The Fonds — A Quick Lesson on Archival Work
The words in script published in this article were written in ink on paper sometime in the 1800s. I came across them while going through folders in a vast archive filled with thousands upon thousands of documents and ephemera on paper. I’ve posted these words here out of context, away from the notebook in which they were written, to illustrate a unique part of archival work that isn’t thought about much by the general public.
Posted here, can you tell what these terms refer to or where they are from? They are certainly pretty things, but without their “archival provenance” they don’t offer much information. Seen with the pages in which they originally accompanied, they retain their contextual meaning and value.
One of the most unique and prominent things about archival work, which sets it apart from simply storing old stuff, is the need to preserve the order in which we receive collections from donors.
Archivists often refer to this as Archival Provenance, or sometimes, if we’re feeling old fashioned and French, we say we “respect des fonds.” {archived} If a donor gives us a collection of letters organized in alphabetical order by sender, we will most likely keep those letters organized by sender, rather than reorganize the letters in any other way. The creator and sometimes the collector of the documents are just as important as the documents themselves. The order in which they store their stuff offers crucial contextual meaning to the individual items in a collection as well as a collection as a whole. Reorganizing things in a collection would remove that information, as well as add our own bias to the interpretation of the documents. If we must reorganize what we are given, we describe with as much neutrality as we can, the original order in which it was found.
The prettily-written words above are section titles from an old notebook kept by one of the first American Egyptologists, Charles Edwin Wilbour {archived}:
Starting in 1916, the heirs of American Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour (1833–1896) donated his collection of Egyptian antiquities, books and personal papers to the Brooklyn Museum. The Wilbour Archival Collection, which includes correspondence, notebooks, squeezes, and inscriptions, provides insight into his research and travels.
On the left is one of many 5x7 inch leaves that were separated by the pages at the top of this post. It is one page of his many notebooks.
I may have teased you a bit — you still likely can’t decipher the small inky symbols in Wilbour’s notes. But a scholar of Egyptian history will…unless you take the pages apart, that is.
If you want to know more about Wilbour and what the tiny characters in his notes could mean, I’m sorry to say that you’ll need much more context than I could ever offer in a blog post, and you’ve got thousands of papers to look through. Take a peek at the entire collection’s finding aid {archived} (a “finding aid” is what it sounds like: a document that describes an archival collection and its contents), and if your interest is peaked, make an appointment with the Brooklyn Museum Archive {archived} and take a look!
