support must come through funding from granting agencies and from
the interested public in the form of contributions both in time
and money.
Tax exempt contributions for the support of this
and other processing projects can be made to the non-profit
support group of the Archives known as the Friends of the
Maryland State Archives, c/o the Maryland State Archives, 350
Rowe Boulevard, Annapolis, MD 21401.
|
