Day 9 in the archives: resisting the desire to “own” the document
Archival research is a treasure hunt, but with the important caveat that you don’t get to take home the treasure you dig up. The value of archival treasure is also different, of course, and much of it is retained in reproduction. The words, and more nuanced elements like the expression in the handwriting, carry much of the value, at least to the researcher, and in this sense the camera is your friend. But there is never enough time to see it all. So what do you do with all these gems, some of which are too obscure for you to ascertain the value when you see them?
Yesterday’s visit was brief, just a couple hours, and today I was home working on a paper presentation that I will be giving at the Biennial ASLE Conference in Detroit (that’s the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment). But the work of the archive often spills over into conversation, and one such conversation with my buddy Jordan Hall intersected well with the question I posed above and the little project I was engaged in during my archival visit yesterday.
Jordan is also in his third summer of the Literature PhD at NYU, and also looking at a chance to do some archival research this summer. We were chatting briefly on the phone yesterday, and he asked me how research was going in the Bailey collection. One of the major pieces of advice he had received from his dissertation advisor, Paula McDowell, was to avoid the temptation to “own” the documents he read.
That seemed strange until Jordan elaborated. When I first visited the Liberty Hyde Bailey Papers in Cornell’s Rare and Manuscript Collections, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was a little over a year into my MFA, I think, and had decided to go whole-hog into a literary nonfiction thesis that would weave in research about Bailey alongside personal essay writing and an interrogation of the small hometown in Michigan that Bailey and I shared 130 years apart. I didn’t have research funding or anything — I told a few professors that I wanted to go, and after it seemed like I couldn’t get any grant money a couple of them very generously offered to help pay my way. I was still trying to figure out who Bailey was, after a brief stint as an unpaid intern at the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum the summer before. I hadn’t even read through a biography, so I brought along my copy of the 1956 bio by Philip Dorf and, thanks to the indirect route and multiple layovers of my cheap flight, managed to read through the whole thing in the daylong trip from Des Moines to Ithaca. At least I had something to go on.
But the archival collection baffled me. At least seventy boxes, 43.3 cubic feet, of mostly paper—hundreds of published articles, uncountable photographs and glass plate negatives, manuscripts, journals, account books, contracts, legal documents, but most of all letters — thousands upon thousands of pieces of correspondence sent to or from Bailey over his incredibly productive life, and still, as I slowly began to see, only a partial collection! A productive author in those days (let alone professor, college administrator, and sometime statesman) left behind a lot of paper.
I had a few general interests, which had led me to request probably ten or more boxes in advance of my arrival. When I began to see how much there was, I just began to photograph. While scans of documents in an archive like Cornell’s cost money, the archivists are happy to let you come in and take as many photos as you’d like with your own camera, and they even provide a kind of document tripod to attach a digital camera to. I made good use of that tripod and my camera that week. Actually, I made excessive use of it.
I had one week — five business days, from 10:00–4:00 — in the archive. I knew I would only be able to read so much, so I tried to limit my reading to only the most intriguing documents, while meanwhile attempting to photograph as many potentially interesting pieces of correspondence and other documents (not knowing what would be interesting later, when I knew more) as I could. I believe I even attempted photographing one or two full boxes of publication-related correspondence. I must have left that week with well over a thousand photographed pages.
And the sad truth is that I probably never read the majority of those pages that I so frenetically photographed that week. I’m willing to admit this now, because all that was close to six years ago, and it was my first experience in an archive — but also because I don’t think it ultimately added up to time wasted. In fact, I emerged from that trip with a lot. Significantly, I developed a large understanding of the shape, the shady contours and ungainly proportions, of the unwieldy collection. (To begin to appreciate just how ungainly, take a scroll through the finding aid yourself.) I noticed, for instance, a strange gap between Boxes 17 and 19. The two seemed to belong together, containing a continuous sequence of articles by Bailey that had been extracted from academic and popular journals, in roughly chronological order, but I did not see Box 18 in the same section of the finding aid. Why the jump? After that visit, I systematically searched through the finding aid to discover that not only Box 18, but two other boxes as well, were missing altogether from the online list (which is not arranged numerically). So, I put in requests for them on my next visit, and Box 18 proved to be one of the most fascinating in the entire collection, containing the only two full unpublished book manuscripts by Bailey currently known to survive.
But this also gets to the point that Paula McDowell made to my buddy Jordan. When you’re first going through an archive, the temptation is to want to “own” it. When I was racing through that first time, I wanted whole boxes to pore over at home, on my computer screen, over and over again. (Granted, archival libraries have strict rules about how you can use those picture files of their materials — you don’t “own” them in the sense of being able to distribute them however you want, but it does feel somewhat like ownership to be able to look at them privately whenever you want.) I didn’t necessarily foresee that I’d be visiting this archive almost annually for the next several years, and I also didn’t have a very well-defined project, as I would on later visits.
Now I feel more like a seasoned veteran, at least of the Bailey collection. I narrowed down the collection to a couple major sections this summer that I thought might be helpful with the dissertation chapter I need to write, and I had the relevant boxes requested in advance. I did take most of two weeks to basically pore through this new material — but I tried to keep my fingers off the camera. Instead of frantically collecting photographs, I simply sat with the materials, visually scanned through until I found something that looked interesting, and then gave myself the luxury of reading — and of taking careful, organized notes by hand, resulting in a growing stack of well-labeled sheets of the recognizable green paper that the archive allows researchers to use in the reading room. Going through those notes at the end of each day and reviewing the organized progress has become a ritual and a pleasure.
With those first two weeks behind me, now that I have a much better sense of what I’ll want to read in depth and possibly cite in my dissertation chapter as I write, I am targeting specific documents and sets of documents — the journal Bailey kept at his farm, the Census Bureau’s report on the Commission on Country Life circulars, etc — and rather than create a pile of picture files, I’ve updated my technology and am now able to create single PDF “scans” of whole, many-paged documents with the Tiny Scanner app on my tablet. The busywork portion of what I do in the archives has been focused and made more efficient. Yesterday, I once again pulled out one of the unpublished book manuscripts that I found unexpectedly in Box 18 during that second visit, four or five years ago. In an hour and a half, I got about halfway through a new scan, with my new app, that will be infinitely easier to read than the heavily compressed greyscale PDF I was eventually able to make of the pile of 300+ color picture files that I took my first time through it.
Most importantly, though, as I now see more clearly, I have relinquished the desire to “own” all of the tantalizing information in those many, many boxes. It will still be there; I can’t read it all; I can always come back. I’d like to think that I’ve graduated from the more piratical school of archival treasure-hunting to something a little more purposeful, a little more graceful. The archive will always know things that I don’t, and vice versa. I’m not there to pillage the archive for information — I’m there to begin the process of co-creating something new with it. Perhaps, in working against the impulse to “own” the documents we study, we should cultivate the impulse to collaborate with those documents instead.
For some context, see my intro post. To get in touch, use my website.
The archive archive: Intro | Days 1–3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7 | Interlude | Day 8
Archival insights gleaned from the Liberty Hyde Bailey Papers, #21/2/3342, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
