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Posted on by Alison Langmead

What Are Archives?

Ever wondered what archivists do? This Co-Learning Encounter covers the basics of how professionals tend to archives, both physical and digital. The encounter is not intended to teach you how to become a professional record keeper, but it will (a) help you better understand your visits to archives (in North America and Europe); and (b) may give you an understanding of what professional techniques might be helpful to you in your own practice, and which, definitively, would not!

What Are Archives?

A Co-Learning Encounter designed by Kate Joranson and Alison Langmead

Proposed Schedule of Topics

Unit 1 The Construction of the Archive(s)
Unit 2 Care of/in the Archives
Unit 3 The Archival Turn/Turning to Archives 
Unit 4 Being in the Archives

Time Commitment Requested

Asynchronous Engagement

About 15 hours total

 Synchronous Engagement

About 12 hours total

Foundational Learning Foci

  • What are the basic principles of professional archives?
  • How does the ‘Archival Turn’ in the humanities relate to archival practice?
  • How does one behave in an archives?
  • How does library practice differ from archival practice?
  • Topics that professional archivists thinking about right now in their work, for example:
    • Post-Custodial Practice
    • Affect in the Archives and Trauma in the Archives
    • De-Colonizing the Archives
  • What might all of this mean for you, as an individual collector, in your own collections management practice?

Asynchronous Efforts

In these Co-Learning Encounters (CLEs), we try to balance asynchronous projects that function as the touchstone, or the baseline drone, of the work we are doing together. For this CLE, there are three such projects, each of which use a different modality of engagement: hands-on practice, academic research and reading, and meta-cognitive reflection. As we work through the units in time, your work on these asynchronous engagements will grow and change, serving as the touchstone for your ongoing learning process. By the end of this CLE, these projects will not only serve as a record of your work in this experience, but also possibly take up on ongoing role in your career.

1. Tending to Your Collections

Just as the desktop computer made us all our own typists, digital computing and digitization processes have also made academics our own collections managers. For this Co-Learning Encounter, let’s all practice as we learn, and use practice as a form of learning.

We would like to encourage you to identify a collection of materials in your possession that you will use as a hands-on laboratory for this CLE. Ideally, it will be a group of (information) objects that mean something to you and that could stand more of your mindful stewardship to make them into a useful, functioning collection. 

Personal documents or professional records, a set of images on your hard drive or a box of paper photographs, twenty bankers boxes filled with notes in your garage or an entire hard drive filled with Word documents, PDFs and/or things you cannot identify…it doesn’t much matter the shape or size of the materials, what matters is that they are in your possession and you would like to take care of them.

We offer the following classic articles in an effort to give a little shape to the work that goes into creating individual archives and introduce you to the complex relationship between individual and professional recordkeeping and collections management practices. That they seem dated cannot be denied, but it is our hope that the necessary distancing this time-separation engenders during your reading might allow you to better see the nuggets of good advice in hindsight, and get less caught up in assuming that these professionals are telling you anything you necessarily should do. We promise you that they hold excellent information. Use what you know about the present and the past to see beyond the time-situatedness, and look for what seems to stay true no matter what.

2. Contributing to a Collection Held in Common

During the course of the synchronous meetings of this CLE, we have offered a handful of common “Content Offerings” for us to engage with together. Our contributions could be considered to constitute the grains of sand in the oyster around which this community’s pearls of resources can grow.

As this CLE progresses and you continue work on your own collection, we would like you to go out and find resources (academic articles, reliable websites, online videos, library-based resources, archival resources, etc…) related to the CLE topics and ideas that you would like to learn more about, that you find interesting, or that you feel is not yet present in our conversations. As you find them, please add the content you selected to a communal wiki-like document we have begun, and that we will refer to as “Co-Created Collection of Resources.” 

If a group of co-learners finds that they are all interested in any given constellation of ideas, we heartily recommend that you form a group and work together, perhaps on a Canvas discussion board (or the asynchronous form of communication of your choice), to build on and delve into your communal interests. We can discuss how this might work at our first synchronous meeting.

Since many of the learning foci for this CLE focus on professional archival (and library) practice, we feel it might be useful for you to have a list of the most-commonly-referenced professional journals in these professions. Their global positioning is also often worth noting, especially for the archival journals.

Archival Journals

Library Journals

3. Meta-Cognitive Reflection

Over the course of this CLE, we would like to encourage you to make a particularly conscious effort to make note of your questions and reflections on this experience, and take the time to write them out each day you engage with it, whether together, synchronously as a community or asynchronously in solitude.

We would like to encourage you to produce a summative document at the end of this CLE designed to share out what you have learned, opinions you have garnered, resources you find helpful, or any other such information that might be useful to our wider community.

Here are a few overall questions to prompt reflection, but of course, please let your own mind be your guide. What do/did you want to learn in this CLE? What are you learning/have you learned? What did you find surprising? What are you curious about? Of the things you have learned, what are you never going to do that you learned? What seems possible, and what seems impossible?

Synchronous Efforts

In this design, there are 8 synchronous sessions, each held in two, 45-minute engagement periods

Unit 1a: The Construction of Archive(s) and the Formation of Our Community

How are archives constructed as historical artifacts? What are some of the fundamental principles of professional archival work in the West? What are some of the principles of personal collection-making/archival work? What is a “record,” and does that word matter as much to you as it does to professional record keepers? Similarly, why is the word “custody” so critical to professionals, and how much should it matter to you? How do professionals decide what to keep and what to remove/destroy from their archives? Why do they have to remove anything, and do you?

Content Offerings

Framing for our work together
Framing the work of libraries and archives

Intentional Preparation

  • Select the collection you will be stewarding during this Co-Learning Encounter. What’s its name, and what does it contain? Reminder: We are all working with imperfect collections, even those who hold professional ones.
  • Reflect on your understanding of the difference between an archive and a library.
For your perusal: Possible Examples of “Archives” and “Libraries”

First Engagement

  • Discuss the plan for our 4 weeks together, including synchronous and asynchronous engagement, tending to your collections, contributing to our collection held in common, and metacognitive reflection. 
  • Introduce ourselves and the collections we are bringing to this CLE.

Second Engagement

  • Building on the content offerings and intentional preparation prompt for today, we will discuss the notions of archival and library work in the context of the collections you are stewarding. 

Unit 1b: The Construction of Archive(s)

Content Offerings

Books and/in Archives
Archival Foundations

Intentional Preparation

  • Consider these statements, and produce a tangible response in the form of your choice (film clip collage, demo, spoken word, music, essay, poem, tweet (thread), whatever calls to you):
    • Books sit on shelves and have a natural order.
    • Books are containers of information.
    • Individual books are not unique.
    • Ideas are only valuable if they are found in books.

First Engagement

  • Breakout groups will share what they produced for the intentional preparation and will develop a provocation for group discussion based on their conversation.

Second Engagement

  • Group discussion, provoked by the breakout groups’ conversations.

Unit 2a: Tending to Archives

What’s the difference between classification and cataloging? What is original order and how does it differ from provenance? Why is archival provenance different from museum provenance? How do library practices differ from archival practices? How do professional archivists represent their collections, and how might that differ from your practices? How might it be the same, and why?

Content Offerings

Library Stewardship Provocations
Archival Stewardship Provocations

Intentional Preparation

  • These content offerings sure have a lot of words in them. A lot of jargony words in places. Consider what you got out of these professional resources, and what the principles you could glean might mean for your approach to tending your collection. What does it mean to steward a collection for “common use” versus stewarding a collection for your individual use?

First Engagement

  • Group discussion of what it means to arrange, describe, and access collections, in the context of the readings for today and your intentional preparation.

Second Engagement

  • Breakout groups will discuss and share our current understandings of and desired approaches to stewarding our hands-on CLE collections.

Unit 2b: Tending to Archives

Content Offerings

  • Every co-learner will have posted resource(s) they have found to the Co-Created Collection of Resources by now. Remember: you do not need to wait until after any given meeting to post the resources you are finding interesting to the common collection!! This is an ongoing resource that should keep track of the themes and resources that this community finds important, as they come up.
  • To be prepared for our synchronous meeting, you only need to come (a) having engaged with a single resource, and (b) having reflected on the intentional preparation below. However you are, of course, more than welcome to engage with the materials found by all the co-learners in advance of our synchronous time together!

Intentional Preparation

  • Come prepared to share your thoughts on why you chose the resource(s) you chose. What intrigued you about the topic you selected? How did you find the resource(s) you are bringing to the group today? What did you learn from the whole experience, from identifying the topic through to engaging with the resource(s)? What narratives are you beginning to build around archives, collections, and their relationship to your own work?

First and Second Engagements

  • For these synchronous meetings, the co-hosts will design a customized set of interactions that both delves into the weekly topic and also allows us all to share the materials and ideas we would like to bring to the group. 

Unit 3a: The Archival Turn, or Turning to Archives

Much has been made in the scholarly humanities literature of the “archival turn.” What does that look like from the archivist’s point of view? What, actually, is the archival turn?

Content Offerings

“Humanists” Theorize Archives
  • Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” in Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, 1-24 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
  • Kate Eichhorn, “Introduction,” in The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order, 1-23 (Temple University Press, 2013).
“Archivists” Theorize Archives

Intentional Preparation

  • Did you come to this CLE with an understanding of what the “archival turn” is? If so, what informed your prior understanding and, indeed, what was that understanding? If you did not come so equipped, consider what you have come to understand about “the archival turn” given these few content offerings? What might it mean for you and your academic work, and you and your CLE collection?

First Engagement

  • Breakout groups will document what the “archival turn” seems to constitute for them–they needn’t agree! We ask, however, that they make a record of their conversation, and come prepared to posit possible meaningful impacts of this turn.

Second Engagement

  • Group discussion around the impact that the “archival turn” has had (or might someday have) on the members of our community.

Unit 3b: The Archival Turn, or Turning to Archives

Content Offerings

  • Every co-learner will have posted the resource(s) they have found to the Co-Created Collection of Resources. Remember: you do not need to wait until after any given meeting to post the resources you are finding interesting to the common collection!! This is an ongoing resource that should keep track of the themes and resources that this community finds important, as they come up.
  • To be prepared for our synchronous meeting, you only need to come (a) having engaged with a single resource, and (b) having reflected on the intentional preparation below. However you are, of course, more than welcome to engage with the materials found by all the co-learners in advance of our synchronous time together!

Intentional Preparation

  • Come prepared to share your thoughts on why you chose the resource(s) you chose. What intrigued you about the topic you selected? How did you find the resource(s) you are bringing to the group today? What did you learn from the whole experience, from identifying the topic through to engaging with the resource(s)? What narratives are you beginning to build around archives, collections, and their relationship to your own work?

First and Second Engagements

  • For these synchronous meetings, the co-hosts will design a customized set of interactions that both delves into the weekly topic and also allows us all to share the materials and ideas we would like to bring to the group. 

Unit 4a: Being in the Archives

What is it like to be in the archives? For archivists? For patrons? What type of people should we be in the archives? What type of people do we become? Are we different while in these spaces? Are we different while interacting with archives online? Do we still have emotions? Do we still react? What happens to trauma in the archives?

Content Offerings

Affect in and from within the Archives
Being in the Archives, Online and Right Now

Intentional Preparation

  • Consider the ways in which you are represented and not represented in libraries and archives. If you have spent time in archives or special collections, have you ever had an emotional experience? What emotions do you bring to the act of visiting archives onsite? Can you access the source of those emotions?

First and Second Engagements

  • We will discuss our roles as human beings working in relation to archives, in the context of the readings and our intentional preparation. 

Unit 4b: Being in the Archives

Content Offerings

  • Every co-learner will have posted the resource(s) they have found to the Co-Created Collection of Resources. Remember: you do not need to wait until after any given meeting to post the resources you are finding interesting to the common collection!! This is an ongoing resource that should keep track of the themes and resources that this community finds important, as they come up.
  • To be prepared for our synchronous meeting, you only need to come (a) having engaged with a single resource, and (b) having reflected on the intentional preparation below. However you are, of course, more than welcome to engage with the materials found by all the co-learners in advance of our synchronous time together!

Intentional Preparation

  • Prepare to share your work on your summative document, to offer opinions you have garnered, resources you found particularly helpful, or any other such information that might be useful to our wider community. 
  • Here are a few overall questions to prompt reflection, but of course, please let your own mind be your guide:
    • What did you want to learn in this CLE? 
    • What are you learning/have you learned? 
    • What did you find surprising? 
    • What are you curious about? 
    • Of the things you have learned, what are you never going to do that you learned?
    • What seems possible, and what seems impossible?
    • What narratives are you building around archives, collections, and their relationship to your own work?

First and Second Engagements

  • For these synchronous meetings, the co-hosts will design a customized set of interactions that both delves into the weekly topic and also allows us all to share the materials and ideas we would like to bring to the group.