Amid pandemic budget cuts, archivists face uncertainty
A few months ago, Adam Harangozó, an Edinburgh-based freelance database consultant, had a problem. He was trying to find a photo of a passenger pigeon online for his research, but there were none. He checked digitized archives from libraries and museums, but came up empty. In some cases, he was blocked by paywalls that demanded money in exchange for access to the archives database.
So, Harangozó posted a letter on the social media networking site, Humanities Commons, titled the “Passenger Pigeon Manifesto,” demanding digital museum and library archives remove paywalls. Since it was published in September, the manifesto has been signed by over 120 museum and library professionals across five continents.
However, digital archivists, who are responsible for the work of uploading and preserving digital collections, took to Twitter to voice their frustration with it. They felt it ignored and devalued their efforts to make physical art and library collections available online.
Since the start of the pandemic, museums in New York have used digital photos of objects from their collections to create virtual tours and programming as a way to engage their audiences. However, financial losses between March and June alone resulted in layoffs and furloughs of 15,000 workers at cultural institutions in New York City, according to a report commissioned by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. That number includes archivists responsible for preserving and digitizing collections. Now archivists are facing pressure on both sides, from layoffs and reduced funding at work and from a public demanding more from them.
“I think it’s offensive in many ways,” said Genevieve Havemeyer-King, Media Preservation Coordinator at the New York Public Library. She said the manifesto is “especially frustrating because it accuses archivists of not doing more,” when she believed the problem is really a lack of funding.
According to Amye McCarther, President of Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York, archival digitization in museums is often funded by external grants rather than internal budgets. However, it is uncertain whether those grants, which often pay archivists’ salaries, will continue in light of the Coronavirus pandemic, according to McCarther.
Before the pandemic, the Museum of the City of New York had received grants to digitize 200,000 objects out of the 750,000 objects in the museum’s entire permanent collection. Sheryl Victor Levy, Vice President of Marketing and Communications at the museum, said it’s likely those grants will stall.
“The way that the world is now — there are more pressing issues,” said Levy.
Harangozó said the manifesto “wasn’t meant as an unfair attack on underpaid cultural workers.” Instead, he said it was meant as an attempt to change the policy that keeps some archives behind a paywall.
