(5021,3,'2013-05-22 01:47:47','2013-05-22 01:47:47','I’d like to tell you a story, one about a series of experiences that changed the way I work with students and faculty at Lehigh. In fact, the story is about stories—digital storytelling, to be exact. Digital storytelling uses computer-based still and moving images, text, audio, and music to document experiences, ideas, and research.\r\n\r\nIn the fall of 2005 I had the pleasure of working with English professor Ed Gallagher in an experimental, first-year writing course, “Digital Songs, Stories, and Histories,” that offered students new ways to communicate through a variety of multi-media assignments. For one assignment the students were asked to create a video based on a research question they developed from materials they found in Lehigh’s Digital Library project, <a href=\"http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/remain/con/digwriting.html\">I Remain: A Digital Archive of Letters, Manuscripts, and Ephemera</a>. The site contains hundreds of items from the university’s Special Collections and Archives that represent five centuries of writers, explorers, scientists, philosophers, and politicians.\r\n\r\nThe students were asked to select a document from the site that piqued their curiosity, transcribe that document, formulate a historical question, develop a thesis, select materials that would support that thesis, and produce a video based on those efforts. The vast majority of the students embraced the archival and technological challenge. The results appear on the <em>I Remain</em> site.\r\n\r\nIn order to understand the content development and technological challenges our students faced, I delved into my family archives and produced a short personal video story about my father. I was amazed at the ability of this process to challenge and change my perspective on the past. Cathartic is the only way I can describe my experience. Clearly smitten with this medium, the following year I taught a course for the History Department, Digital History and Video. This class had a mix of undergraduate and graduate students who were also asked to explore the archival materials on the <em>I Remain</em> site. They had to perform many of the same assignments as the previous class did, but, as the course level dictated, they had to be even more rigorous in their research. The students wrote a footnoted essay about their document(s), and then converted their research essay into a script to include narration and accompanying visuals.\r\n\r\nOne of the Digital History students, a senior with a double major in history and education, discovered a treasure trove of primary sources when she came upon a scrapbook of memorabilia related to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The scrapbook was compiled by American boundary commissioner, Rhode Island Secretary of State, historian, and author John R. Bartlett. Using many of the images in the scrapbook, she constructed a <a href=\"http://player.vimeo.com/video/40877170\">seven-minute video about the assassination of President Lincoln</a> and the effect his death had on the country. Rather than address a scholarly audience in her production, she chose to produce a documentary with a general audience in mind. The storytelling choices she made in her narration and accompanying voice-over collaborations with faculty and fellow classmates are clearly directed toward that general audience. Though initially intimidated by the use of new technology, this student was pleased that she was able to face the challenge and learn a new skill that would help her in her career in elementary education.\r\n\r\nSince these initial forays into student-produced documentary, I am pleased to say that this form of communication is alive and well at Lehigh University. As the number of requests for video projects grew, Library and Technology Services formed the Documentary Resource Team. The Team is comprised of librarians, instructional technologists, and media specialists who help faculty and students navigate the opportunities and challenges of video production. In many of these classes, students use physical and virtual archives extensively in their research and image selection. With the opportunities of archival discovery also come the challenges of representing findings.\r\n\r\nThe materials we uncover in archives and the way we choose to use them has provoked an ongoing series of questions about copyright, research methodology, and documentary ethics. Regardless of the event (long ago or yesterday) or the individual (living or dead), the lessons our students learn about their obligations in representing the lives of others are important ones. What is at stake when, as digital storytellers, we document the experience of others? What happens when those experiences move beyond the confines of the classroom and become part of a larger audience at public screenings or on the web? The questions of authority, privacy, responsibility, and moral obligations are good ones with no easy answers. Luckily, as educators, we are not in the business of easy answers.','Julia Maserjian','I’d like to tell you a story, one about a series of experiences that changed the way I work with students and faculty at Lehigh. In fact, the story is about stories—digital storytelling, to be exact. Digital storytelling uses computer-based still and moving images, text, audio, and music to document experiences, ideas, and research.','inherit','open','open','','1116-revision-9','','','2013-05-22 01:47:47','2013-05-22 01:47:47','',1116,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/1116-revision-9/',0,'revision','',0),(5022,3,'2013-07-08 17:23:42','2013-07-08 17:23:42','When people think of Johns Hopkins University they think of medicine, and rightly so. JHU prepares people for medical school better than any college in the world. The medical attitude, however, extends beyond the bounded world of pre-meds. Hopkins often values the reductionism of the scientific method and the cleanliness of the lab over holism and real-world, big-picture thinking. In looking for classes during my sophomore year at JHU, then, I was surprised to find The Power of Place taught by Melanie Shell-Weiss. The course was a practicum, and all participants would conduct oral histories as part of the East Baltimore Oral History Project (EBOH). This was a rare chance to get out of the infamous “Hopkins Bubble.” I signed up.\n\nDuring Power of Place I helped produce several oral histories. As interviews flowed in, however, I began to see a problem. Each interview was around two hours long and included a full transcript. From my class alone, the project would amass nearly thirty hours of audio and several hundred pages of text. Making use of those materials would be tough. As a software developer, I saw a solution. I imagined a tool that could link transcripts with audio, allow people to tag important areas within interviews, and make all the EBOH materials searchable. With support from the university, I spent the next year working with Professor Shell-Weiss to make my idea into a working web application.\n\nWhile working on EBOH, I started visiting archives. I could find few digital images of East Baltimore, and I wanted to know why. On a trip to the <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em> with Moira Hinderer, I found a plethora of visual materials. Very few, however, had been digitized. The main factor was cost; resources to manually digitize the <em>Afro</em> collection simply were not available. Again, I saw a technical solution: I would build a robot. I proposed creating an automatic scanner that could lift and digitize the <em>Afro</em>’s sensitive artifacts, all for less than $500. No one at JHU thought it would happen. Luckily, Professor Shell-Weiss managed to raise some funds, and I spent a summer prototyping. The result was the Gado 1, a proof-of-concept that would later scan over 1,000 images at the <em>Afro</em>. The price tag was $496.\n\nAfter graduating from JHU in May 2011, I wanted to continue refining my technology. With support from the JHU Sheridan Libraries and the Abell Foundation (a regional grantsmaker), I secured enough funding to work on my project full time. In December 2011, I completed the Gado 2, a second-generation machine that dramatically outpaces the original. Since testing began, my machine has digitized over 3,000 artifacts at the <em>Afro</em>, at a tiny fraction of the cost of manual scanning. In February 2012, we made these images available to the general public and launched GadoImages.com to distribute them to paying licensors. I believe Gado has the potential to dramatically alter the economics of archival digitization. I would never be at this point without that first push to step outside the classroom and start thinking in broader terms.','Tom Smith','When people think of Johns Hopkins University they think of medicine, and rightly so. JHU prepares people for medical school better than any college in the world. The medical attitude, however, extends beyond the bounded world of pre-meds. Hopkins often values the reductionism of the scientific method and the cleanliness of the lab over holism and real-world, big-picture thinking. In looking for classes during my sophomore year at JHU, then, I was surprised to find The Power of Place taught by Melanie Shell-Weiss. The course was a practicum, and all participants would conduct oral histories as part of the East Baltimore Oral History Project (EBOH). This was a rare chance to get out of the infamous “Hopkins Bubble.” I signed up.','inherit','open','open','','1059-autosave','','','2013-07-08 17:23:42','2013-07-08 17:23:42','',1059,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/1059-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(5023,3,'2013-05-22 02:35:55','2013-05-22 02:35:55','When people think of Johns Hopkins University they think of medicine, and rightly so. JHU prepares people for medical school better than any college in the world. The medical attitude, however, extends beyond the bounded world of pre-meds. Hopkins often values the reductionism of the scientific method and the cleanliness of the lab over holism and real-world, big-picture thinking. In looking for classes during my sophomore year at JHU, then, I was surprised to find The Power of Place taught by Melanie Shell-Weiss. The course was a practicum, and all participants would conduct oral histories as part of the East Baltimore Oral History Project (EBOH). This was a rare chance to get out of the infamous “Hopkins Bubble.” I signed up.\r\n\r\nDuring Power of Place I helped produce several oral histories. As interviews flowed in, however, I began to see a problem. Each interview was around two hours long and included a full transcript. From my class alone, the project would amass nearly thirty hours of audio and several hundred pages of text. Making use of those materials would be tough. As a software developer, I saw a solution. I imagined a tool that could link transcripts with audio, allow people to tag important areas within interviews, and make all the EBOH materials searchable. With support from the university, I spent the next year working with Professor Shell-Weiss to make my idea into a working web application.\r\n\r\nWhile working on EBOH, I started visiting archives. I could find few digital images of East Baltimore, and I wanted to know why. On a trip to the <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em> with Moira Hinderer, I found a plethora of visual materials. Very few, however, had been digitized. The main factor was cost; resources to manually digitize the <em>Afro</em> collection simply were not available. Again, I saw a technical solution: I would build a robot. I proposed creating an automatic scanner that could lift and digitize the <em>Afro</em>’s sensitive artifacts, all for less than $500. No one at JHU thought it would happen. Luckily, Professor Shell-Weiss managed to raise some funds, and I spent a summer prototyping. The result was the Gado 1, a proof-of-concept that would later scan over 1,000 images at the <em>Afro</em>. The price tag was $496.\r\n\r\nAfter graduating from JHU in May 2011, I wanted to continue refining my technology. With support from the JHU Sheridan Libraries and the Abell Foundation (a regional grantsmaker), I secured enough funding to work on my project full time. In December 2011, I completed the Gado 2, a second-generation machine that dramatically outpaces the original. Since testing began, my machine has digitized over 3,000 artifacts at the <em>Afro</em>, at a tiny fraction of the cost of manual scanning. In February 2012, we made these images available to the general public and launched GadoImages.com to distribute them to paying licensors. I believe Gado has the potential to dramatically alter the economics of archival digitization. I would never be at this point without that first push to step outside the classroom and start thinking in broader terms.','Tom Smith','When people think of Johns Hopkins University they think of medicine, and rightly so. JHU prepares people for medical school better than any college in the world. The medical attitude, however, extends beyond the bounded world of pre-meds. Hopkins often values the reductionism of the scientific method and the cleanliness of the lab over holism and real-world, big-picture thinking. In looking for classes during my sophomore year at JHU, then, I was surprised to find The Power of Place taught by Melanie Shell-Weiss. The course was a practicum, and all participants would conduct oral histories as part of the East Baltimore Oral History Project (EBOH). This was a rare chance to get out of the infamous “Hopkins Bubble.” I signed up.','inherit','open','open','','1059-revision-9','','','2013-05-22 02:35:55','2013-05-22 02:35:55','',1059,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/1059-revision-9/',0,'revision','',0),(5024,3,'2013-05-22 02:36:01','2013-05-22 02:36:01','Over the last four years, I have worked as a lecturer teaching courses about Baltimore and African American history, and I have also served as the project manager for the Diaspora Pathways Archival Access Project (DPAAP), a partnership between Johns Hopkins University and the <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em> funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These experiences have shown me that students learn best when they are not simply taught history, but when they also act as historians. Baltimore offers both possibilities and challenges for students doing historical projects. Much of the city’s history remains unwritten, and historical materials are often tucked away in small archives and private homes. Records that are not easily accessible present a special problem for students who are constrained by time and transportation. Both the East Baltimore Oral History Project and the <em>Afro</em> Archives partnership seek to address these challenges by involving students in the process of uncovering, describing, and making accessible historical records, and then encouraging students to use these resources for historical research.\r\n\r\nThe East Baltimore Oral History Project involves students in the work of preserving the memories of established members of the East Baltimore community. For students, this work addresses a major complaint about life as a Johns Hopkins undergraduate: they are too removed from the life of the city, and they are not encouraged to interact with the city and its inhabitants in meaningful ways. The interviewing process has the additional benefit of making students experts, allowing them to bring a substantive point of view and body of evidence as they critique course readings and engage in class discussions. As interviews are added to the project website, students produce an accessible community history resource that will last well beyond the usual semester-long class project.\r\n\r\nDPAAP also depends heavily on the work of student archival interns, and on the technical skills of the current and former students who form the Project Gado team, led by recent Johns Hopkins University graduate Tom Smith. Archival interns have been involved in every step of uncovering the archives, from labeling boxes and shelves, to entering information into our archival database, to writing essays for our database website. This work has given interns a perspective on African American history usually reserved for history professionals. With materials pertaining to almost every local, national, and international aspect of Black history, interns are often asked to describe the central themes and narratives of this diverse archive. This challenge requires them to address the problem of twentieth-century information overload familiar to both historians and archivists. The Project Gado team offers a different set of solutions to the problem of preserving and making accessible vast amounts of archival materials. The members of Project Gado are involved in innovative work in the digital humanities as they create low-cost options for large-scale digitization. The work of Tom Smith and Project Gado suggests another possibility for hands-on coursework in history, courses that would integrate technical skills and the creation of hardware and software into a rigorous humanities education to prepare students to be twenty-first-century humanities scholars.','Moira Hinderer','Over the last four years, I have worked as a lecturer teaching courses about Baltimore and African American history, and I have also served as the project manager for the Diaspora Pathways Archival Access Project (DPAAP), a partnership between Johns Hopkins University and the Afro-American Newspapers funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These experiences have shown me that students learn best when they are not simply taught history, but when they also act as historians. Baltimore offers both possibilities and challenges for students doing historical projects. Much of the city’s history remains unwritten, and historical materials are often tucked away in small archives and private homes. Records that are not easily accessible present a special problem for students who are constrained by time and transportation. Both the East Baltimore Oral History Project and the Afro Archives partnership seek to address these challenges by involving students in the process of uncovering, describing, and making accessible historical records, and then encouraging students to use these resources for historical research. ','inherit','open','open','','1062-revision-9','','','2013-05-22 02:36:01','2013-05-22 02:36:01','',1062,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/1062-revision-9/',0,'revision','',0),(5025,3,'2013-05-22 02:55:21','2013-05-22 02:55:21','[caption id=\"attachment_1367\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"333\"]<img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1367 \" title=\"cscc_student action photo_saunders\" alt=\"Matthew Saunders exploring the Ramsey Family Papers at the Cleveland Bradley County Library History Branch.\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/cscc_student-action-photo_saunders-333x250.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /> Matthew Saunders exploring the Ramsey Family Papers at the Cleveland Bradley County Library History Branch (CPLHB). Photo credit: Sarah Copeland.[/caption]\r\n\r\nI was one of the first students to take the History Laboratory class at Cleveland State Community College (CSCC). My previous experience during an extra-credit activity in a traditional history course initially sparked my interest. During an American history survey course, Mr. Reed, the CSCC instructor who founded the Southeast Tennessee Digital Archive (SETDA), offered students a chance to digitize historical photographs. He demonstrated how to research a photograph\'s history, starting with the limited information written on the back and clues within the picture itself. I was eager to enroll in a course that was dedicated to digitizing historical photographs.\r\n\r\nFew history majors would turn down the opportunity to go beyond lecture courses and work directly with historical documents, but I never expected a two-year college to offer me this opportunity. The History Laboratory allowed me to gain hands-on experience preserving important records of local history. Moreover, the History Lab transformed how I research. I had to learn to use a library because the most relevant research material was not accessible online. It took a while to get into the groove of picking up a book and reading through the text as opposed to using a search engine to gather information. Using physical books to research is an invaluable experience that I will take with me throughout my future courses and career.\r\n\r\nAnother new experience was the archiving section of the class, in which we digitized photographs and organized the research in a way that would be coherent on the SETDA website. As students, we are accustomed to elaborating and expanding upon our research to produce an essay. The archiving section of the course, instead, forced me to condense my findings into a few concise sentences. The term “metadata” was foreign to me before this class, so working my research into that format was not the easiest task. Entering metadata into ContentDM was a challenge. Nevertheless, this exercise has helped me to convey my thoughts more clearly in other classes.\r\n\r\nOverall, the History Laboratory was a great experience. I had wanted to add some constructive criticism, but after reflecting on my experience I cannot think of any suggestions. The instructors were terrific and the course of study was refreshing. I would recommend this course to history students or any student who is searching for an experience that goes beyond a classroom lecture.','Matthew E. Saunders','I was one of the first students to take the History Laboratory class at Cleveland State Community College (CSCC). My previous experience during an extra-credit activity in a traditional history course initially sparked my interest. During an American history survey course, Mr. Reed, the CSCC instructor who founded the Southeast Tennessee Digital Archive (SETDA), offered students a chance to digitize historical photographs. He demonstrated how to research a photograph\'s history, starting with the limited information written on the back and clues within the picture itself. I was eager to enroll in a course that was dedicated to digitizing historical photographs.','inherit','open','open','','1040-revision-8','','','2013-05-22 02:55:21','2013-05-22 02:55:21','',1040,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/1040-revision-8/',0,'revision','',0),(5026,3,'2013-05-15 03:50:47','2013-05-15 03:50:47','Cleveland State Community College (CSCC), a small two-year college in southeast Tennessee, offers freshman and sophomore students a service-learning course as an introduction to research in archives. In this course, the History Laboratory students assist local cultural heritage institutions with digitizing collections and publishing them on the web. As of spring 2012, students have completed service-learning hours at the Cleveland Bradley County Public Library History Branch, the Museum Center at 5ive Points, and the Polk County Historical and Genealogical Society Library. These local archives and museums benefit from increased access to their collections, while CSCC history students gain experience with handling and researching primary sources.\r\n\r\nSeveral developments led the Department of History and the Library to collaborate on the creation of the History Laboratory. The college’s administrators recently encouraged instructors of every discipline, including the humanities, to develop content-appropriate service-learning courses to promote student engagement. Moreover, the history curriculum at CSCC emphasizes the central role of primary sources in historical analysis, even in research projects assigned in introductory courses. A history instructor, Bryan Reed, realized that his students could access a rich learning experience if they contributed to a regional digitization project, the <a href=\" http://www.clevelandstatecc.edu/setda/\">Southeast Tennessee Digital Archive</a>. Thus, Reed and I developed a service-learning history course where students assist local archives, museums, and historical societies that lack staff to digitize their collections.\r\n\r\nAs the primary instructor, I oversee the classroom content of the course, which is informed by my training in both history and information science (MA, History; MS, Information Science). The historian’s need to understand primary sources, where they are found and how they are curated, shapes the goal of the course. Information science, including the philosophy of archives, digitization, and creating metadata, shapes the course activities. Reed serves as the local history expert, assisting students with research in obscure local publications.\r\n\r\nBecause the History Laboratory’s target audience is freshman and sophomore history majors, the course is very basic. The primary goal is to expose students to the cultural heritage institution’s role as curator of artifacts. At the archive I introduce students to the archivist, collections, finding aids, and additional tools for discovering information about a collection. After this introduction to cultural heritage institutions, we discuss the historian’s role as interpreter of artifacts. This discussion is often the students’ initiation to the “historian’s craft”: assembling a narrative, interpreting facts, and determining significance.\r\n\r\nThe learning outcomes for the History Laboratory are similarly basic. By the end of the course, we expect students to demonstrate appropriate handling of unique historical materials, to create digital surrogates of assigned primary documents, to research these primary documents using relevant resources (in paper and electronic formats), and to organize and present their findings in the Southeast Tennessee Digital Archive (SETDA) using a simple content management system (CONTENTdm). The last learning outcome, creating and entering metadata, may seem out of place in a history course. Nevertheless, we felt it was essential for students to complete this step; it gives them the opportunity to digest their research, consider their audience, and share their findings. This process empowers students to take on the role of expert.\r\n\r\nAfter two pilot semesters, the History Laboratory is now an officially sanctioned course in the history curriculum at Cleveland State Community College. Former students have indicated that the course was a valuable first introduction to archives and their importance to historical research. In the future, we look forward to requiring this service-learning experience for all CSCC history majors. Although we believe that the History Laboratory offers an unparalleled initiation to archival research, we look forward to hearing whether our graduates’ experiences remain relevant as they continue their academic careers.','Sarah Shippy Copeland','Cleveland State Community College (CSCC), a small two-year college in southeast Tennessee, offers freshman and sophomore students a service-learning course as an introduction to research in archives. In this course, the History Laboratory students assist local cultural heritage institutions with digitizing collections and publishing them on the web. As of spring 2012, students have completed service-learning hours at the Cleveland Bradley County Public Library History Branch, the Museum Center at 5ive Points, and the Polk County Historical and Genealogical Society Library. These local archives and museums benefit from increased access to their collections, while CSCC history students gain experience with handling and researching primary sources.','inherit','open','open','','1027-revision-6','','','2013-05-15 03:50:47','2013-05-15 03:50:47','',1027,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/1027-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(5027,3,'2013-06-27 21:37:53','2013-06-27 21:37:53','<em>1.  How many students worked at the History Branch and Archives of the Cleveland Bradley County Library?</em>\r\nTwo students worked at the History Branch one evening a week for a set number of weeks.\r\n\r\n<em>2.  Will you work with History Lab students again?</em>\r\nCertainly. The students were polite, reliable, diligent in their work, and followed directions with little supervision.\r\n<strong></strong>\r\n\r\n<em>3.  What did you find most productive or enjoyable about the process of working with the students?</em>\r\nIt was rewarding to see the students’ progress from novice researchers to becoming confident in their work. Along the way their project changed from a class assignment to one of discovery. They became excited and interested in their subject and <em>wanted</em> to expand the scope of their work through additional research.\r\n<strong></strong>\r\n\r\n<em>4.  How has the students’ work impacted the History Branch and its collections?</em>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>The additional research done by the students will be available to all of the library’s patrons.</li>\r\n	<li>Students have given presentations on their research to the Bradley County Historical and Genealogical Society.</li>\r\n	<li>Observing the students as they worked with the photograph collection helped me to be more aware of the type of material that captures a new researcher’s attention.</li>\r\n</ul>','Barbara Fagen','','inherit','open','open','','1020-revision-7','','','2013-06-27 21:37:53','2013-06-27 21:37:53','',1020,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/1020-revision-7/',0,'revision','',0),(5028,3,'2013-06-27 21:53:06','2013-06-27 21:53:06','Digitally scanning archival objects requires not only technical know-how but also an appreciation for the subject matter. My fine-arts background gave me the knowledge and skill set to digitize architectural renderings by Carrère &amp; Hastings of historic structures in Saint Augustine, Florida. I worked on the scanning with two concerns: the drawing as an artifact and the drawing’s content, or what is being represented. The architectural renderings averaged six feet by three feet, some larger and some smaller, though all were difficult to handle. Add the paper’s age and brittleness to the immense size, and one has to have quite a bit of finesse in handling the renderings. I had to hatch a strategy to properly scan each of the uniquely sized drawings.\r\n\r\nGoing into the project, I thought my experience in printmaking would influence the way I scanned the drawings, not realizing that the reverse would happen; the scanning actually affected my art practice. In printmaking I have dealt with large paper before, but never anything quite as large as these archival renderings. My experience handling large paper for the digitization project scaled up my thinking in my own work outside of the project. Consequently, my own art work got larger. With confidence in my newly learned ability to handle paper larger than me, I started a large installation piece in which I put together staging proofs of an etching plate into a single four-by-six feet layered installation. The scale and construction would have never come to mind had I not worked with these large architectural drawings.\r\n\r\n<span class=\"alignright wp-caption\" style=\"width: 333px;\"><img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-969\" style=\"margin-left: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"uf_student  action photo_barnett 6\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/uf_student-action-photo_barnett-6-333x222.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"222\" /> <span class=\"wp-caption-text\">Barnett using a Betterlight Super 8k-HS camera back and custom mount configuration to digitize John Carrère and Thomas Hastings’ “Ground Plan, Presbyterian Church, St. Augustine, Fla.” c. 1889-1890. Photo credit: Joe Kaleita, University of Florida Libraries.</span></span>Working with the photo editing software to optimize the scanned images for online viewing has also affected my art. Most of the archival pieces were so large they had to be captured in successive scans of two or more and stitched together in a photo editing program. In the digital stitching process, layers are important in getting a seamless product. When scanning the segments, I had to figure out where the respective scans would overlap in their respective digital layers so that when I got to the stitching, they all line up correctly. This takes planning, calculating, and configuring measurements in relation to the object. This idea of smaller units constructing a whole informed my process in constructing the art installation mentioned above, and it continues to affect my work.\r\n\r\nWhile I did not realize it at the time, my artwork reflects the processes I was dealing with at work. All together, the many different renderings that are part of the Carrère &amp; Hastings project build a picture of the architects’ process. I learned to see their end result, the building itself, as not the whole story but the final step in the process that you can only see if you include the drawings. This idea influenced my own installation. I felt that my whole process had to be shown; the print proofs (the intermittent states) are just as important as the end result. I never would have come to this idea had I not worked on the Carrère &amp; Hastings project.','James Barnett','Digitally scanning archival objects requires not only technical know-how but also an appreciation for the subject matter. My fine-arts background gave me the knowledge and skill set to digitize architectural renderings by Carrère & Hastings of historic structures in Saint Augustine, Florida. I worked on the scanning with two concerns: the drawing as an artifact and the drawing’s content, or what is being represented. The architectural renderings averaged six feet by three feet, some larger and some smaller, though all were difficult to handle. Add the paper’s age and brittleness to the immense size, and one has to have quite a bit of finesse in handling the renderings. I had to hatch a strategy to properly scan each of the uniquely sized drawings.','inherit','open','open','','967-revision-9','','','2013-06-27 21:53:06','2013-06-27 21:53:06','',967,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/967-revision-9/',0,'revision','',0),(5029,3,'2013-07-08 17:35:01','2013-07-08 17:35:01','In 2010, Flagler College and the University of Florida (UF) were awarded a <em>Save America’s Treasures</em> grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve and provide access to architectural drawings for the National Historic Landmark Hotel Ponce de Leon (1885-1887) and the Memorial Presbyterian Church (1889-1890) in St. Augustine, Florida. During this two-year project, the UF Smathers Libraries are conserving and digitizing an irreplaceable collection of the earliest architectural drawings of the Carrère &amp; Hastings firm. The drawings were created for the oil and railroad tycoon Henry Flagler beginning in the 1880s, but the majority of the drawings subsequently had been “lost” for decades. The few people who knew of their existence were unaware of their historical significance, and the drawings remained stored for years in a boiler room under high Florida temperatures and humidity, and exposed to insects and rodents.\n\nThis treasure trove remained unknown and endangered until its rediscovery in 2004 at Flagler College. To ensure that the drawings are protected and accessible to researchers, the drawings were deposited in 2005 in the UF Architecture Archives, a unit of Special &amp; Area Studies Collections. Comprised of over 260 fragile objects, the St. Augustine collection includes original drawings on cloth, silk, and paper, and a variety of blueprints, diazotypes, and other reproductions. Sizes range from eight by eight inches to over four by eight feet. Many of the drawings could not be unrolled or handled because they were literally crumbling on the shelves; it is very likely that some of these drawings had not been unrolled since they were last used in the 1890s. The grant funding has enabled UF to hire personnel and supplies to properly conserve and digitize all of the drawings.\n\nThe UF Digital Library Center (DLC) has an excellent track record employing students to digitize materials in all formats and conditions. One undergraduate student, James (Jimmy) Barnett, already had experience digitizing architectural drawings in the DLC, so we were happy to hire him as the imaging technician for this project. We knew that we could trust Jimmy to handle the items properly during imaging, which is crucial since many of the drawings are in extremely poor condition and are over eight feet long. Moreover, with his background and coursework in art we were confident that Jimmy could appreciate the drawings as cultural objects and be sensitive to the techniques and media used to produce them. Our trust was well placed, and Jimmy has been an exemplary steward of the drawings placed temporarily in his custody.\n\nIn planning for this project, there was no hesitation about employing an undergraduate student to work with fragile drawings. The archivists and curators in Special Collections have long relied on undergraduate students to assist with processing, research, and outreach activities. We offer an internship course through the History Department, and we have had great success retaining former interns as either paid employees or volunteers. We are able to maintain a pool of highly-trained, motivated assistants, and the students gain practical experience working with historical records. Several of these students have gone on to pursue archives, library, or public history master’s degrees. But regardless of their educational and career paths, we have found that many undergraduate students truly appreciate the value of cultural heritage materials, and many, such as Jimmy, can be trusted to treat them with the care they require.','John Nemmers','In 2010, Flagler College and the University of Florida (UF) were awarded a Save America’s Treasures grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve and provide access to architectural drawings for the National Historic Landmark Hotel Ponce de Leon (1885-1887) and the Memorial Presbyterian Church (1889-1890) in St. Augustine, Florida. During this two-year project, the UF Smathers Libraries are conserving and digitizing an irreplaceable collection of the earliest architectural drawings of the Carrère & Hastings firm. The drawings were created for the oil and railroad tycoon Henry Flagler beginning in the 1880s, but the majority of the drawings subsequently had been “lost” for decades. The few people who knew of their existence were unaware of their historical significance, and the drawings remained stored for years in a boiler room under high Florida temperatures and humidity, and exposed to insects and rodents.','inherit','open','open','','976-autosave','','','2013-07-08 17:35:01','2013-07-08 17:35:01','',976,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/976-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(5030,3,'2013-05-20 02:37:13','2013-05-20 02:37:13','In 2010, Flagler College and the University of Florida (UF) were awarded a <em>Save America’s Treasures</em> grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve and provide access to architectural drawings for the National Historic Landmark Hotel Ponce de Leon (1885-1887) and the Memorial Presbyterian Church (1889-1890) in St. Augustine, Florida. During this two-year project, the UF Smathers Libraries are conserving and digitizing an irreplaceable collection of the earliest architectural drawings of the Carrère &amp; Hastings firm. The drawings were created for the oil and railroad tycoon Henry Flagler beginning in the 1880s, but the majority of the drawings subsequently had been “lost” for decades. The few people who knew of their existence were unaware of their historical significance, and the drawings remained stored for years in a boiler room under high Florida temperatures and humidity, and exposed to insects and rodents.\r\n\r\nThis treasure trove remained unknown and endangered until its rediscovery in 2004 at Flagler College. To ensure that the drawings are protected and accessible to researchers, the drawings were deposited in 2005 in the UF Architecture Archives, a unit of Special &amp; Area Studies Collections. Comprised of over 260 fragile objects, the St. Augustine collection includes original drawings on cloth, silk, and paper, and a variety of blueprints, diazotypes, and other reproductions. Sizes range from eight by eight inches to over four by eight feet. Many of the drawings could not be unrolled or handled because they were literally crumbling on the shelves; it is very likely that some of these drawings had not been unrolled since they were last used in the 1890s. The grant funding has enabled UF to hire personnel and supplies to properly conserve and digitize all of the drawings.\r\n\r\nThe UF Digital Library Center (DLC) has an excellent track record employing students to digitize materials in all formats and conditions. One undergraduate student, James (Jimmy) Barnett, already had experience digitizing architectural drawings in the DLC, so we were happy to hire him as the imaging technician for this project. We knew that we could trust Jimmy to handle the items properly during imaging, which is crucial since many of the drawings are in extremely poor condition and are over eight feet long. Moreover, with his background and coursework in art we were confident that Jimmy could appreciate the drawings as cultural objects and be sensitive to the techniques and media used to produce them. Our trust was well placed, and Jimmy has been an exemplary steward of the drawings placed temporarily in his custody.\r\n\r\nIn planning for this project, there was no hesitation about employing an undergraduate student to work with fragile drawings. The archivists and curators in Special Collections have long relied on undergraduate students to assist with processing, research, and outreach activities. We offer an internship course through the History Department, and we have had great success retaining former interns as either paid employees or volunteers. We are able to maintain a pool of highly-trained, motivated assistants, and the students gain practical experience working with historical records. Several of these students have gone on to pursue archives, library, or public history master’s degrees. But regardless of their educational and career paths, we have found that many undergraduate students truly appreciate the value of cultural heritage materials, and many, such as Jimmy, can be trusted to treat them with the care they require.','John Nemmers','In 2010, Flagler College and the University of Florida (UF) were awarded a Save America’s Treasures grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve and provide access to architectural drawings for the National Historic Landmark Hotel Ponce de Leon (1885-1887) and the Memorial Presbyterian Church (1889-1890) in St. Augustine, Florida. During this two-year project, the UF Smathers Libraries are conserving and digitizing an irreplaceable collection of the earliest architectural drawings of the Carrère & Hastings firm. The drawings were created for the oil and railroad tycoon Henry Flagler beginning in the 1880s, but the majority of the drawings subsequently had been “lost” for decades. The few people who knew of their existence were unaware of their historical significance, and the drawings remained stored for years in a boiler room under high Florida temperatures and humidity, and exposed to insects and rodents.','inherit','open','open','','976-revision-7','','','2013-05-20 02:37:13','2013-05-20 02:37:13','',976,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/976-revision-7/',0,'revision','',0),(5031,3,'2013-07-08 17:33:45','2013-07-08 17:33:45','In 2010, Flagler College and the University of Florida (UF) were awarded a <em>Save America’s Treasures</em> grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve and provide access to architectural drawings for the National Historic Landmark Hotel Ponce de Leon (1885-1887) and the Memorial Presbyterian Church (1889-1890) in St. Augustine, Florida. During this two-year project, the UF Smathers Libraries are conserving and digitizing an irreplaceable collection of the earliest architectural drawings of the Carrère &amp; Hastings firm. The drawings were created for the oil and railroad tycoon Henry Flagler beginning in the 1880s, but the majority of the drawings subsequently had been “lost” for decades. The few people who knew of their existence were unaware of their historical significance, and the drawings remained stored for years in a boiler room under high Florida temperatures and humidity, and exposed to insects and rodents.\r\n\r\nThis treasure trove remained unknown and endangered until its rediscovery in 2004 at Flagler College. To ensure that the drawings are protected and accessible to researchers, the drawings were deposited in 2005 in the UF Architecture Archives, a unit of Special &amp; Area Studies Collections. Comprised of over 260 fragile objects, the St. Augustine collection includes original drawings on cloth, silk, and paper, and a variety of blueprints, diazotypes, and other reproductions. Sizes range from eight by eight inches to over four by eight feet. Many of the drawings could not be unrolled or handled because they were literally crumbling on the shelves; it is very likely that some of these drawings had not been unrolled since they were last used in the 1890s. The grant funding has enabled UF to hire personnel and supplies to properly conserve and digitize all of the drawings.\r\n\r\nThe UF Digital Library Center (DLC) has an excellent track record employing students to digitize materials in all formats and conditions. One undergraduate student, James (Jimmy) Barnett, already had experience digitizing architectural drawings in the DLC, so we were happy to hire him as the imaging technician for this project. We knew that we could trust Jimmy to handle the items properly during imaging, which is crucial since many of the drawings are in extremely poor condition and are over eight feet long. Moreover, with his background and coursework in art we were confident that Jimmy could appreciate the drawings as cultural objects and be sensitive to the techniques and media used to produce them. Our trust was well placed, and Jimmy has been an exemplary steward of the drawings placed temporarily in his custody.\r\n\r\nIn planning for this project, there was no hesitation about employing an undergraduate student to work with fragile drawings. The archivists and curators in Special Collections have long relied on undergraduate students to assist with processing, research, and outreach activities. We offer an internship course through the History Department, and we have had great success retaining former interns as either paid employees or volunteers. We are able to maintain a pool of highly-trained, motivated assistants, and the students gain practical experience working with historical records. Several of these students have gone on to pursue archives, library, or public history master’s degrees. But regardless of their educational and career paths, we have found that many undergraduate students truly appreciate the value of cultural heritage materials, and many, such as Jimmy, can be trusted to treat them with the care they require.','John Nemmers','In 2010, Flagler College and the University of Florida (UF) were awarded a Save America’s Treasures grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve and provide access to architectural drawings for the National Historic Landmark Hotel Ponce de Leon (1885-1887) and the Memorial Presbyterian Church (1889-1890) in St. Augustine, Florida. During this two-year project, the UF Smathers Libraries are conserving and digitizing an irreplaceable collection of the earliest architectural drawings of the Carrère & Hastings firm. The drawings were created for the oil and railroad tycoon Henry Flagler beginning in the 1880s, but the majority of the drawings subsequently had been “lost” for decades. The few people who knew of their existence were unaware of their historical significance, and the drawings remained stored for years in a boiler room under high Florida temperatures and humidity, and exposed to insects and rodents.','inherit','open','open','','976-revision-8','','','2013-07-08 17:33:45','2013-07-08 17:33:45','',976,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/976-revision-8/',0,'revision','',0),(5033,1,'2013-06-15 22:02:38','2013-06-15 22:02:38','What has been your most enlightening moment in your work with data curation?','Data Curation - Question 4','','inherit','open','open','','4655-revision-2','','','2013-06-15 22:02:38','2013-06-15 22:02:38','',4655,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4655-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(5034,1,'2013-06-15 21:58:44','2013-06-15 21:58:44','In your role, are the main pressures on and needs of data curation the same across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities?','Data Curation - Question 2','','inherit','open','open','','4646-revision-2','','','2013-06-15 21:58:44','2013-06-15 21:58:44','',4646,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4646-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(5035,1,'2013-06-15 21:56:34','2013-06-15 21:56:34','How is data curation a part of your job?','Data Curation - Question 1','','inherit','open','open','','4643-revision-3','','','2013-06-15 21:56:34','2013-06-15 21:56:34','',4643,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4643-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(5036,1,'2013-06-22 04:14:10','2013-06-22 04:14:10','I am the Digital Archivist for the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. We collect materials in many areas, but primarily we are concerned with humanities and social sciences (broadly speaking). This means that I work with everything from 20-year-old floppy disks that might contain the work of a contemporary novelist, to hard drives of architectural design files created over the last 20 years, to the electronic “papers” of a modern local organization saved to Google Docs. The materials I work with generally have no unifying characteristics; they represent a wide variety of ages, types, formats, carrier media, and data size.\r\n\r\nData curation, to me, means ensuring that data is safely transferred from its original context (such as a disk, a hard drive, or an email account) into the archive. Since much of the material I get was created in the past and lives on obsolescent software or hardware, sometimes just figuring out how to read the disk is a challenge. With any type of material, I need to capture metadata about it, such as its size, data type, and other important details. Knowing these details at the beginning means that in the future I can verify that it has not corrupted. I also document the chain of custody and any preservation actions taken, which could potentially have an impact on future use. If I am lucky, I get the opportunity to work with donors who still have access to their data. In those cases I can gather information from them about their computer use: How do they organize files? How much do they use social media? Do they create things in electronic form, or do they use a combination of paper and electronic files to do their work? Knowing the answers to these questions helps me piece together the context of their collection so that it can be understood in the future.','Gueguen - Question1','I am the Digital Archivist for the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. We collect materials in many areas, but primarily we are concerned with humanities and social sciences (broadly speaking). This means that I work with everything from 20-year-old floppy disks that might contain the work of a contemporary novelist, to hard drives of architectural design files ...','inherit','open','open','','4590-revision-4','','','2013-06-22 04:14:10','2013-06-22 04:14:10','',4590,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4590-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(5037,1,'2013-07-06 23:36:01','2013-07-06 23:36:01','As research and teaching produce ever-increasing amounts of data in analog and digital forms, what we do with that data is a question that librarians, archivists, scholars, teachers, and students must address.  The four contributors discuss what “data curation” is and might become.  We invite you to read through the responses by author or by question.','Data Curation: Curating the Digital, Curating the Analog','','inherit','open','open','','4572-revision-7','','','2013-07-06 23:36:01','2013-07-06 23:36:01','',4572,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4572-revision-7/',0,'revision','',0),(5038,1,'2013-06-28 19:37:43','2013-06-28 19:37:43','[gallery columns=\"4\" ids=\"4807,4806,4805,4804\"]\r\n\r\n<div class=\"wp-caption-text\">Panel 1 comments quoted from:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Pamela Bock, “Going Hunting!!!” Microblog, Rachel Donahue’s Facebook, September 20, 2012.</li>\r\n	<li>Katelyn Burgett, “Fording the River That Was 1.5 Feet Deep, My Wagon Tipping over, and Somehow My Whole Family Drowns in Water That’s Shallow Enough to Stand up In...” Microblog, Rachel Donahue’s Facebook, September 20, 2012.</li>\r\n	<li>Rebecca Goldman, “@sheepeeh Giving Silly Names to My Party Members,” Microblog, @DerangeDescribe, September 20, 2012, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/DerangeDescribe/status/248782809114738688\">https://twitter.com/DerangeDescribe/status/248782809114738688</a>.</li>\r\n	<li>Brad Houston, “@sheepeeh When I Was 8 I Was Absolutely Convinced I Was Going to Die of Exhaustion. Had Nightmares of the Gravestone-littered Trail,” Microblog, @herodotusjr, September 20, 2012, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/herodotusjr/status/248782614876549121\">https://twitter.com/herodotusjr/status/248782614876549121</a>.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n</div>','Comic','','inherit','open','open','','4813-revision-8','','','2013-06-28 19:37:43','2013-06-28 19:37:43','',4813,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4813-revision-8/',0,'revision','',0),(5039,3,'2013-07-09 19:16:32','0000-00-00 00:00:00','','Auto Draft','','auto-draft','open','open','','','','','2013-07-09 19:16:32','0000-00-00 00:00:00','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?p=5039',0,'post','',0),(5040,3,'2013-07-08 16:18:24','2013-07-08 16:18:24','<h3><a name=\"mission\"></a>Mission</h3>\r\n<em>Archive</em> focuses on the use and theory of archives and special collections in higher education.\r\n<p class=\"textblock\">The academic community has invested deeply in the preservation, use, and digitization of materials in special collections, and <em>Archive</em> provides the space to reflect on this investment. The objects and texts in special collections and archives are the focus of this journal, just as they are the focus of the many projects from and in archives that have been executed and continue with great success. Digitization efforts large and small have freed archives from the bounds of brick and mortar by bringing a wealth of texts and objects into virtual circulation. Teachers and librarians have increasingly emphasized work with original materials for students at all levels as a way to enrich student experience and position students as researchers. The use of materials in special collections as the objects of scholarly study continues to be a key methodology of humanities disciplines even as new technologies, from data mining to visualizations, open up possibilities for what scholars learn from these objects. Recent archival projects have involved multiple institutions (universities and colleges, independent libraries and archives, and non-profit organizations) and multiple constituencies (including librarians, archivists, undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, university press directors, and information technologists). In this moment when archival projects, both virtual and real, have become the norm rather than the exception, <em>Archive</em> offers a way to forge connections among the projects and the communities producing them.</p>\r\n\r\n<h3><a name=\"content\"></a>Journal Content</h3>\r\n<p class=\"textblock\">The journal consists of three content areas:</p>\r\n\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><em>360°: Analysis and Discussion in the Round</em> features an asynchronous “discussion” among contributors from various backgrounds — in the form of several individual, linked essays — on a single archive or archival topic.</li>\r\n	<li><em>Archives, Remixed: Critical Perspectives and Pathways</em> invites analytical and creative pieces that reflect on meaning-making in and through archives. The format is open to both traditional research or theoretical essays, as well as multi-modal, alternate, or experimental formats. Contributions that analyze, use, theorize, create, find ways through, or reconstitute particular archives, objects or exhibits are invited. Only original work that has not been published elsewhere will be accepted for publication.</li>\r\n	<li><em>Notes + Queries</em> consists of short essays that share best practices, archival finds, reports from the field, and thoughts on current work in the field.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h3><a name=\"editors\"></a>Editorial &amp; Advisory Boards</h3>\r\n<h5>Editorial Team</h5>\r\n<h6>Founding Editor</h6>\r\nLauren Coats, Assistant Professor of English – LSU\r\n<h6>Managing Editor</h6>\r\nGabrielle Dean, Curator of Modern Literary Rare Books and Manuscripts, Librarian for English and the Writing Seminars – Johns Hopkins University\r\n<h6>Contributing Editor</h6>\r\nLaurie N. Taylor, Digital Humanities Librarian, Digital Library Center – University of Florida\r\n<h6>Social Media Editor</h6>\r\nJane Carr, affiliation\r\n<h6>Technical Editor</h6>\r\nDaniel Chamberlain, Director, Center for Digital Learning and Research – Occidental College\r\n<h5>Editorial Board</h5>\r\nWendy Hui Kyong Chun, Professor of Modern Culture and Media – Brown University\r\nLisa Darms, Senior Archivist, Fales Library &amp; Special Collections – NYU\r\nKate Eichorn, Assistant Professor of Culture and Media Studies – The New School University\r\nJulia Flanders, Director, Women Writers Project; Associate Director for Textbase Development, Center for Digital Scholarship – Brown University\r\nPatricia Hswe, Digital Collections Curator – Penn State University\r\nKorey Jackson, ACLS Public Fellow and Project Analyst &amp; Coordinator – Anvil Academic\r\nCecily Marcus, Curator in Archives and Special Collections – University of Minnesota\r\nKenneth M. Price, University Professor and Hillegass Chair of American Literature; Co-Director, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities – University of Nebraska-Lincoln\r\nRichard Szary, Director, Louis Round Wilson Library; Associate University Librarian for Special Collections – UNC-Chapel Hill\r\nEd Whitley, Associate Professor of English – Lehigh University\r\nPeter Wosh, Clinical Associate Professor of History; Director, Archives and Public History Program – NYU\r\n<h5>Advisory Board</h5>\r\nDan Cohen, Executive Director – Digital Public Library of America\r\nSharon Farb, Associate University Librarian – UCLA\r\nKathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Scholarly Communications – MLA and Professor of Media Studies – Pomona College\r\nAmanda French, THATCamp Coordinator, Center for History and New Media – George Mason University\r\nChuck Henry, President – Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)\r\nTara McPherson, Associate Professor of Critical Studies, School of Cinematic Arts – University of Southern California\r\nElliott Shore, Executive Director – Association of Research Libraries\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h3><a name=\"submissions\"></a>Submissions</h3>\r\nPlease review our <a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/home/submit-to-archive-journal/\">submit page</a>, if you are interested in submitting to the journal. <a name=\"review\"></a>Peer ReviewAll materials in <em>Archive Journal</em> are peer-reviewed.Peer review is central to scholarly communication by providing feedback for improvement, ensuring the quality of published materials, and validating the scholarly merit and proper credentialing of published materials. <em>Archive Journal</em>’s peer review policy is designed to achieve these goals, while also using emerging forms of peer review. Because <em>Archive Journal</em> focuses on the use and theory of archives and special collections in higher education, offering a way to forge connections among diverse projects and the communities producing them, the review process is structured to support building connections while retaining the scholarly rigor inherent in peer review.Our review process consists of editorial and open review in the following stages:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Every submission is read by the Editorial Team to determine suitability for publication. The Editorial Team declines materials that are not appropriate at this stage; gives detailed feedback and the opportunity to resubmit for appropriate materials that need substantial revision; and gives feedback and facilitates the process towards publication for appropriate materials that need minor or no revisions. Because <em>Archive Journal</em> is an interdisciplinary space to forge connections and because the online format continues to evolve, this stage may include a series of back and forth feedback from the Editorial Team in order to ensure scholarly rigor, communicability across scholarly fields, and appropriateness of online display.</li>\r\n	<li>If deemed necessary by the Editorial Team, submissions within specialized subject areas that the Editorial Team cannot assess will be sent to reviewers with the appropriate expertise. Reviewers are encouraged to provide guidance to the Editorial Team and constructive feedback for the authors.</li>\r\n	<li>Revised submissions are reviewed after revision for final approval by the Editorial Team before publication. <em>Archive Journal</em> reserves the right to reject revised materials that are deemed not suitable for publication.</li>\r\n	<li>Following peer review and before publication, all accepted materials are copyedited for style and consistency.</li>\r\n	<li>All submissions will be subject to open review via reader comments. After an appropriate open review period has passed, the author(s) will have the opportunity to revise the submission. The final version will be posted and marked as such, with a clear link to the original version and associated open review comments.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<h3><a name=\"copyright\"></a>Copyright &amp; Licenses</h3>\r\nAuthors published in <em>Archive Journal</em> retain permanent ownership of their work via an open-access license. In order to facilitate access and preservation, <em>Archive Journal</em> retains a perpetual, non-exclusive right to publish accepted work and to include it in other aggregations and indexes. Authors are free to deposit a pre-publication version in an institutional repository, individual webpage, or similar site, as well as to reprint, reuse, or republish their work in any venue after one year.The <em>Archive Journal</em> site is made available under the terms of a <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/\">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License</a>. The license grants permission for non-commercial, attributed re-use of content that is produced by <em>Archive Journal</em>.<a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/\" rel=\"license\"><img style=\"border-width: 0;\" alt=\"Creative Commons License\" src=\"http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/88x31.png\" /></a><em>Archive</em><em>Journal </em>has made every effort to ensure that third-party materials used in this journal and on this site follows all copyright and other restrictions. If you have any more information about an item you\'ve seen on our website or if you are the copyright owner and believe our website has not properly attributed your work to you or has used it without permission, we want to hear from you. Please email us at <a href=\"mailto:contact@archivejournal.net\">contact@archivejournal.net</a> with your contact information and a link to the relevant content. <a name=\"publication\"></a>PublicationPermanent access and preservation for citation and reproducible research are core components of scholarly communication. <em>Archive Journal</em> provides permanent open, online access for all journal issues.ISSN 2166-1189\r\n<h3><a name=\"support\"></a>Support</h3>\r\n<em>Archive Journal </em>is currently supported in part by funds from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).  <em><a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/CLIR-Logo-5.27.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone  wp-image-4839\" alt=\"CLIR Logo 5.27\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/CLIR-Logo-5.27.jpg\" width=\"32\" height=\"32\" /></a></em><em></em>\r\n\r\n<em>Archive Journal</em> has been generously supported with grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.','About','','inherit','open','open','','3549-revision-35','','','2013-07-08 16:18:24','2013-07-08 16:18:24','',3549,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/3549-revision-35/',0,'revision','',0),(5041,3,'2013-07-09 19:17:24','2013-07-09 19:17:24','<h3><a name=\"mission\"></a>Mission</h3>\r\n<em>Archive</em> focuses on the use and theory of archives and special collections in higher education.\r\n<p class=\"textblock\">The academic community has invested deeply in the preservation, use, and digitization of materials in special collections, and <em>Archive</em> provides the space to reflect on this investment. The objects and texts in special collections and archives are the focus of this journal, just as they are the focus of the many projects from and in archives that have been executed and continue with great success. Digitization efforts large and small have freed archives from the bounds of brick and mortar by bringing a wealth of texts and objects into virtual circulation. Teachers and librarians have increasingly emphasized work with original materials for students at all levels as a way to enrich student experience and position students as researchers. The use of materials in special collections as the objects of scholarly study continues to be a key methodology of humanities disciplines even as new technologies, from data mining to visualizations, open up possibilities for what scholars learn from these objects. Recent archival projects have involved multiple institutions (universities and colleges, independent libraries and archives, and non-profit organizations) and multiple constituencies (including librarians, archivists, undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, university press directors, and information technologists). In this moment when archival projects, both virtual and real, have become the norm rather than the exception, <em>Archive</em> offers a way to forge connections among the projects and the communities producing them.</p>\r\n\r\n<h3><a name=\"content\"></a>Journal Content</h3>\r\n<p class=\"textblock\">The journal consists of three content areas:</p>\r\n\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><em>360°: Analysis and Discussion in the Round</em> features an asynchronous “discussion” among contributors from various backgrounds — in the form of several individual, linked essays — on a single archive or archival topic.</li>\r\n	<li><em>Archives, Remixed: Critical Perspectives and Pathways</em> invites analytical and creative pieces that reflect on meaning-making in and through archives. The format is open to both traditional research or theoretical essays, as well as multi-modal, alternate, or experimental formats. Contributions that analyze, use, theorize, create, find ways through, or reconstitute particular archives, objects or exhibits are invited. Only original work that has not been published elsewhere will be accepted for publication.</li>\r\n	<li><em>Notes + Queries</em> consists of short essays that share best practices, archival finds, reports from the field, and thoughts on current work in the field.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h3><a name=\"editors\"></a>Editorial &amp; Advisory Boards</h3>\r\n<h5>Editorial Team</h5>\r\n<h6>Founding Editor</h6>\r\nLauren Coats, Assistant Professor of English – LSU\r\n<h6>Managing Editor</h6>\r\nGabrielle Dean, Curator of Modern Literary Rare Books and Manuscripts, Librarian for English and the Writing Seminars – Johns Hopkins University\r\n<h6>Contributing Editor</h6>\r\nLaurie N. Taylor, Digital Humanities Librarian, Digital Library Center – University of Florida\r\n<h6>Social Media Editor</h6>\r\nJane Carr, Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow – NYU\r\n<h6>Technical Editor</h6>\r\nDaniel Chamberlain, Director, Center for Digital Learning and Research – Occidental College\r\n<h5>Editorial Board</h5>\r\nWendy Hui Kyong Chun, Professor of Modern Culture and Media – Brown University\r\nLisa Darms, Senior Archivist, Fales Library &amp; Special Collections – NYU\r\nKate Eichorn, Assistant Professor of Culture and Media Studies – The New School University\r\nJulia Flanders, Director, Women Writers Project; Associate Director for Textbase Development, Center for Digital Scholarship – Brown University\r\nPatricia Hswe, Digital Collections Curator – Penn State University\r\nKorey Jackson, ACLS Public Fellow and Project Analyst &amp; Coordinator – Anvil Academic\r\nCecily Marcus, Curator in Archives and Special Collections – University of Minnesota\r\nKenneth M. Price, University Professor and Hillegass Chair of American Literature; Co-Director, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities – University of Nebraska-Lincoln\r\nRichard Szary, Director, Louis Round Wilson Library; Associate University Librarian for Special Collections – UNC-Chapel Hill\r\nEd Whitley, Associate Professor of English – Lehigh University\r\nPeter Wosh, Clinical Associate Professor of History; Director, Archives and Public History Program – NYU\r\n<h5>Advisory Board</h5>\r\nDan Cohen, Executive Director – Digital Public Library of America\r\nSharon Farb, Associate University Librarian – UCLA\r\nKathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Scholarly Communications – MLA and Professor of Media Studies – Pomona College\r\nAmanda French, THATCamp Coordinator, Center for History and New Media – George Mason University\r\nChuck Henry, President – Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)\r\nTara McPherson, Associate Professor of Critical Studies, School of Cinematic Arts – University of Southern California\r\nElliott Shore, Executive Director – Association of Research Libraries\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h3><a name=\"submissions\"></a>Submissions</h3>\r\nPlease review our <a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/home/submit-to-archive-journal/\">submit page</a>, if you are interested in submitting to the journal. <a name=\"review\"></a>Peer ReviewAll materials in <em>Archive Journal</em> are peer-reviewed.Peer review is central to scholarly communication by providing feedback for improvement, ensuring the quality of published materials, and validating the scholarly merit and proper credentialing of published materials. <em>Archive Journal</em>’s peer review policy is designed to achieve these goals, while also using emerging forms of peer review. Because <em>Archive Journal</em> focuses on the use and theory of archives and special collections in higher education, offering a way to forge connections among diverse projects and the communities producing them, the review process is structured to support building connections while retaining the scholarly rigor inherent in peer review.Our review process consists of editorial and open review in the following stages:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Every submission is read by the Editorial Team to determine suitability for publication. The Editorial Team declines materials that are not appropriate at this stage; gives detailed feedback and the opportunity to resubmit for appropriate materials that need substantial revision; and gives feedback and facilitates the process towards publication for appropriate materials that need minor or no revisions. Because <em>Archive Journal</em> is an interdisciplinary space to forge connections and because the online format continues to evolve, this stage may include a series of back and forth feedback from the Editorial Team in order to ensure scholarly rigor, communicability across scholarly fields, and appropriateness of online display.</li>\r\n	<li>If deemed necessary by the Editorial Team, submissions within specialized subject areas that the Editorial Team cannot assess will be sent to reviewers with the appropriate expertise. Reviewers are encouraged to provide guidance to the Editorial Team and constructive feedback for the authors.</li>\r\n	<li>Revised submissions are reviewed after revision for final approval by the Editorial Team before publication. <em>Archive Journal</em> reserves the right to reject revised materials that are deemed not suitable for publication.</li>\r\n	<li>Following peer review and before publication, all accepted materials are copyedited for style and consistency.</li>\r\n	<li>All submissions will be subject to open review via reader comments. After an appropriate open review period has passed, the author(s) will have the opportunity to revise the submission. The final version will be posted and marked as such, with a clear link to the original version and associated open review comments.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<h3><a name=\"copyright\"></a>Copyright &amp; Licenses</h3>\r\nAuthors published in <em>Archive Journal</em> retain permanent ownership of their work via an open-access license. In order to facilitate access and preservation, <em>Archive Journal</em> retains a perpetual, non-exclusive right to publish accepted work and to include it in other aggregations and indexes. Authors are free to deposit a pre-publication version in an institutional repository, individual webpage, or similar site, as well as to reprint, reuse, or republish their work in any venue after one year.The <em>Archive Journal</em> site is made available under the terms of a <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/\">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License</a>. The license grants permission for non-commercial, attributed re-use of content that is produced by <em>Archive Journal</em>.<a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/\" rel=\"license\"><img style=\"border-width: 0;\" alt=\"Creative Commons License\" src=\"http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/88x31.png\" /></a><em>Archive</em><em>Journal </em>has made every effort to ensure that third-party materials used in this journal and on this site follows all copyright and other restrictions. If you have any more information about an item you\'ve seen on our website or if you are the copyright owner and believe our website has not properly attributed your work to you or has used it without permission, we want to hear from you. Please email us at <a href=\"mailto:contact@archivejournal.net\">contact@archivejournal.net</a> with your contact information and a link to the relevant content. <a name=\"publication\"></a>PublicationPermanent access and preservation for citation and reproducible research are core components of scholarly communication. <em>Archive Journal</em> provides permanent open, online access for all journal issues.ISSN 2166-1189\r\n<h3><a name=\"support\"></a>Support</h3>\r\n<em>Archive Journal </em>is currently supported in part by funds from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).  <em><a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/CLIR-Logo-5.27.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone  wp-image-4839\" alt=\"CLIR Logo 5.27\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/CLIR-Logo-5.27.jpg\" width=\"32\" height=\"32\" /></a></em><em></em>\r\n\r\n<em>Archive Journal</em> has been generously supported with grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.','About','','inherit','open','open','','3549-revision-36','','','2013-07-09 19:17:24','2013-07-09 19:17:24','',3549,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/3549-revision-36/',0,'revision','',0),(5042,3,'2013-07-09 19:19:23','2013-07-09 19:19:23','<h3><a name=\"mission\"></a>Mission</h3>\r\n<em>Archive</em> focuses on the use and theory of archives and special collections in higher education.\r\n<p class=\"textblock\">The academic community has invested deeply in the preservation, use, and digitization of materials in special collections, and <em>Archive</em> provides the space to reflect on this investment. The objects and texts in special collections and archives are the focus of this journal, just as they are the focus of the many projects from and in archives that have been executed and continue with great success. Digitization efforts large and small have freed archives from the bounds of brick and mortar by bringing a wealth of texts and objects into virtual circulation. Teachers and librarians have increasingly emphasized work with original materials for students at all levels as a way to enrich student experience and position students as researchers. The use of materials in special collections as the objects of scholarly study continues to be a key methodology of humanities disciplines even as new technologies, from data mining to visualizations, open up possibilities for what scholars learn from these objects. Recent archival projects have involved multiple institutions (universities and colleges, independent libraries and archives, and non-profit organizations) and multiple constituencies (including librarians, archivists, undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, university press directors, and information technologists). In this moment when archival projects, both virtual and real, have become the norm rather than the exception, <em>Archive</em> offers a way to forge connections among the projects and the communities producing them.</p>\r\n\r\n<h3><a name=\"content\"></a>Journal Content</h3>\r\n<p class=\"textblock\">The journal consists of three content areas:</p>\r\n\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><em>360°: Analysis and Discussion in the Round</em> features an asynchronous “discussion” among contributors from various backgrounds — in the form of several individual, linked essays — on a single archive or archival topic.</li>\r\n	<li><em>Archives, Remixed: Critical Perspectives and Pathways</em> invites analytical and creative pieces that reflect on meaning-making in and through archives. The format is open to both traditional research or theoretical essays, as well as multi-modal, alternate, or experimental formats. Contributions that analyze, use, theorize, create, find ways through, or reconstitute particular archives, objects or exhibits are invited. Only original work that has not been published elsewhere will be accepted for publication.</li>\r\n	<li><em>Notes + Queries</em> consists of short essays that share best practices, archival finds, reports from the field, and thoughts on current work in the field.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h3><a name=\"editors\"></a>Editorial &amp; Advisory Boards</h3>\r\n<h5>Editorial Team</h5>\r\n<h6>Founding Editor</h6>\r\nLauren Coats, Assistant Professor of English – LSU\r\n<h6>Managing Editor</h6>\r\nGabrielle Dean, Curator of Modern Literary Rare Books and Manuscripts, Librarian for English and the Writing Seminars – Johns Hopkins University\r\n<h6>Contributing Editor</h6>\r\nLaurie N. Taylor, Digital Humanities Librarian, Digital Library Center – University of Florida\r\n<h6>Social Media Editor</h6>\r\nJane Carr, Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow – NYU\r\n<h6>Technical Editor</h6>\r\nDaniel Chamberlain, Director, Center for Digital Learning and Research – Occidental College\r\n<h5>Editorial Board</h5>\r\nWendy Hui Kyong Chun, Professor of Modern Culture and Media – Brown University\r\nLisa Darms, Senior Archivist, Fales Library &amp; Special Collections – NYU\r\nKate Eichorn, Assistant Professor of Culture and Media Studies – The New School University\r\nJulia Flanders, Director, Women Writers Project; Associate Director for Textbase Development, Center for Digital Scholarship – Brown University\r\nPatricia Hswe, Digital Collections Curator – Penn State University\r\nKorey Jackson, ACLS Public Fellow and Project Analyst &amp; Coordinator – Anvil Academic\r\nCecily Marcus, Curator in Archives and Special Collections – University of Minnesota\r\nKenneth M. Price, University Professor and Hillegass Chair of American Literature; Co-Director, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities – University of Nebraska-Lincoln\r\nRichard Szary, Director, Louis Round Wilson Library; Associate University Librarian for Special Collections – UNC-Chapel Hill\r\nEd Whitley, Associate Professor of English – Lehigh University\r\nPeter Wosh, Clinical Associate Professor of History; Director, Archives and Public History Program – NYU\r\n<h5>Advisory Board</h5>\r\nDan Cohen, Executive Director – Digital Public Library of America\r\nSharon Farb, Associate University Librarian – UCLA\r\nKathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Scholarly Communications – MLA and Professor of Media Studies – Pomona College\r\nAmanda French, THATCamp Coordinator, Center for History and New Media – George Mason University\r\nChuck Henry, President – Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)\r\nTara McPherson, Associate Professor of Critical Studies, School of Cinematic Arts – University of Southern California\r\nElliott Shore, Executive Director – Association of Research Libraries\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h3><a name=\"submissions\"></a>Submissions</h3>\r\nPlease review our <a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/home/submit-to-archive-journal/\">submit page</a>, if you are interested in submitting to the journal. <a name=\"review\"></a>Peer ReviewAll materials in <em>Archive Journal</em> are peer-reviewed.Peer review is central to scholarly communication by providing feedback for improvement, ensuring the quality of published materials, and validating the scholarly merit and proper credentialing of published materials. <em>Archive Journal</em>’s peer review policy is designed to achieve these goals, while also using emerging forms of peer review. Because <em>Archive Journal</em> focuses on the use and theory of archives and special collections in higher education, offering a way to forge connections among diverse projects and the communities producing them, the review process is structured to support building connections while retaining the scholarly rigor inherent in peer review.Our review process consists of editorial and open review in the following stages:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Every submission is read by the Editorial Team to determine suitability for publication. The Editorial Team declines materials that are not appropriate at this stage; gives detailed feedback and the opportunity to resubmit for appropriate materials that need substantial revision; and gives feedback and facilitates the process towards publication for appropriate materials that need minor or no revisions. Because <em>Archive Journal</em> is an interdisciplinary space to forge connections and because the online format continues to evolve, this stage may include a series of back and forth feedback from the Editorial Team in order to ensure scholarly rigor, communicability across scholarly fields, and appropriateness of online display.</li>\r\n	<li>If deemed necessary by the Editorial Team, submissions within specialized subject areas that the Editorial Team cannot assess will be sent to reviewers with the appropriate expertise. Reviewers are encouraged to provide guidance to the Editorial Team and constructive feedback for the authors.</li>\r\n	<li>Revised submissions are reviewed after revision for final approval by the Editorial Team before publication. <em>Archive Journal</em> reserves the right to reject revised materials that are deemed not suitable for publication.</li>\r\n	<li>Following peer review and before publication, all accepted materials are copyedited for style and consistency.</li>\r\n	<li>All submissions will be subject to open review via reader comments. After an appropriate open review period has passed, the author(s) will have the opportunity to revise the submission. The final version will be posted and marked as such, with a clear link to the original version and associated open review comments.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<h3><a name=\"copyright\"></a>Copyright &amp; Licenses</h3>\r\nAuthors published in <em>Archive Journal</em> retain permanent ownership of their work via an open-access license. In order to facilitate access and preservation, <em>Archive Journal</em> retains a perpetual, non-exclusive right to publish accepted work and to include it in other aggregations and indexes. Authors are free to deposit a pre-publication version in an institutional repository, individual webpage, or similar site, as well as to reprint, reuse, or republish their work in any venue after one year.The <em>Archive Jour</em><em>nal</em> site is made available under the terms of a <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/\">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License</a>. The license grants permission for non-commercial, attributed re-use of content that is produced by <em>Archive Journal</em>.\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/\" rel=\"license\"><img class=\"alignnone\" style=\"border-width: 0px;\" alt=\"Creative Commons License\" src=\"http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/88x31.png\" width=\"88\" height=\"31\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<em>Archive</em><em>Journal </em>has made every effort to ensure that third-party materials used in this journal and on this site follows all copyright and other restrictions. If you have any more information about an item you\'ve seen on our website or if you are the copyright owner and believe our website has not properly attributed your work to you or has used it without permission, we want to hear from you. Please email us at <a href=\"mailto:contact@archivejournal.net\">contact@archivejournal.net</a> with your contact information and a link to the relevant content. <a name=\"publication\"></a>PublicationPermanent access and preservation for citation and reproducible research are core components of scholarly communication. <em>Archive Journal</em> provides permanent open, online access for all journal issues.ISSN 2166-1189\r\n<h3><a name=\"support\"></a>Support</h3>\r\n<em>Archive Journal </em>is currently supported in part by funds from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).  <em><a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/CLIR-Logo-5.27.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone  wp-image-4839\" alt=\"CLIR Logo 5.27\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/CLIR-Logo-5.27.jpg\" width=\"32\" height=\"32\" /></a></em><em></em>\r\n\r\n<em>Archive Journal</em> has been generously supported with grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.','About','','inherit','open','open','','3549-revision-37','','','2013-07-09 19:19:23','2013-07-09 19:19:23','',3549,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/3549-revision-37/',0,'revision','',0),(5049,10,'2013-07-10 06:25:49','2013-07-10 06:25:49','The primal scene of archival research takes place in a dreary reading room. A researcher sits at her table, inert. An archivist enters, pushing a cart that bears a dozen dusty gray boxes. (See Figure 1.)\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ykY6moIaDE?rel=0\" height=\"250\" width=\"333\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe>\r\nA staged archival encounter.\r\n\r\nThe archivist unhinges a box, removes a numbered file folder and, placing it at the researcher’s elbow, steps back. The researcher stirs, then sits upright with a mechanical jolt. She turns sharply in the direction of the folder, flips it open and cocks her head towards the flimsy leaves inside; now she is reading. (Zoom in on the eyes as they click into focus.) Now she is reading, and now she truly comes alive; she bends towards the papers, taps her forehead in thought. A sheaf of blank paper and a pencil appear on her table, and she begins taking notes. Her fingers fly—and soon, so do the pages she is writing upon. Caught up in eddies of excitement, they swoop to the ceiling and around the room and down to the floor, where they fall together into perfect piles. Bindings sprout from the outer strata; the pages sew themselves into bright, tight, hard-cover books. These the archivist gathers up and places on the shelves that line the room, next to other books and gray boxes.\r\n\r\nI may have it backwards: in other versions of the fantasy, it is the archive that is first animated by the presence of the researcher, a Dr. Coppelius who waves a pencil and sets the dusty boxes to dancing. But either way, the archival imaginary posits a symbiotic relationship between researcher and source, a photogenic pas de deux that leads to a finished scholarly product. This work, in turn, enters the archive for the next generation of researchers; it might even be taken apart again so that its secret ingredients (notes, drafts, letters) can themselves be served up in a series of boxes. Such a strangely private form of publication it creates, the coupling of researcher and source.\r\n\r\nWhat Freudian trauma results from witnessing this sight? Only the harm that myth inflicts. This primal scene is a fiction, a dream of perfect union between researcher and source that ignores, first of all, the full cast of characters. What about the archivist, who is rendered invisible? What about all those within and without the archive, upon whose labor—acquiring, preserving, organizing, reading, cataloging, describing, interpreting, analyzing, debating, teaching, writing, editing, digitizing, referencing and publishing—the current project depends? More a barn dance than a pas de deux: an archival encounter is an enactment of social authorship long before the researcher enters the room. ((See Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) on the idea of social authorship, which could be described as “the dialectic between the historically located individual author and the historically developed institutions of literary production” that help create a work, e.g., printers, publishers, editors and readers (81).))\r\n\r\nBut even a barn dance is much too mannered a metaphor. The sketch above misleads us more generally about the experience on the ground. Doing time in an archive is often tedious, uncomfortable and bewildering. For librarians, there is the struggle to promote and simultaneously protect what you have; the difficulty of fitting unruly materials into arrangements and workflows; and worries about space and time—where to put it all, how to address your backlog. For researchers, there is the struggle to locate the archives you need and what matters to you inside them; the uncertainty created by unruly data; and worries about time and space— how to access what you need during your research trip, how to record and organize the information you gather. At both ends, the archival encounter is counter-cinematic and erratic, days of monotonous sifting and dead-ends punctuated by one or two, or maybe zero, hidden moments of vivid, peculiar joy.\r\n\r\nSo archival research does not fulfill its ideal outline. So what? Who cares? Why dredge up the fantasy? Because the fantasy continues to structure our archival encounters—what we expect and undertake in the reading room, what we allow it to mean. Twenty years ago, Alice Kaplan observed that “conventional academic discourse requires that when you write up the results of your archival work, you tell a story about what you found, but not about how you found it. The less the seams of your findings show, the better your discoveries lend themselves to use by others… tell[ing] these stories breaks their spell and violates the spirit of the archives.” ((Alice Yaeger Kaplan, “Working in the Archives,” Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 103-116; 103, 107.)) With a few word changes, the same could be said about what counts as professional archivist discourse: the impersonal, neutral genre of the finding aid, for example, should say what is in a collection, but should not discuss what is confusing or missing in it, or the problems it posed in processing. ((See, for example, James M. O’Toole and Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006).)) Despite the growing recognition that this sequestration is never completely possible—that the material conditions and social relations of the archive shape the work we do in it—that work continues to be represented in professional and scholarly publications as if it is. Despite the recent call to move to the fore “the backstage of the archives—how they are constructed, policed, experienced, and manipulated” in order to support historiography “not merely [as] a project of fact-retrieval” but as “a set of complex processes of selection, interpretation, and even creative invention,” the “backstage” stays in the background. ((Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 7-8.)) Antoinette Burton may be correct that “many if not most historians operate under the assumption that history is a highly interpretive act,” but this belief is not yet reflected in the archival encounter: the ways that researchers (not just historians) and librarians report their experiences with primary sources; the ways that librarians and researchers work together; the ways librarians and researchers regard the involvement of “non specialists.” ((Burton, 8. Burton notes that “whether historians concede or fully countenance the impact of such contingencies on their work is another question. They rarely speak of them, and even more rarely do they do so in print” (8). Her books recuperates some of those archive stories but this effort, I’ll suggest below, is hampered by other kinds of obligations.)) While the advent of digitization and electronic resource sharing has revolutionized the research landscape, making primary sources public in unprecedented ways, there remains in the archive a habitus of secret knowledge—the “spell” that Kaplan is loathe to break. This is not necessarily intentional. It is rather the effect of layering recent shifts in technology, theory and professional definition onto older foundations: petrified conditions, relations, expectations and systems that continue to operate in part through the enduring power of fantasies about research. What we have in the archive is a stratified groundwork that still governs our archival encounters.\r\n\r\nBut, you will object, the archive has already changed. Now we have the “archival turn”—the scholarly interest in the archive not just as a source of evidence but as an epistemological mode. Surely, this attention to the constructedness of the archive has led to a revealing reconsideration of what actually goes on inside an archive; surely, as a result, those archaic fantasies have diminished. Have they? In what follows, I begin by unearthing one stratum of the archival turn, the decade of the 1990s, as represented by three texts: Kaplan’s essay mentioned above, “Working in the Archives” (1990)\r\n\r\n[gallery ids=\"373,372,369\"]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_369\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-369 \" alt=\"fig 2 kaplan\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan-300x224.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"224\" /></a> Photocopy of Alice Yaeger Kaplan’s “Working in the Archives.”; Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1994/95)[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_372\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-372 \" alt=\"Print out of Jacque Derrida’s “Archive Fever” from Diacritics.; and Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida-300x224.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"224\" /></a> Print out of Jacque Derrida’s “Archive Fever” from Diacritics.; and Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_373\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-373 \" alt=\"Library copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust. (Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25.2 (Summer 1995): 9-63. Web. 1 Dec. 2010. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).) \" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman-300x224.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"224\" /></a> Library copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust. ((Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25.2 (Summer 1995): 9-63. Web. 1 Dec. 2010. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).))[/caption]\r\n\r\nA cross-examination of these three texts reveals a pattern of interests, a set of efforts to defy customary practices—but only, it turns out, “in theory.” While certain practices are challenged in these texts, they leave mostly intact the older strata of archival research fantasies and conventions. Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman do not dislodge the forces that organize the actual archival encounter.\r\n\r\nHow does this happen? Why is practice so stubborn? We need another take on archival practice: not practice in theory, but practice in action; not the 1990s, but now; not in terms of textual patterns, but in terms that suit the subject: the terms of the archival encounter itself, and the eccentric, anachronistic and even monotonous experience it generates. My second look at practice will take the form of a series of vignettes about a real-life archive, the George Peabody Library in Baltimore. While this narrative structure may seem to recreate the division of labor between theory and practice, my hope is that—by giving practice the last word—we’ll be in a better position to synthesize the two.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>I. “The library doubles as a detective’s office.” ((Kaplan, 114.))</strong>\r\n\r\nThe archival turn could be dated to the founding of “scientific” history in the mid-nineteenth century, or to the development a century later of the quantitative methods of the Annales School, or to other evidence-based movements in the history of history, but what is generally meant by this phrase corresponds with the formation of cultural studies and the use of the archive as a conceptual category. That is, the archival turn has to do with the notion of the “figuration” of the archive, a parallel decline in its empirical authority and a related expansion of its relevance within domains that are not exclusively historiographic, like art, literary criticism, textual studies, media studies and information studies. ((See the use of the term in, for example, Carolyn Hamilton et al, eds., Refiguring the Archive (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), Cheryl Simon, ed., Following the Archival Turn: Photography, the Museum, and the Archive, special issue of Visual Resources: A Journal of Documentation 18.2 (June 2002), and Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). This turn is partially construed as a “move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject,” but also by the earlier metaphorical interest in “the archive” that goes back to the 1980s (Stoler, 44-45) and by Foucauldian descriptions of archives as “‘monuments to particular configurations of power” (Hamilton, qtd. in Burton, 6).)) But it is not irrelevant that a devotion to archival methods precedes by many decades contemporary theories of the archive; if the archival turn lacks a precise origin, this (we will see) is completely in keeping with its own preoccupations.\r\n\r\nKaplan therefore represents in some ways an arbitrary beginning for this cross-examination—clearly the archive as a conceptual category predates 1990—but her article does initiate something new: the recognition that there is something called an “archive story” that must remain hidden in order for the official “results” to function authoritatively. In admitting this bit of professional legerdemain, and in telling her own archive story in a prestigious scholarly journal, Kaplan not only commits the violation she prohibits but also contradicts it. Through its publication, Kaplan’s own archive story is elevated to the status of “results”—a kind of research that shadows conventional academic discourse. Indeed, Kaplan notes, such “fables” of research “can be analyzed like a text,” a “mixed up genre” that combines the “redemptive detective fiction” with the epic and the dime novel. ((Kaplan, 106, 107.))\r\n\r\nKaplan’s archive story thus marks a distinctive moment in the archival turn—one which gained its most prominent authorization in 1994, with a paper that Jacques Derrida delivered (in English) to a conference sponsored by the Freud Museum, the Courtauld Institute and the Société International d’Histoire de la Psychiatrie et de la Psychoanalyse. Called initially “The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression,” the lecture was revised and published in 1995 as Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne in French; the published English version echoed the French publication with its 1995 title Archive Fever. As Carolyn Steedman points out in Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, however, this work that has been assigned a seminal status in archival studies “for the main part… is not about archives at all, but is rather a sustained contemplation of a work of history, of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (1991),” itself a sustained contemplation of Moses and Monotheism—which (according to Steedman) Yerushalmi examines through Freud’s description of the work as a “‘historical novel,’ or a kind of historical story,” undertaken “in order to understand the period of baroque anti-semitism through which he was living.” ((Steedman, 3.))\r\n\r\nDizzy yet? Let’s undertake a more careful reading of this splatter pattern of intra-references—or, to stick with the archaeological metaphor, let’s call them groups of potsherds buried in the 1990s layer of the “archival turn.” Digging down to reassemble them reveals a set of interests with special implications for archival practice.\r\n\r\nThe most prominent group of sherds to note are the fragments of disciplinarity: the inter-, multi- or perhaps simply anti-disciplinarity of the texts, authors and audiences caught up in these three archival addresses. Kaplan, an American scholar of French literature, calls the post-theory exchange between literature and history a “cross-pollination of desire between historians and literary critics” undertaken “with the curiosity and energetic passion of collectors.” ((Kaplan, 107-108.)) Steedman, a British historian, performs this cross-pollinating process without comment: her epigraph to Dust is from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, one chapter treats George Eliot’s Middlemarch in depth… in fact, almost every chapter depends on a literary text. ((Another chapter invokes Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel Mary Barton, a third is anchored by W. H. Auden’s poem “Homage to Clio,” and a fourth finds its most eloquent examples in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.)) Derrida, a French philosopher, produced a work that has been exceptionally mobile across disciplines, forms, languages and professional domains. He gave his initial talk to an audience drawing on three different kinds of institutions; Mal d’Archive was published in book form in both French and English, but also made an intermediate appearance as an essay in the journal diacritics. All of these texts, it seems, respond to the provocations of the archive—to the materials and circumstances of discovery—rather than to the disciplinary distinctions that arguably divide the archive from itself.\r\n\r\nArchive Fever has become a founding document even though, as Steedman notes in the very beginning of her book, many in Derrida’s audience “knew the ‘archival turn’ to be [already] well underway” at the time of his talk. ((Steedman, 2.)) As it happens—and this is the second group of sherds I see—these three essays have in common an investment in or a problem with origins, especially with the failure of origins. Derrida, for example, defines archive fever as a kind of Freudian death drive—a drive to fix and preserve which at the same time “works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own ‘proper’ traces… [it] is above all anarchivic, one could say, or archiviolithic… the archive always works, and a priori, against itself.” ((Derrida, 14.)) If the archival impulse is driven to destroy its own work, then the question of origins ultimately point to the larger question of disorder. The disorder of origins makes frequent appearances in the essay but one example will make the point—in the “Preamble” where he recounts how he titled the talk that he had not yet written and was to give at the Freud Museum. The “Preamble” starts with his reflections on the word “impression,” which has several simultaneous registers of meaning for him. One of these is the “scriptural or typographic” register: that of the graphic impression that marks a substrate. In English, “impression” is phonetically related to “repression” and “suppression,” key words in the Freudian vocabulary, translated respectively from the German Verdrängung and Unterdrückung. English, that is, retains the rhyming relationship of the two German terms, and “impression” in this company comes to have a vaguely Freudian meaning as well. But in French, Verdrängung is “refoulement,” which means something more like expulsion, a driving away. The Freudian sense of the French word “répression” has been reserved for Unterdrückung. So English “repression” defines a phenomenon that must be distinguished from the French “répression.” These translational shifts “directly concern the structures of archivization,” Derrida says, “because they touch on the topic differences and thus on the location of the substrates of traces\" (Derrida, 23). In other words, how do you classify concepts whose meanings shift across languages? Where do you store them in a disciplinary grammar—or in an archive? How do these asymmetrical linguistic structures shape the establishment and extension of a new science? For Derrida, the difference between “repression” and “répression” is “enough to disrupt the tranquil landscape of all historical knowledge, of all historiography, and even of all self-consistent ‘scholarship’” ((Derrida, 23.))\r\n\r\nOrigin failure appears both as deliberate performance and as unintentional oversight in these essays. Derrida stages his own inability to get past “go”; with an introductory section, and subsequent sections sub-titled “Exergue,” “Preamble,” “Foreword,” his essay functions, Steedman notes, like a “primer offering instruction in the principle of deferral.” ((A short notice called “Priere d’inserer,” published only in the French book version, carried the bulk of an argument for which there was no room in the lecture. Steedman, 7.)) For all her insight into Derrida’s titling adventures, however, Steedman’s title is marked by its own origin aporia. While her first chapter is devoted to Archive Fever—a “let’s begin at the beginning” homage to the seminal text—her book’s title, Dust, seems more indebted to the last sentence of Kaplan’s essay, published five years before Derrida’s: “Usually there is no mother lode, no original manuscript to be retrieved—the gold is all in the dust.” ((Kaplan, 116.)) Kaplan, however, is never mentioned. ((Kaplan also begins her essay with a brief consideration of the “arche,” the Greek and Latin term for the public records office, which is a major starting point for Derrida. Is he borrowing from her, or is she borrowing from him, given that this sort of etymological investigation was an established signature of Deconstruction?))\r\n\r\nKaplan, for her part, unravels her own archive story. She gives us a kind of “whodunit”—her search for the ephemeral sources of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s anti-semitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937). She uses this account to exemplify her effort to “move through the archival process and recover some of the stories that get deleted in the final scholarly form.” ((Kaplan, 104. For this reason, perhaps, Kaplan never reveals what she ultimately discovers in her successful search for Celine’s sources. In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether her pre-emptive and truncated treatment of her archive story is deliberate or not. Is this treatment meant to indirectly support her official claim about “results”? Or does the presence of the archive story suggest that telling it is an impulse she can’t quite control? Thanks, Lauren Coats, for helping tease this problem out.)) These beginnings are preemptively struck out, however, by what seems to be her main claim: “the passion of the archives must finally be used to eradicate all personal stories in the interests of the dry archival report, fit for a public.” ((Kaplan, 103.)) Only in the “para-text”—a preface, for example—can the archive story appear without “interrupt[ing] or complicat[ing] the narrative so much that no results could ever be understood or perceived.” ((Kaplan, 104.)) Despite this unequivocal assertion, the personal “whodunit” prevails in her essay, especially in the final section set in the Centre du documentation juive contemporain (CDJC). It is this library, where Kaplan solves the mystery of Céline’s sources, that “doubles as a detective’s office.”\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_423\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"333\"]<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-5-cdjc-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-423\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-423\" title=\"fig 5 cdjc\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1-333x250.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a> Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhile Kaplan’s research mystery resolves neatly, the truth about archives is that they are full of gaps, mistakes and excesses: in the words of one of the CDJC librarians, “‘ici on trouve tout’—there’s some of everything here”—but not, one could add, all of anything. ((Kaplan, 115.)) Kaplan’s essay ends by nullifying both her detective story success and her “dry archival report,” by recognizing the disorder on which both of these narratives are unsteadily perched: “The archive is constituted by these errors, these pieces out of place, which are then reintegrated into a story of some kind.” ((Kaplan, 115.)) “A story of some kind”? So much for “results.”\r\n\r\nKaplan sets us up to perceive one final potsherd pattern common to these three essays. If origin-less disorder is the order of the archive, it is a disorder that is generated out of human loss—a disorder that joins the body and the material world. The archive is always predicated on historical violence of some sort, whatever is censored, erased, excluded, trumped up, used up, misplaced, conquered, killed. Moreover, the archival categories that mark both the visible victories and hidden defeats do not stay within their walls; the archive is both a repository of existing schemas and a means of perpetuating them in the world beyond. While we might usually think of this disciplinary activity as a pact between the archive and its political authors, Steedman makes it clear that the dilemmas of order shape the archival body in many ways. For example, she takes literally the provocation of Derrida’s title Archive Fever to investigate the illness that researchers contract on the penultimate day of their trip to the archive: prompted by the anxiety of the task that remains unfinished, they end their research with night-sweats and head-aches. But what seems like a strangely specific malady is transformed by Steedman into a far-reaching social symptom: by relating the researcher’s “archive fever” to the terrible diseases suffered by tanners, skinners and other workers in the trades associated with paper and leather, Steedman expands our sense of who is in the archive—the bodies whose specialized labors populate our libraries with books, the many kinds of expertise the archive consumes.\r\n\r\nFor Derrida, the relation between the material archive and its human architects focuses on one kind of “graphic mark,” a particular “private inscription”: circumcision as the archival signature that is also the signature of patrimoine, with Freud’s relationship to his father as his main example. ((Derrida, 19.)) It is perhaps not a coincidence that the body in question in both Kaplan’s and Derrida’s archive is Jewish, for that is a body that has come to symbolize the destructive power of classificatory regimes. Despite her contention that the private passions motivating research must be kept secret, Kaplan is fascinated by the “missing person stories” at the CDJC: by the “quantity of people who are there for personal reasons,” the survivors of occupation or deportation or camps, or their descendants, quietly looking up their lost ones or noisily dropping off their memoirs. ((Kaplan, 113.)) This disorganized crowd of dead and living bodies tries to meet up with an equally disorganized crowd of materials—individual letters, trial transcripts, pamphlets, newspapers, first-person accounts, books, photographs, lists. The monumental task of match-making, the librarians’ work, is never complete. More papers are always generated or declassified or discovered, different human questions and needs emerge. The tidy choreography of the research fantasy, where the detective always finds her man, is not so much in evidence; what we have instead is corpora in excess of existing categories.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\nKaplan, Derrida and Steedman open up the archival body. They show us how paper meets the press of flesh; they make us feel just how intimate it is. [note number=\'26\']This interest in the corporeal dimensions and effects of order, its human and non-human components, has in common with their other gestures—an experimental attitude towards conventional disciplinarity and attention to the priority of disorder—the circumstances of the academic humanities in the 1990s. Since the archival turn came out of the ascent of cultural studies and allied intrigues in the 1970s and ‘80s, the circles in the Venn diagram of these ventures will necessarily overlap. We could also say that the archive took off when it did precisely because it made a clever new container for these preoccupations, thick in the humanities atmosphere at the time, where they were distilled and united. [/note] But for all their revelations about the limits of discipline and the multiplicities of disorder in the archive, these texts do not disclose the specific methods of engagement that led to their existence. While Kaplan offers up her own archival victory and outlines several other such stories, she still insists on their marginalization. [note number=\'27\']“Were the story of how you got the story really to be told inside the book, it would interrupt or complicate the narrative so much that no results could be understood or even perceived. Every story of success in the archives is emotionally charged, for only the most extreme emotions can drive people to the drudgery, to the discomfort, of sitting and sifting through dog-eared documents, manuscripts, microfilms. To reveal those emotions would not only gum up the narrative, it would threaten its credibility, by showing on what thin strands of coincidence, accident, or on what unfair forms of friendship, ownership, geographical proximity, the discoveries were based” (Kaplan, 104).[/note] If these texts are not concerned with actual practices in the archive or changes in its methodologies, what do they tell us?\r\n\r\nFirst, they suggest one reason for the perpetuation of myths about the archive. While Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman are eager to show how archival materials do not conform to disciplinary distinctions—an enthusiasm related to other disruptive tendencies in late twentieth-century humanist scholarship –they seem less cognizant of a related phenomenon: the archive does not obey strict professional divisions, either. In Kaplan’s library-as-detective’s-office metaphor, the scholar is the detective, but does the “Eureka” moment belong only to the scholar who pieces together a narrative? What about the people who prepared those pieces? The archivist is still missing in action. Likewise, these essays do not dwell on missing boxes, illegible papers, neglected citations. There are no descriptions of archival slogging, no admissions that some materials failed to be relevant. And of course, there are no prescriptions for a different order. It is not the main aim of Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman to effect an evolution of practice; archival turnistas are not interested in disorder in order to re-order. But it is worth remembering that it is not in their professional interest as scholars to make their practices more transparent.\r\n\r\nSecondly, along the same lines, these texts inform us of the duplicity of speculative practices that reveal but cannot live out the instability of their archival mandates. Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman are put into the position of saying, “Yes, the archive is biased, idiosyncratic and treacherous—but the observations I draw from it are flawless.” [note number=\'28\']Derrida, unlike Kaplan and Steedman, makes no claims to work inside an actual archive, unless we consider Yerushalmi’s book as a kind of archive. But the fact that the essay was written self-consciously for presentation at the Freud Museum suggests that it was made out of an archive indirectly—in its construction, if not in its contents. [/note]\r\n\r\nFinally, these texts suggest why archival studies that attempt to be explicit about the messy nature of the archive have become instead “archive studies.” In more recent works like Refiguring the Archive (2002), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (2005) and Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009), the archive appears as a subject in its own right. Although the archival scenarios that are put into play in each of these books incorporate different disciplines—art, history, anthropology, literature, post-colonial studies—they have essentially created a new discipline. “Archive studies” is something we might, in the taxonomy of disciplines, see as the love-child of cultural studies, history and archival methodology. Moreover, this new discipline has in common with other humanities disciplines a complete blindness about its professional investments; it does not register much awareness of the professional investments of librarians, archivists, curators and “non-specialists,” or invite insights from those perspectives. Perhaps this is inevitably what happens when academics must give legitimacy to something new, which in turn reflects the pressures of scholarly communication: a topic must be delineated in conventional terms in order to merit publication. [note number=\'29\']Perhaps this is also the moment to ask why we—I—have been using the term “archive” all along, with its statist resonances, rather than the term “collection,” which has institutional but also personal resonances. Does “archive” bring us closer to recognizably “serious scholarship”?[/note] But it is also true that in these more recent books, which openly investigate the archive’s power-politics, the disorderly drift of the archive and its hybrid corporeality have mostly been bent towards a particular narrative about the archive as an agent of history rather than as a set of ongoing practices. It is as if the historical archive has been assembled in ways that reflect and reiterate power relations, but the contemporary archive has not; it is as if the researcher’s own research travails remain a transparent layer over the body of work that it constructs. [note number=\'30\']Of course, this is precisely what Derrida meant about the “death drive” of the archival impulse. Archive Stories is something of an exception; researchers speak openly here about themselves as researchers. It is interesting, however, that this book—like Steedman’s—doesn’t cite Kaplan’s essay as a precursor text despite the clear titular link.[/note]\r\n\r\nPerhaps it would also be fair to note that, if archival studies are now being formulated as an interdisciplinary discipline called “archive studies,” this might be just another stage in the turn. It might be that what comes next reconfigures the premise of disciplinarity and the promise of disorder, with a different approach to the human/non-human interactions that the archive documents and realizes: a more diffuse and multi-vocal set of practices in place of a new field. One way to imagine this approach would be to fully embrace Kaplan’s idea of the archive story as an account of what one hoped for, looked for and found, what one did and did not do, in the archive—an account loosed from the quarantine she advocates. Some very basic genre precedents for the archive story do exist; the bibliographic essay and the methodology statement, for example, have played an important role in many disciplines in the past and still do in some. Instead of a para-textual nod towards that archive story (in Kaplan’s sense), why not create a parallel text written collaboratively by the researcher(s) and the librarian(s), or by one person acting in both professional capacities, that runs alongside the official “results”? Or in a set of expanded notes that address not just the “what” and “where” but the “how” and “why” of sources, which are lifted from their small-type, bottom-of-page basement up into the light? Or—to add yet another layer—parallel texts that also offer room for exchange with other researchers, archivists and even interested “non specialists,” like collectors, bibliophiles and fans?\r\n\r\nIf it is hasn’t been clear already that I have scrupulously avoided so far the other kind of archive, the digital archive, it will be now. What I am imagining would be far too complicated to produce or consult in print, but would not be at all difficult to organize as a digital object—as an archive in its own right. By avoiding the digital archive up to this point, I have also finessed the fact that our current archival research methods are completely reliant on the digital archive, along with the development of online research tools and electronic instruments of data discovery and organization. Those conditions probably bear the most responsibility for making the archive visible as something that warranted a “turn” in the first place. Even Derrida refers in each version of Archive Fever to the computer on which he is currently composing, predicting that email will not only totally transform the archive as he knows it, but will make his own essay obsolete.\r\n\r\nIn short, we already have in place both the theory and the media that will make it possible to enact a radical new archival practice. We have in place what we need to integrate the archive story into the archive itself, while making it visible as a new form of “results.”\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>II. The library doubles as a librarian’s office.</strong>\r\n\r\nI could end here, with a triumphant firing of the starter pistol and a rousing cheer. But that would be a bit disingenuous, given that the starter pistol for both the archival turn and the academic use of the internet actually went off decades ago. So the question remains, what stands in the way of the practical enactment of the archival turn’s speculative insights? I’d like to engage this question by following Kaplan’s example (but not her main claim): through some archive story-telling about the George Peabody Library. These three vignettes, identified as “typical” through conversations with my colleague Paul Espinosa, illustrate the intractable formations that present-day archival encounters come up against.\r\n\r\n<strong>1. The Perils of Description.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>A group of Russian speakers visits the Peabody Library. The dozen men and women sit down around the screen that Paul has set up. He narrates a brief slide-show about the Peabody’s history, then leads them to a table where a dozen books from the collection have been laid out in cradles. He tells them about each book: what it is, why it is interesting. Each phrase of his presentation is painstakingly translated by the group’s leader into Russian.</blockquote>\r\nWhen academic and community groups visit the Peabody, my colleagues and I draw upon a standard tour-guide’s repertoire to describe it. We explain that George Peabody was a tradesman cum financier cum philanthropist who decided in 1857 that Baltimore needed a cultural institution to support the arts and learning. We talk about the evolution of the Peabody Institute, the four-part athenaeum that resulted, with its art gallery, lecture series, conservatory and free, public, non-circulating library. We discuss the model of philanthropy that George Peabody initiated and its wide-ranging influence. We point out the signal features of the awe-inspiring architecture of the current library, built to accommodate a rapidly growing collection in 1878. But when it comes to the library itself, as a collection, it is hard to know what to say. How to accurately translate the library’s holdings into a succinct and memorable statement that conveys an appropriate level of detail to different audiences? While it poses specific challenges, the Peabody also exemplifies more general problems of collection description.\r\n\r\nWe do not lack evidence for the evolving contents of the Peabody. We have the two-volume printed list of “desiderata” drawn up by the Peabody’s first librarian, John G. Morris. [note number=\'31\']Alphabetical Catalogue of Books to be Purchased for the Library of the Peabody Institute, Baltimore, Vols. 1 and 2 (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1861, 1863).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'6\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-6-alpha-index-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-395\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-395\" title=\"fig 6 alpha index\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1-336x484.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"484\" /></a>Alphabetical index from Alphabetical Catalouge (“desiderata”).[/note] We have the collections register for several decades’-worth of acquisitions, recording bibliographic information and accession numbers that can still be found on the inside front end papers of many of the books in the collection. We have the librarians’ annual reports to the library trustees. [note number=\'32\']The Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore: The Founder’s Letters and the Papers Relating to its Dedication and History, Up to the 1st January, 1868 (Baltimore: William K. Boyle, 1868); and subsequent Annual Reports, 1869, etc.[/note] We have the library’s first printed catalogue, an unsurpassed achievement when first published in 1883, which listed 100,000 volumes by author and title. [note number=\'33\']Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Vols. 1-5 (Baltimore: Isaac Friedenwald, 1883; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, [1961?]; also on googlebooks), and Second Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Including the Additions Made Since 1882, Vols. 1-8 (Baltimore: Deutsch Lithographic and Printing, 1896; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, 1961).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'7\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-7-print-cat/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-396\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-396\" title=\"fig 7 print cat\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).[/note] We have the cards from the Dewey decimal system card catalogue, which replaced the printed catalogue in the 1910s. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'8\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-8-card-cat/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-397\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-397\" title=\"fig 8 card cat\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"448\" /></a>One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.[/note] Now, of course, the library’s collections are represented in an online catalogue that integrates them with other collections in the Hopkins library system.\r\n\r\nThese markers of the collection, however, fail to satisfy some contemporary research queries for reasons that are both practical and philosophical. The transfer of the printed index, organized by author, to the Dewey decimal system, organized by topic, represented a major epistemological shift that facilitated browsing by subject category. But of course, those categories are embedded in historically-bound notions about the subjects and structures of knowledge: Dewey was invented in the 1870s, and the 22 revisions it has undergone since then cannot overcome its essential organizational distortions. For example, the literature range—the 800s—offers only 10% of its categorical space to literatures in languages other than English, Germanic and Romance languages, Greek and Latin.\r\n\r\nIn the case of the Peabody, the Dewey arrangements overlay even older systems of knowledge hierarchy. Should we continue to offer, for example, a description of the Peabody’s “voyages and travels” books? This category represents a Renaissance schematic that was still in service in the mid-nineteenth century; while actual “voyages and travels” were extended by colonial ventures, the category was eventually disbanded. Dewey combined it with geography to make a sub-category of “history.” In keeping active the old-fashioned phrase “voyages and travels,” we are participating in a centuries-long project of euphemism about the material aims and actual activities of colonialism; we are privileging an early phase of the Peabody’s evolution over later phases; we may even be confusing modern researchers. And yet, as one of the topics in Morris’s “desiderata,” a considerable portion of the Peabody’s collection was acquired with the aim of fleshing out that descriptor. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'9\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-9-index-detail/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-398\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-398\" title=\"fig 9 index detail\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail-336x274.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"274\" /></a>Detail of subject index from Alphabetical Catalouge No. 2 (“desiderata”).[/note]\r\n\r\nYet another classificatory dilemma is expressed by George Peabody’s original statement of the library’s purpose: that it “be furnished in every department of knowledge, with the most approved literature… It should consist on the best works on every subject… to satisfy the researches of students who may be engaged in the pursuit of knowledge not ordinarily attainable in the private libraries of the country.” [note number=\'34\']“Letters from George Peabody, Esq.: Baltimore, February 12th, 1857,” in Founder’s Letters, 7.[/note] The Peabody was founded as a cultural institution for the people of Baltimore, but from the first, this democratic ambition was in conflict with the intellectual aspirations of the first librarians and their desire to facilitate civic “self-improvement.” Morris (a doctor of divinity), his successor Nathaniel Holmes Morison (a schoolmaster and poet), and Morison’s assistant and successor Philip Uhler (who had trained as an entomologist) were all devoted to the nineteenth-century idea of the scholar-librarian. Morison wrote in one annual report that “Education always proceeds from the above downward, from the best to the common minds, from the leaders of the people to the people themselves. Furnish... the foundations of intelligence and thought, and they will... stimulate and improve the whole community.\" [note number=\'35\']Qtd. in Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, “PIB Ref. Library. 8-Morison\'s Philosophy of Excellence,” in George Peabody (1795-1869): A-Z Handbook of the Massachusetts-Born Merchant in the South, London-Based Banker, and Philanthropist\'s Life, Influence, and Related People, Places, Events, and Institutions. . 11 Mar. 2011.[/note] When the Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876 in close proximity to the Peabody—in large part to take advantage of the library—the tendency of the librarians to address scholarly needs and “approved literature” over popular desires was given additional momentum. In keeping with these ideas, the Peabody’s librarians kept careful track of their readers’ choices, noting with special caution the numbers of novels that were requested. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'10\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-10-annual-report-detail/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-399\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-399\" title=\"fig 10 annual report detail\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail-336x452.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"452\" /></a>Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.[/note] This schism at the heart of the library’s collecting paradigm was not unique to the Peabody; the question of reading matter—should it offer leisure for the masses or the means of social uplift?—was central to the public library movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. [note number=\'36\']See, for example, Alexis McCrossen, “’One Cathedral More’ or ‘Mere Lounging Places for Bummers’? The Cultural Politics of Leisure and the Public Library in Gilded Age America,” Libraries &amp; Culture 41.2 (2006): 169-188; Paul Sturges, “The Public Library and Reading by the Masses: Historical Perspectives on the USA and Britain 1850-1900,” ; Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, Upon the Objects to be Attained by the Establishment of a Public Library, 12 Dec. 2010.[/note]\r\n\r\nFinally, the Peabody’s “desiderata” acquisitions and librarians’ selections were supplemented by book donations from local elites—bibliophiles with extensive private collections that included incunabula, classical authors in Renaissance editions, expensive illustrated atlases. At the same time, book donations came in from more plebian sources. The Peabody’s growth overlapped with the decline of the local social libraries, and it eventually absorbed some of the books from the Library Company of Baltimore, Robinson’s Circulating Library and several small professional and mechanics’ libraries. And I haven’t even touched on the Peabody’s twentieth-century fate.\r\n\r\nThe variety of philanthropic impulses, resource streams and classification philosophies that have fed the Peabody over the 150 years of its existence has led to a collection that does not so much map the nineteenth-century mind as signal its odd amalgam of popular and scholarly investments. The Peabody’s collection effectively evades succinct description—at least, any kind of description that pretends to be coherent, that is not perforated by its stakes in local history, library history, book history. But more importantly, it suggests the degree to which accident and opportunity and prejudice and wealth and the changing winds of cataloguing rules shape any archive. Description, which should be the most fundamental tool of communication between librarians and researchers, turns out to be utterly elusive. Yet we do not know what to replace them with, these inadequate descriptions, these exercises in stilted and partial translation.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>2. The Researcher’s Progress.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>I am preparing for my class about women and nineteenth-century print culture, which meets in the Peabody; we have reached the part of the syllabus where we look at gift books and annuals. I want students to examine several examples of these literary miscellanies, offering some illustration of their variety, and I have a list of such items that I have used in the past. But since I also want to show the students new acquisitions, I need to refresh my list. I will start with “gift book” as a keyword in the online catalogue.</blockquote>\r\nIn place of perfect and commensurate description—not possible—what we have are cataloguing systems that indexically represent collections through data and metadata that are, as I have already suggested, historically marked and inevitably inconsistent. In the case of the Peabody, these records are further compromised: Dewey cards developed from a nineteenth-century print index do not offer Library of Congress subject terms or detailed tables of contents; they also frequently lack other kinds of information. [note number=\'37\']Many of the electronic records for Peabody books have been copy-cataloged, that is, developed from records for identical books in other libraries. But these records might also be incomplete or inconsistent, given that many are quite old. The expense of original cataloging prevents our staff from creating full, new records for every item in the Peabody’s collection of over 300,000 titles.[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'11\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-11-ddc-cards/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-400\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-400\" title=\"fig 11 ddc cards\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Dewey cards for “gift books.”[/note] My search for “gift book” will turn up bequests—the term “gift book” is often attached to these donations—and it will miss many of the nineteenth-century gift books and annuals in our collection whose records lack subject classifications, or whose subject classifications reference the book’s contents, not its format. For example, the 1848 Rough and Ready Annual: or, Military Souvenir published by Appleton’s has been assigned the subject “Mexican War, 1846-1848—Anecdotes.” [note number=\'38\']Rough and Ready Annual (New York: D. Appleton; Philadelphia: G.S. Appleton, 1848).[/note]\r\n\r\nThe problem of finding is perhaps only a sub-set of the problem of description, but I want to give it special attention because it introduces another variable: the physical space of the object. My search for gift books in the Peabody also entails the privilege of retrieving the books from the stacks. There are two search processes, the intellectual and the physical, that I must navigate. The intellectual search in this case requires a variety of keyword/date range combinations, and ultimately, recourse to my prepared bibliography—a holdover from pre-catalogue research methods. Now the second search begins.\r\n\r\nThe Rough and Ready Annual is at 973.62 A5121, in the “general history of North America; United States” category. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'12\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-12-rr/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-401\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-401\" title=\"fig 12 r&amp;r\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.[/note] This call number range is on the second floor, west side. Other items on my list are in very different parts of the library. Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them, edited by the temperance writer T. S. Arthur and published in London, has been given the call number 813 A7910 duodecimo—fourth floor east, in the “American literature in English, fiction” section. [note number=\'39\']Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them (London: Knight &amp; Co., [1857]). This title does not appear in at least one Arthur bibliography; see Donald A Koch, \"Timothy Shay Arthur,\" Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, ed. Joel Myerson (Detroit: Gale Research, 1979), from Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Feb. 2011. To check on this, I need Mitchell Sharpe Jr.’s A Bibliography of the Published Books of Timothy Shay Arthur (Atlanta: Emory University, 1954), a typewritten quarto at 012 A791S, but it seems to be missing.[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'13\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-13-orange/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-402\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-402\" title=\"fig 13 orange\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Orange Blossoms in the stacks.[/note] Arthur shows up again as co-editor of The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present, which has received more extensive description as it contains the first printing of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Siope.” [note number=\'40\']The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present (Baltimore: Bayly and Burns, [1838]).[/note] We have two copies of this very genteel little gift book, one at 808.83 B2175 (rhetoric &amp; collections of literature), and one at 810.8 C297 (American literature in English). The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons is in the rare book room at the south end of the third floor. [note number=\'41\']The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons (London: The Religious Tract Society, ca. 1850).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'14\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-14-rbr/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-403\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-403\" title=\"fig 14 rbr\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The rare book room.[/note] In this case, the book’s rarity has to do with a lovely fore-edge painting. It has been assigned to 820.8 N42017 (general books about literature). On the other end of the “rare” continuum is The Family Circle and Parlor Annual, volume 5 in a series, which is shelved up on the sixth floor with the periodicals at 051 F198 (serials in American English). [note number=\'42\']The Family Circle and Parlor Annual (New York: Comstock, 1847).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'15\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-15-parlor/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-404\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-404\" title=\"fig 15 parlor\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Parlor Annual in the stacks.[/note]\r\n\r\nI’ll fill out call slips for each book, stick the slips into red flags, and put the flags in an order that will help me chart a logical course through the stacks. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'16\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-16-slips/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-405\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-405\" title=\"fig 16 slips\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Call slips and flags.[/note] It’s easiest to start on the sixth floor and work one’s way down, picking up books along the way. Usually I find other interesting items as I go, so I carry a batch of blank call slips and extra flags. (On this occasion, for example, I find The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse; published in 1813 and inscribed by its owner in 1817, it pre-dates by several years the official beginning of the gift book phenomenon. It might be more of a “literary almanac.” [note number=\'43\']The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse (Philadelphia: David Hogan, 1813).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'17\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-17-new-reader/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-406\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-406\" title=\"fig 17 new reader\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Inscription in The New American Reader.[/note]) Usually I am also unable to locate at least one of the books I have set out to find. Most likely the book has been misshelved, so I’ll check the quartos and folios, which are shelved separately; then I’ll check the rare book room’s octavo, duodecimo and quarto shelving areas. It used to astonish me that books were still shelved by format in the Peabody, but it does save space. At the same time, this shelving system—along with the multiple distinct areas within the library where books may reside, eg the rare book room, the reference section, the genealogy books, the Limited Editions Club, and several discrete named collections—means that retrieving a few books can take quite a long time, as I traipse up and down the six floors of the library, thread through stacks, open secured doors with multiple keys, turn lights on and off, and maneuver a book truck in and out of a tiny service elevator built in the 1920s. By the end of the journey, the library and I will have exchanged dust; I’ll take on a few streaks of red rot, and the library will have taken in particles from my body as well.\r\n\r\nWhile the Peabody is unique, these conditions are not in the end very unusual. In terms of the intellectual search, the absence of “gift book” from many of the catalogue records is no less egregious than the absence of other information—the names of all the contributors; the subjects of the illustrations. The metadata is potentially infinite. The “gift book” only exists as a category because of scholars who teased out this cultural phenomenon; it would be very difficult to define its absolute borders. In terms of the physical search, the Peabody might be messier than, say, a rare book library that has assigned current LC call numbers to all its contents and houses them in compact shelving, but it exemplifies the general on-the-ground situation. As I wind my way through the Peabody stacks, I remember how much more difficult it is to gather research materials from several different institutions.\r\n\r\nThe fact is, for scholars who rely on archives, research is something you do only after you have already undertaken a rigorous search. It is the search that provides you with the foundational sense of your subject. But the search is rarely acknowledged or accredited; even the foot-soldier craft of bibliography, the link between “librarianship” and “scholarship,” has largely lost its scholarly status.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>3. An Architecture of Disctinction.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>A non-affiliate researcher contacts the Peabody about our H. L. Mencken collections. Since she will bring a couple of graduate students with her, I set up a group work space in one of the library alcoves where the three of them can share materials and talk without disturbing other readers. I pull the requested volumes with the help of some students and set the cart up within easy reach of the alcove. When the researchers arrive, I show them the Mencken collections on the ground floor. Then I lead them to their group work space and leave them, returning to the glassed-in office behind the reading room, the vantage point that allows me to monitor the otherwise empty reading room.</blockquote>\r\nIn “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” a team of Dutch sociologists investigates the library as a space that is strongly marked by situational norms—“knowledge-based beliefs about how to behave in particular situations that are shaped by social influence.” [note number=\'44\']Henk Aarts and Ap Dijksterhuis, “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84.1 (2003), 19.[/note] Their research leads them to argue, however, that such norms do not require direct social influences to be triggered; in fact, “the situation can activate mental representations of normative behaviors automatically. And once activated, these representations provide the knowledge necessary for guiding one’s own situationally appropriate behavior.” [note number=\'45\']Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 19.[/note] Physical environments do not necessarily prompt these behaviors; rather, the behavior “depend[s] on whether the environment is of immediate behavioral relevance.” [note number=\'46\']Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 20.[/note] Talking in a quiet voice in the library, a normative behavior, is only activated for those who plan to visit the library.\r\n\r\nTen years ago, when the research for this article was conducted, the “silence of the library” was still a widespread norm. While the situation is now often reversed—in our main campus library, we must designate specific quiet areas because otherwise a sociable undergraduate din would take over—the norm of silence does continue to preside at the Peabody. Because it is off campus, the Peabody is often attractively under-populated compared to the crowded main library; it is mostly used by advanced researchers and those who seek a quiet place to study. The large central open area catches and amplifies even the smallest noises. The shelf-lined alcoves on either side of this central area offer the appearance of privacy, but in fact are little echo chambers. Visitors immediately detect these acoustics, and—except for the periodic tour groups—most spend their time in the Peabody in silence. But it is not just the physics of sound that shape behaviors here, as the Dutch researchers show; the social expectations of the space prefigure those behaviors.\r\n\r\nIn setting up a group work space for the Mencken researchers, I have quite deliberately contravened the usual norm of silence. Clearly, I am not inviting them to shout, and by putting them in an alcove in back, I have taken measures to protect any quiet-seeking visitors who might arrive. But in accordance with new ideas about the use of library space, my colleagues and I have decided that we must accommodate group study even if it might occasionally disrupt the silence desired by others. As it happens, the Mencken researchers’ conversation is eventually interrupted by a tour group, and the two activities play out side by side.\r\n\r\nI must admit that at moments I have mixed feelings about the tour groups and even the study cohorts. While my pedagogical instincts tend towards cheerful hub-bub, there is a part of me that is still in awe of the sanctuary-like atmosphere of the Peabody. John Morris called the library a “cathedral of books,” and clearly that’s what architect Edmund G. Lind had in mind. The central area with its grand skylight and the alcoves on its sides is like a nave bordered with chapels. Lind didn’t need a psychological study of environment-based situational norms to tell him that he might activate different behaviors within his building. The great central space inspires reverence—your eye is drawn to the skylight the way it would be drawn to the rose windows of Chartres, and on its way up catches row upon solemn row of books stowed behind gilded railings, a testament to the accumulated wisdom of the ages. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'18\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-18-skylight/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-407\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-407\" title=\"fig 18 skylight\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"448\" /></a>The skylight in the George Peabody Library.[/note] But step into an alcove, especially on the ground floor where each is filled with an immense wooden table, and you instantly feel something else, something no less grand but more human. The alcoves are study-sized, and once you sit down at one of those dark, gleaming, broad tables, it is like you are the master of your own private library. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'19\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-19-alcove/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-408\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-408\" title=\"fig 19 alcove\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Alcove in the George Peabody Library.[/note]\r\n\r\nIronically, the Peabody’s architecture was out-dated by the time it was completed. With the professionalization of librarianship and the evolution of library science in the late nineteenth century, librarians like William Frederick Poole advocated for a functional rather than decorative design of interior library space. [note number=\'47\']See William Frederick Poole, Remarks on Library Construction (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1884).[/note] Moreover, the actual use of space in the Peabody in the late nineteenth century was at odds with its symbolic appeal. The main library was known as the “stack room”; readers were seated in a comparatively plain reading room on the other side of the main doors. In this arrangement, the librarians reigned inside the gorgeous “cathedral of books,” but the building’s potential to civilize the masses was lost.\r\n\r\nNow, of course, we do not send readers outside. Inside the “stack room,” we explicitly call visitors’ attention to its beauty to explain the connections between the library’s architecture and its collections—how both speak eloquently of Victorian values. At the same time, we who staff the library have relegated ourselves to its periphery. We work in the glassed-in room at one end that serves as a monitoring point and occasional classroom; the official “librarian’s office” in one corner—its luxurious proportions suggesting something like a sacristy and something like a robber baron’s lair—is now shared work-space stuffed with several desks and laden book trucks. There is another monitoring station near the main doors. I often do my work at the photography station, in the back of one of the alcoves [note type=\'figure\' number=\'20\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-20-station/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-409\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-409\" title=\"fig 20 station\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Photography station in the George Peabody Library.[/note]. It offers some privacy but is close enough to the central reading tables to be accessible to readers.\r\n\r\nThe space of the Peabody initiates other situational behaviors besides the norm of silence, and our work-station arrangements testify to this. The spatial re-centralizing of readers and marginalization of staff is not merely practical; it is a reflection of the modern office of librarianship. We are there to be of service, in a para-textual position. Consequently, our work should be out of sight; it should be separate from and secondary to the work that readers do. Our locations call upon us, in other words, to support the scholar’s effort to hide the “seams of [her] findings” by hiding the ways we contribute to that work—by the ways we sometimes do that work.\r\n\r\nI think about these complications as I escort the Mencken researchers to their table and walk back to the glassed-in office, where there is nothing pressing for me to do. I’d rather spend more time talking with them. I’d like to learn about their research and introduce them to some underappreciated parts of the collection. I’d like to share with them what I learned curating an exhibition of Mencken-related magazines and writing about one of those magazines. But I don’t want to get in their way; it’s likely that they are ready to get on with work that they don’t see as connected to mine. The professional norms of the archive are strong, and although I know how to talk about my research in many contexts—in presentations, interviews, hotel elevators—I haven’t figured out how to mix my scholarly role with the curatorial role I am supposed to play here, in the Peabody. In the end, I say nothing. Professional segregation is another kind of silence in the library.\r\n\r\nWe cannot change the archaeological record beneath our feet, but we can rearrange the fossils we dig up to create new narratives. We can tell different kinds of archive stories, including the story of what research in the archive was and is. Is it too idealistic to expect that dissolving the entrenched fantasies about archival research will make room for new methods? Is it naïve to imagine a space that, in putting into practice the archival turn’s preliminary insights about disciplinary and disorder, can support experimentation, facilitate connection across professions and disciplines, and enable new discoveries?','Disciplinarity and Disorder','','inherit','open','open','','2199-revision-32','','','2013-07-10 06:25:49','2013-07-10 06:25:49','',2199,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/2199-revision-32/',0,'revision','',0),(5043,10,'2013-07-10 06:07:57','0000-00-00 00:00:00','','Auto Draft','','auto-draft','open','open','','','','','2013-07-10 06:07:57','0000-00-00 00:00:00','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?p=5043',0,'post','',0),(5048,10,'2013-07-10 06:15:24','2013-07-10 06:15:24','The primal scene of archival research takes place in a dreary reading room. A researcher sits at her table, inert. An archivist enters, pushing a cart that bears a dozen dusty gray boxes. (See Figure 1.)\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ykY6moIaDE?rel=0\" height=\"250\" width=\"333\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe> \r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4725\" align=\"alignnone\"]A staged archival encounter.[/caption]\r\n\r\nThe archivist unhinges a box, removes a numbered file folder and, placing it at the researcher’s elbow, steps back. The researcher stirs, then sits upright with a mechanical jolt. She turns sharply in the direction of the folder, flips it open and cocks her head towards the flimsy leaves inside; now she is reading. (Zoom in on the eyes as they click into focus.) Now she is reading, and now she truly comes alive; she bends towards the papers, taps her forehead in thought. A sheaf of blank paper and a pencil appear on her table, and she begins taking notes. Her fingers fly—and soon, so do the pages she is writing upon. Caught up in eddies of excitement, they swoop to the ceiling and around the room and down to the floor, where they fall together into perfect piles. Bindings sprout from the outer strata; the pages sew themselves into bright, tight, hard-cover books. These the archivist gathers up and places on the shelves that line the room, next to other books and gray boxes.\r\n\r\nI may have it backwards: in other versions of the fantasy, it is the archive that is first animated by the presence of the researcher, a Dr. Coppelius who waves a pencil and sets the dusty boxes to dancing. But either way, the archival imaginary posits a symbiotic relationship between researcher and source, a photogenic pas de deux that leads to a finished scholarly product. This work, in turn, enters the archive for the next generation of researchers; it might even be taken apart again so that its secret ingredients (notes, drafts, letters) can themselves be served up in a series of boxes. Such a strangely private form of publication it creates, the coupling of researcher and source.\r\n\r\nWhat Freudian trauma results from witnessing this sight? Only the harm that myth inflicts. This primal scene is a fiction, a dream of perfect union between researcher and source that ignores, first of all, the full cast of characters. What about the archivist, who is rendered invisible? What about all those within and without the archive, upon whose labor—acquiring, preserving, organizing, reading, cataloging, describing, interpreting, analyzing, debating, teaching, writing, editing, digitizing, referencing and publishing—the current project depends? More a barn dance than a pas de deux: an archival encounter is an enactment of social authorship long before the researcher enters the room. ((See Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) on the idea of social authorship, which could be described as “the dialectic between the historically located individual author and the historically developed institutions of literary production” that help create a work, e.g., printers, publishers, editors and readers (81).))\r\n\r\nBut even a barn dance is much too mannered a metaphor. The sketch above misleads us more generally about the experience on the ground. Doing time in an archive is often tedious, uncomfortable and bewildering. For librarians, there is the struggle to promote and simultaneously protect what you have; the difficulty of fitting unruly materials into arrangements and workflows; and worries about space and time—where to put it all, how to address your backlog. For researchers, there is the struggle to locate the archives you need and what matters to you inside them; the uncertainty created by unruly data; and worries about time and space— how to access what you need during your research trip, how to record and organize the information you gather. At both ends, the archival encounter is counter-cinematic and erratic, days of monotonous sifting and dead-ends punctuated by one or two, or maybe zero, hidden moments of vivid, peculiar joy.\r\n\r\nSo archival research does not fulfill its ideal outline. So what? Who cares? Why dredge up the fantasy? Because the fantasy continues to structure our archival encounters—what we expect and undertake in the reading room, what we allow it to mean. Twenty years ago, Alice Kaplan observed that “conventional academic discourse requires that when you write up the results of your archival work, you tell a story about what you found, but not about how you found it. The less the seams of your findings show, the better your discoveries lend themselves to use by others… tell[ing] these stories breaks their spell and violates the spirit of the archives.” ((Alice Yaeger Kaplan, “Working in the Archives,” Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 103-116; 103, 107.)) With a few word changes, the same could be said about what counts as professional archivist discourse: the impersonal, neutral genre of the finding aid, for example, should say what is in a collection, but should not discuss what is confusing or missing in it, or the problems it posed in processing. ((See, for example, James M. O’Toole and Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006).)) Despite the growing recognition that this sequestration is never completely possible—that the material conditions and social relations of the archive shape the work we do in it—that work continues to be represented in professional and scholarly publications as if it is. Despite the recent call to move to the fore “the backstage of the archives—how they are constructed, policed, experienced, and manipulated” in order to support historiography “not merely [as] a project of fact-retrieval” but as “a set of complex processes of selection, interpretation, and even creative invention,” the “backstage” stays in the background. ((Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 7-8.)) Antoinette Burton may be correct that “many if not most historians operate under the assumption that history is a highly interpretive act,” but this belief is not yet reflected in the archival encounter: the ways that researchers (not just historians) and librarians report their experiences with primary sources; the ways that librarians and researchers work together; the ways librarians and researchers regard the involvement of “non specialists.” ((Burton, 8. Burton notes that “whether historians concede or fully countenance the impact of such contingencies on their work is another question. They rarely speak of them, and even more rarely do they do so in print” (8). Her books recuperates some of those archive stories but this effort, I’ll suggest below, is hampered by other kinds of obligations.)) While the advent of digitization and electronic resource sharing has revolutionized the research landscape, making primary sources public in unprecedented ways, there remains in the archive a habitus of secret knowledge—the “spell” that Kaplan is loathe to break. This is not necessarily intentional. It is rather the effect of layering recent shifts in technology, theory and professional definition onto older foundations: petrified conditions, relations, expectations and systems that continue to operate in part through the enduring power of fantasies about research. What we have in the archive is a stratified groundwork that still governs our archival encounters.\r\n\r\nBut, you will object, the archive has already changed. Now we have the “archival turn”—the scholarly interest in the archive not just as a source of evidence but as an epistemological mode. Surely, this attention to the constructedness of the archive has led to a revealing reconsideration of what actually goes on inside an archive; surely, as a result, those archaic fantasies have diminished. Have they? In what follows, I begin by unearthing one stratum of the archival turn, the decade of the 1990s, as represented by three texts: Kaplan’s essay mentioned above, “Working in the Archives” (1990)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_369\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-369 \" alt=\"fig 2 kaplan\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan-300x224.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"224\" /></a> Photocopy of Alice Yaeger Kaplan’s “Working in the Archives.”; Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1994/95)[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_372\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-372 \" alt=\"Print out of Jacque Derrida’s “Archive Fever” from Diacritics.; and Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida-300x224.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"224\" /></a> Print out of Jacque Derrida’s “Archive Fever” from Diacritics.; and Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_373\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-373 \" alt=\"Library copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust. (Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25.2 (Summer 1995): 9-63. Web. 1 Dec. 2010. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).) \" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman-300x224.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"224\" /></a> Library copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust. ((Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25.2 (Summer 1995): 9-63. Web. 1 Dec. 2010. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).))[/caption]\r\n\r\nA cross-examination of these three texts reveals a pattern of interests, a set of efforts to defy customary practices—but only, it turns out, “in theory.” While certain practices are challenged in these texts, they leave mostly intact the older strata of archival research fantasies and conventions. Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman do not dislodge the forces that organize the actual archival encounter.\r\n\r\nHow does this happen? Why is practice so stubborn? We need another take on archival practice: not practice in theory, but practice in action; not the 1990s, but now; not in terms of textual patterns, but in terms that suit the subject: the terms of the archival encounter itself, and the eccentric, anachronistic and even monotonous experience it generates. My second look at practice will take the form of a series of vignettes about a real-life archive, the George Peabody Library in Baltimore. While this narrative structure may seem to recreate the division of labor between theory and practice, my hope is that—by giving practice the last word—we’ll be in a better position to synthesize the two.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>I. “The library doubles as a detective’s office.” ((Kaplan, 114.))</strong>\r\n\r\nThe archival turn could be dated to the founding of “scientific” history in the mid-nineteenth century, or to the development a century later of the quantitative methods of the Annales School, or to other evidence-based movements in the history of history, but what is generally meant by this phrase corresponds with the formation of cultural studies and the use of the archive as a conceptual category. That is, the archival turn has to do with the notion of the “figuration” of the archive, a parallel decline in its empirical authority and a related expansion of its relevance within domains that are not exclusively historiographic, like art, literary criticism, textual studies, media studies and information studies. ((See the use of the term in, for example, Carolyn Hamilton et al, eds., Refiguring the Archive (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), Cheryl Simon, ed., Following the Archival Turn: Photography, the Museum, and the Archive, special issue of Visual Resources: A Journal of Documentation 18.2 (June 2002), and Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). This turn is partially construed as a “move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject,” but also by the earlier metaphorical interest in “the archive” that goes back to the 1980s (Stoler, 44-45) and by Foucauldian descriptions of archives as “‘monuments to particular configurations of power” (Hamilton, qtd. in Burton, 6).)) But it is not irrelevant that a devotion to archival methods precedes by many decades contemporary theories of the archive; if the archival turn lacks a precise origin, this (we will see) is completely in keeping with its own preoccupations.\r\n\r\nKaplan therefore represents in some ways an arbitrary beginning for this cross-examination—clearly the archive as a conceptual category predates 1990—but her article does initiate something new: the recognition that there is something called an “archive story” that must remain hidden in order for the official “results” to function authoritatively. In admitting this bit of professional legerdemain, and in telling her own archive story in a prestigious scholarly journal, Kaplan not only commits the violation she prohibits but also contradicts it. Through its publication, Kaplan’s own archive story is elevated to the status of “results”—a kind of research that shadows conventional academic discourse. Indeed, Kaplan notes, such “fables” of research “can be analyzed like a text,” a “mixed up genre” that combines the “redemptive detective fiction” with the epic and the dime novel. ((Kaplan, 106, 107.))\r\n\r\nKaplan’s archive story thus marks a distinctive moment in the archival turn—one which gained its most prominent authorization in 1994, with a paper that Jacques Derrida delivered (in English) to a conference sponsored by the Freud Museum, the Courtauld Institute and the Société International d’Histoire de la Psychiatrie et de la Psychoanalyse. Called initially “The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression,” the lecture was revised and published in 1995 as Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne in French; the published English version echoed the French publication with its 1995 title Archive Fever. As Carolyn Steedman points out in Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, however, this work that has been assigned a seminal status in archival studies “for the main part… is not about archives at all, but is rather a sustained contemplation of a work of history, of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (1991),” itself a sustained contemplation of Moses and Monotheism—which (according to Steedman) Yerushalmi examines through Freud’s description of the work as a “‘historical novel,’ or a kind of historical story,” undertaken “in order to understand the period of baroque anti-semitism through which he was living.” ((Steedman, 3.))\r\n\r\nDizzy yet? Let’s undertake a more careful reading of this splatter pattern of intra-references—or, to stick with the archaeological metaphor, let’s call them groups of potsherds buried in the 1990s layer of the “archival turn.” Digging down to reassemble them reveals a set of interests with special implications for archival practice.\r\n\r\nThe most prominent group of sherds to note are the fragments of disciplinarity: the inter-, multi- or perhaps simply anti-disciplinarity of the texts, authors and audiences caught up in these three archival addresses. Kaplan, an American scholar of French literature, calls the post-theory exchange between literature and history a “cross-pollination of desire between historians and literary critics” undertaken “with the curiosity and energetic passion of collectors.” ((Kaplan, 107-108.)) Steedman, a British historian, performs this cross-pollinating process without comment: her epigraph to Dust is from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, one chapter treats George Eliot’s Middlemarch in depth… in fact, almost every chapter depends on a literary text. ((Another chapter invokes Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel Mary Barton, a third is anchored by W. H. Auden’s poem “Homage to Clio,” and a fourth finds its most eloquent examples in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.)) Derrida, a French philosopher, produced a work that has been exceptionally mobile across disciplines, forms, languages and professional domains. He gave his initial talk to an audience drawing on three different kinds of institutions; Mal d’Archive was published in book form in both French and English, but also made an intermediate appearance as an essay in the journal diacritics. All of these texts, it seems, respond to the provocations of the archive—to the materials and circumstances of discovery—rather than to the disciplinary distinctions that arguably divide the archive from itself.\r\n\r\nArchive Fever has become a founding document even though, as Steedman notes in the very beginning of her book, many in Derrida’s audience “knew the ‘archival turn’ to be [already] well underway” at the time of his talk. ((Steedman, 2.)) As it happens—and this is the second group of sherds I see—these three essays have in common an investment in or a problem with origins, especially with the failure of origins. Derrida, for example, defines archive fever as a kind of Freudian death drive—a drive to fix and preserve which at the same time “works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own ‘proper’ traces… [it] is above all anarchivic, one could say, or archiviolithic… the archive always works, and a priori, against itself.” ((Derrida, 14.)) If the archival impulse is driven to destroy its own work, then the question of origins ultimately point to the larger question of disorder. The disorder of origins makes frequent appearances in the essay but one example will make the point—in the “Preamble” where he recounts how he titled the talk that he had not yet written and was to give at the Freud Museum. The “Preamble” starts with his reflections on the word “impression,” which has several simultaneous registers of meaning for him. One of these is the “scriptural or typographic” register: that of the graphic impression that marks a substrate. In English, “impression” is phonetically related to “repression” and “suppression,” key words in the Freudian vocabulary, translated respectively from the German Verdrängung and Unterdrückung. English, that is, retains the rhyming relationship of the two German terms, and “impression” in this company comes to have a vaguely Freudian meaning as well. But in French, Verdrängung is “refoulement,” which means something more like expulsion, a driving away. The Freudian sense of the French word “répression” has been reserved for Unterdrückung. So English “repression” defines a phenomenon that must be distinguished from the French “répression.” These translational shifts “directly concern the structures of archivization,” Derrida says, “because they touch on the topic differences and thus on the location of the substrates of traces\" (Derrida, 23). In other words, how do you classify concepts whose meanings shift across languages? Where do you store them in a disciplinary grammar—or in an archive? How do these asymmetrical linguistic structures shape the establishment and extension of a new science? For Derrida, the difference between “repression” and “répression” is “enough to disrupt the tranquil landscape of all historical knowledge, of all historiography, and even of all self-consistent ‘scholarship’” ((Derrida, 23.))\r\n\r\nOrigin failure appears both as deliberate performance and as unintentional oversight in these essays. Derrida stages his own inability to get past “go”; with an introductory section, and subsequent sections sub-titled “Exergue,” “Preamble,” “Foreword,” his essay functions, Steedman notes, like a “primer offering instruction in the principle of deferral.” ((A short notice called “Priere d’inserer,” published only in the French book version, carried the bulk of an argument for which there was no room in the lecture. Steedman, 7.)) For all her insight into Derrida’s titling adventures, however, Steedman’s title is marked by its own origin aporia. While her first chapter is devoted to Archive Fever—a “let’s begin at the beginning” homage to the seminal text—her book’s title, Dust, seems more indebted to the last sentence of Kaplan’s essay, published five years before Derrida’s: “Usually there is no mother lode, no original manuscript to be retrieved—the gold is all in the dust.” ((Kaplan, 116.)) Kaplan, however, is never mentioned. ((Kaplan also begins her essay with a brief consideration of the “arche,” the Greek and Latin term for the public records office, which is a major starting point for Derrida. Is he borrowing from her, or is she borrowing from him, given that this sort of etymological investigation was an established signature of Deconstruction?))\r\n\r\nKaplan, for her part, unravels her own archive story. She gives us a kind of “whodunit”—her search for the ephemeral sources of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s anti-semitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937). She uses this account to exemplify her effort to “move through the archival process and recover some of the stories that get deleted in the final scholarly form.” ((Kaplan, 104. For this reason, perhaps, Kaplan never reveals what she ultimately discovers in her successful search for Celine’s sources. In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether her pre-emptive and truncated treatment of her archive story is deliberate or not. Is this treatment meant to indirectly support her official claim about “results”? Or does the presence of the archive story suggest that telling it is an impulse she can’t quite control? Thanks, Lauren Coats, for helping tease this problem out.)) These beginnings are preemptively struck out, however, by what seems to be her main claim: “the passion of the archives must finally be used to eradicate all personal stories in the interests of the dry archival report, fit for a public.” ((Kaplan, 103.)) Only in the “para-text”—a preface, for example—can the archive story appear without “interrupt[ing] or complicat[ing] the narrative so much that no results could ever be understood or perceived.” ((Kaplan, 104.)) Despite this unequivocal assertion, the personal “whodunit” prevails in her essay, especially in the final section set in the Centre du documentation juive contemporain (CDJC). It is this library, where Kaplan solves the mystery of Céline’s sources, that “doubles as a detective’s office.”\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_423\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"333\"]<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-5-cdjc-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-423\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-423\" title=\"fig 5 cdjc\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1-333x250.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a> Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhile Kaplan’s research mystery resolves neatly, the truth about archives is that they are full of gaps, mistakes and excesses: in the words of one of the CDJC librarians, “‘ici on trouve tout’—there’s some of everything here”—but not, one could add, all of anything. ((Kaplan, 115.)) Kaplan’s essay ends by nullifying both her detective story success and her “dry archival report,” by recognizing the disorder on which both of these narratives are unsteadily perched: “The archive is constituted by these errors, these pieces out of place, which are then reintegrated into a story of some kind.” ((Kaplan, 115.)) “A story of some kind”? So much for “results.”\r\n\r\nKaplan sets us up to perceive one final potsherd pattern common to these three essays. If origin-less disorder is the order of the archive, it is a disorder that is generated out of human loss—a disorder that joins the body and the material world. The archive is always predicated on historical violence of some sort, whatever is censored, erased, excluded, trumped up, used up, misplaced, conquered, killed. Moreover, the archival categories that mark both the visible victories and hidden defeats do not stay within their walls; the archive is both a repository of existing schemas and a means of perpetuating them in the world beyond. While we might usually think of this disciplinary activity as a pact between the archive and its political authors, Steedman makes it clear that the dilemmas of order shape the archival body in many ways. For example, she takes literally the provocation of Derrida’s title Archive Fever to investigate the illness that researchers contract on the penultimate day of their trip to the archive: prompted by the anxiety of the task that remains unfinished, they end their research with night-sweats and head-aches. But what seems like a strangely specific malady is transformed by Steedman into a far-reaching social symptom: by relating the researcher’s “archive fever” to the terrible diseases suffered by tanners, skinners and other workers in the trades associated with paper and leather, Steedman expands our sense of who is in the archive—the bodies whose specialized labors populate our libraries with books, the many kinds of expertise the archive consumes.\r\n\r\nFor Derrida, the relation between the material archive and its human architects focuses on one kind of “graphic mark,” a particular “private inscription”: circumcision as the archival signature that is also the signature of patrimoine, with Freud’s relationship to his father as his main example. ((Derrida, 19.)) It is perhaps not a coincidence that the body in question in both Kaplan’s and Derrida’s archive is Jewish, for that is a body that has come to symbolize the destructive power of classificatory regimes. Despite her contention that the private passions motivating research must be kept secret, Kaplan is fascinated by the “missing person stories” at the CDJC: by the “quantity of people who are there for personal reasons,” the survivors of occupation or deportation or camps, or their descendants, quietly looking up their lost ones or noisily dropping off their memoirs. ((Kaplan, 113.)) This disorganized crowd of dead and living bodies tries to meet up with an equally disorganized crowd of materials—individual letters, trial transcripts, pamphlets, newspapers, first-person accounts, books, photographs, lists. The monumental task of match-making, the librarians’ work, is never complete. More papers are always generated or declassified or discovered, different human questions and needs emerge. The tidy choreography of the research fantasy, where the detective always finds her man, is not so much in evidence; what we have instead is corpora in excess of existing categories.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\nKaplan, Derrida and Steedman open up the archival body. They show us how paper meets the press of flesh; they make us feel just how intimate it is. [note number=\'26\']This interest in the corporeal dimensions and effects of order, its human and non-human components, has in common with their other gestures—an experimental attitude towards conventional disciplinarity and attention to the priority of disorder—the circumstances of the academic humanities in the 1990s. Since the archival turn came out of the ascent of cultural studies and allied intrigues in the 1970s and ‘80s, the circles in the Venn diagram of these ventures will necessarily overlap. We could also say that the archive took off when it did precisely because it made a clever new container for these preoccupations, thick in the humanities atmosphere at the time, where they were distilled and united. [/note] But for all their revelations about the limits of discipline and the multiplicities of disorder in the archive, these texts do not disclose the specific methods of engagement that led to their existence. While Kaplan offers up her own archival victory and outlines several other such stories, she still insists on their marginalization. [note number=\'27\']“Were the story of how you got the story really to be told inside the book, it would interrupt or complicate the narrative so much that no results could be understood or even perceived. Every story of success in the archives is emotionally charged, for only the most extreme emotions can drive people to the drudgery, to the discomfort, of sitting and sifting through dog-eared documents, manuscripts, microfilms. To reveal those emotions would not only gum up the narrative, it would threaten its credibility, by showing on what thin strands of coincidence, accident, or on what unfair forms of friendship, ownership, geographical proximity, the discoveries were based” (Kaplan, 104).[/note] If these texts are not concerned with actual practices in the archive or changes in its methodologies, what do they tell us?\r\n\r\nFirst, they suggest one reason for the perpetuation of myths about the archive. While Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman are eager to show how archival materials do not conform to disciplinary distinctions—an enthusiasm related to other disruptive tendencies in late twentieth-century humanist scholarship –they seem less cognizant of a related phenomenon: the archive does not obey strict professional divisions, either. In Kaplan’s library-as-detective’s-office metaphor, the scholar is the detective, but does the “Eureka” moment belong only to the scholar who pieces together a narrative? What about the people who prepared those pieces? The archivist is still missing in action. Likewise, these essays do not dwell on missing boxes, illegible papers, neglected citations. There are no descriptions of archival slogging, no admissions that some materials failed to be relevant. And of course, there are no prescriptions for a different order. It is not the main aim of Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman to effect an evolution of practice; archival turnistas are not interested in disorder in order to re-order. But it is worth remembering that it is not in their professional interest as scholars to make their practices more transparent.\r\n\r\nSecondly, along the same lines, these texts inform us of the duplicity of speculative practices that reveal but cannot live out the instability of their archival mandates. Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman are put into the position of saying, “Yes, the archive is biased, idiosyncratic and treacherous—but the observations I draw from it are flawless.” [note number=\'28\']Derrida, unlike Kaplan and Steedman, makes no claims to work inside an actual archive, unless we consider Yerushalmi’s book as a kind of archive. But the fact that the essay was written self-consciously for presentation at the Freud Museum suggests that it was made out of an archive indirectly—in its construction, if not in its contents. [/note]\r\n\r\nFinally, these texts suggest why archival studies that attempt to be explicit about the messy nature of the archive have become instead “archive studies.” In more recent works like Refiguring the Archive (2002), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (2005) and Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009), the archive appears as a subject in its own right. Although the archival scenarios that are put into play in each of these books incorporate different disciplines—art, history, anthropology, literature, post-colonial studies—they have essentially created a new discipline. “Archive studies” is something we might, in the taxonomy of disciplines, see as the love-child of cultural studies, history and archival methodology. Moreover, this new discipline has in common with other humanities disciplines a complete blindness about its professional investments; it does not register much awareness of the professional investments of librarians, archivists, curators and “non-specialists,” or invite insights from those perspectives. Perhaps this is inevitably what happens when academics must give legitimacy to something new, which in turn reflects the pressures of scholarly communication: a topic must be delineated in conventional terms in order to merit publication. [note number=\'29\']Perhaps this is also the moment to ask why we—I—have been using the term “archive” all along, with its statist resonances, rather than the term “collection,” which has institutional but also personal resonances. Does “archive” bring us closer to recognizably “serious scholarship”?[/note] But it is also true that in these more recent books, which openly investigate the archive’s power-politics, the disorderly drift of the archive and its hybrid corporeality have mostly been bent towards a particular narrative about the archive as an agent of history rather than as a set of ongoing practices. It is as if the historical archive has been assembled in ways that reflect and reiterate power relations, but the contemporary archive has not; it is as if the researcher’s own research travails remain a transparent layer over the body of work that it constructs. [note number=\'30\']Of course, this is precisely what Derrida meant about the “death drive” of the archival impulse. Archive Stories is something of an exception; researchers speak openly here about themselves as researchers. It is interesting, however, that this book—like Steedman’s—doesn’t cite Kaplan’s essay as a precursor text despite the clear titular link.[/note]\r\n\r\nPerhaps it would also be fair to note that, if archival studies are now being formulated as an interdisciplinary discipline called “archive studies,” this might be just another stage in the turn. It might be that what comes next reconfigures the premise of disciplinarity and the promise of disorder, with a different approach to the human/non-human interactions that the archive documents and realizes: a more diffuse and multi-vocal set of practices in place of a new field. One way to imagine this approach would be to fully embrace Kaplan’s idea of the archive story as an account of what one hoped for, looked for and found, what one did and did not do, in the archive—an account loosed from the quarantine she advocates. Some very basic genre precedents for the archive story do exist; the bibliographic essay and the methodology statement, for example, have played an important role in many disciplines in the past and still do in some. Instead of a para-textual nod towards that archive story (in Kaplan’s sense), why not create a parallel text written collaboratively by the researcher(s) and the librarian(s), or by one person acting in both professional capacities, that runs alongside the official “results”? Or in a set of expanded notes that address not just the “what” and “where” but the “how” and “why” of sources, which are lifted from their small-type, bottom-of-page basement up into the light? Or—to add yet another layer—parallel texts that also offer room for exchange with other researchers, archivists and even interested “non specialists,” like collectors, bibliophiles and fans?\r\n\r\nIf it is hasn’t been clear already that I have scrupulously avoided so far the other kind of archive, the digital archive, it will be now. What I am imagining would be far too complicated to produce or consult in print, but would not be at all difficult to organize as a digital object—as an archive in its own right. By avoiding the digital archive up to this point, I have also finessed the fact that our current archival research methods are completely reliant on the digital archive, along with the development of online research tools and electronic instruments of data discovery and organization. Those conditions probably bear the most responsibility for making the archive visible as something that warranted a “turn” in the first place. Even Derrida refers in each version of Archive Fever to the computer on which he is currently composing, predicting that email will not only totally transform the archive as he knows it, but will make his own essay obsolete.\r\n\r\nIn short, we already have in place both the theory and the media that will make it possible to enact a radical new archival practice. We have in place what we need to integrate the archive story into the archive itself, while making it visible as a new form of “results.”\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>II. The library doubles as a librarian’s office.</strong>\r\n\r\nI could end here, with a triumphant firing of the starter pistol and a rousing cheer. But that would be a bit disingenuous, given that the starter pistol for both the archival turn and the academic use of the internet actually went off decades ago. So the question remains, what stands in the way of the practical enactment of the archival turn’s speculative insights? I’d like to engage this question by following Kaplan’s example (but not her main claim): through some archive story-telling about the George Peabody Library. These three vignettes, identified as “typical” through conversations with my colleague Paul Espinosa, illustrate the intractable formations that present-day archival encounters come up against.\r\n\r\n<strong>1. The Perils of Description.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>A group of Russian speakers visits the Peabody Library. The dozen men and women sit down around the screen that Paul has set up. He narrates a brief slide-show about the Peabody’s history, then leads them to a table where a dozen books from the collection have been laid out in cradles. He tells them about each book: what it is, why it is interesting. Each phrase of his presentation is painstakingly translated by the group’s leader into Russian.</blockquote>\r\nWhen academic and community groups visit the Peabody, my colleagues and I draw upon a standard tour-guide’s repertoire to describe it. We explain that George Peabody was a tradesman cum financier cum philanthropist who decided in 1857 that Baltimore needed a cultural institution to support the arts and learning. We talk about the evolution of the Peabody Institute, the four-part athenaeum that resulted, with its art gallery, lecture series, conservatory and free, public, non-circulating library. We discuss the model of philanthropy that George Peabody initiated and its wide-ranging influence. We point out the signal features of the awe-inspiring architecture of the current library, built to accommodate a rapidly growing collection in 1878. But when it comes to the library itself, as a collection, it is hard to know what to say. How to accurately translate the library’s holdings into a succinct and memorable statement that conveys an appropriate level of detail to different audiences? While it poses specific challenges, the Peabody also exemplifies more general problems of collection description.\r\n\r\nWe do not lack evidence for the evolving contents of the Peabody. We have the two-volume printed list of “desiderata” drawn up by the Peabody’s first librarian, John G. Morris. [note number=\'31\']Alphabetical Catalogue of Books to be Purchased for the Library of the Peabody Institute, Baltimore, Vols. 1 and 2 (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1861, 1863).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'6\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-6-alpha-index-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-395\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-395\" title=\"fig 6 alpha index\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1-336x484.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"484\" /></a>Alphabetical index from Alphabetical Catalouge (“desiderata”).[/note] We have the collections register for several decades’-worth of acquisitions, recording bibliographic information and accession numbers that can still be found on the inside front end papers of many of the books in the collection. We have the librarians’ annual reports to the library trustees. [note number=\'32\']The Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore: The Founder’s Letters and the Papers Relating to its Dedication and History, Up to the 1st January, 1868 (Baltimore: William K. Boyle, 1868); and subsequent Annual Reports, 1869, etc.[/note] We have the library’s first printed catalogue, an unsurpassed achievement when first published in 1883, which listed 100,000 volumes by author and title. [note number=\'33\']Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Vols. 1-5 (Baltimore: Isaac Friedenwald, 1883; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, [1961?]; also on googlebooks), and Second Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Including the Additions Made Since 1882, Vols. 1-8 (Baltimore: Deutsch Lithographic and Printing, 1896; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, 1961).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'7\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-7-print-cat/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-396\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-396\" title=\"fig 7 print cat\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).[/note] We have the cards from the Dewey decimal system card catalogue, which replaced the printed catalogue in the 1910s. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'8\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-8-card-cat/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-397\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-397\" title=\"fig 8 card cat\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"448\" /></a>One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.[/note] Now, of course, the library’s collections are represented in an online catalogue that integrates them with other collections in the Hopkins library system.\r\n\r\nThese markers of the collection, however, fail to satisfy some contemporary research queries for reasons that are both practical and philosophical. The transfer of the printed index, organized by author, to the Dewey decimal system, organized by topic, represented a major epistemological shift that facilitated browsing by subject category. But of course, those categories are embedded in historically-bound notions about the subjects and structures of knowledge: Dewey was invented in the 1870s, and the 22 revisions it has undergone since then cannot overcome its essential organizational distortions. For example, the literature range—the 800s—offers only 10% of its categorical space to literatures in languages other than English, Germanic and Romance languages, Greek and Latin.\r\n\r\nIn the case of the Peabody, the Dewey arrangements overlay even older systems of knowledge hierarchy. Should we continue to offer, for example, a description of the Peabody’s “voyages and travels” books? This category represents a Renaissance schematic that was still in service in the mid-nineteenth century; while actual “voyages and travels” were extended by colonial ventures, the category was eventually disbanded. Dewey combined it with geography to make a sub-category of “history.” In keeping active the old-fashioned phrase “voyages and travels,” we are participating in a centuries-long project of euphemism about the material aims and actual activities of colonialism; we are privileging an early phase of the Peabody’s evolution over later phases; we may even be confusing modern researchers. And yet, as one of the topics in Morris’s “desiderata,” a considerable portion of the Peabody’s collection was acquired with the aim of fleshing out that descriptor. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'9\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-9-index-detail/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-398\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-398\" title=\"fig 9 index detail\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail-336x274.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"274\" /></a>Detail of subject index from Alphabetical Catalouge No. 2 (“desiderata”).[/note]\r\n\r\nYet another classificatory dilemma is expressed by George Peabody’s original statement of the library’s purpose: that it “be furnished in every department of knowledge, with the most approved literature… It should consist on the best works on every subject… to satisfy the researches of students who may be engaged in the pursuit of knowledge not ordinarily attainable in the private libraries of the country.” [note number=\'34\']“Letters from George Peabody, Esq.: Baltimore, February 12th, 1857,” in Founder’s Letters, 7.[/note] The Peabody was founded as a cultural institution for the people of Baltimore, but from the first, this democratic ambition was in conflict with the intellectual aspirations of the first librarians and their desire to facilitate civic “self-improvement.” Morris (a doctor of divinity), his successor Nathaniel Holmes Morison (a schoolmaster and poet), and Morison’s assistant and successor Philip Uhler (who had trained as an entomologist) were all devoted to the nineteenth-century idea of the scholar-librarian. Morison wrote in one annual report that “Education always proceeds from the above downward, from the best to the common minds, from the leaders of the people to the people themselves. Furnish... the foundations of intelligence and thought, and they will... stimulate and improve the whole community.\" [note number=\'35\']Qtd. in Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, “PIB Ref. Library. 8-Morison\'s Philosophy of Excellence,” in George Peabody (1795-1869): A-Z Handbook of the Massachusetts-Born Merchant in the South, London-Based Banker, and Philanthropist\'s Life, Influence, and Related People, Places, Events, and Institutions. . 11 Mar. 2011.[/note] When the Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876 in close proximity to the Peabody—in large part to take advantage of the library—the tendency of the librarians to address scholarly needs and “approved literature” over popular desires was given additional momentum. In keeping with these ideas, the Peabody’s librarians kept careful track of their readers’ choices, noting with special caution the numbers of novels that were requested. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'10\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-10-annual-report-detail/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-399\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-399\" title=\"fig 10 annual report detail\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail-336x452.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"452\" /></a>Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.[/note] This schism at the heart of the library’s collecting paradigm was not unique to the Peabody; the question of reading matter—should it offer leisure for the masses or the means of social uplift?—was central to the public library movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. [note number=\'36\']See, for example, Alexis McCrossen, “’One Cathedral More’ or ‘Mere Lounging Places for Bummers’? The Cultural Politics of Leisure and the Public Library in Gilded Age America,” Libraries &amp; Culture 41.2 (2006): 169-188; Paul Sturges, “The Public Library and Reading by the Masses: Historical Perspectives on the USA and Britain 1850-1900,” ; Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, Upon the Objects to be Attained by the Establishment of a Public Library, 12 Dec. 2010.[/note]\r\n\r\nFinally, the Peabody’s “desiderata” acquisitions and librarians’ selections were supplemented by book donations from local elites—bibliophiles with extensive private collections that included incunabula, classical authors in Renaissance editions, expensive illustrated atlases. At the same time, book donations came in from more plebian sources. The Peabody’s growth overlapped with the decline of the local social libraries, and it eventually absorbed some of the books from the Library Company of Baltimore, Robinson’s Circulating Library and several small professional and mechanics’ libraries. And I haven’t even touched on the Peabody’s twentieth-century fate.\r\n\r\nThe variety of philanthropic impulses, resource streams and classification philosophies that have fed the Peabody over the 150 years of its existence has led to a collection that does not so much map the nineteenth-century mind as signal its odd amalgam of popular and scholarly investments. The Peabody’s collection effectively evades succinct description—at least, any kind of description that pretends to be coherent, that is not perforated by its stakes in local history, library history, book history. But more importantly, it suggests the degree to which accident and opportunity and prejudice and wealth and the changing winds of cataloguing rules shape any archive. Description, which should be the most fundamental tool of communication between librarians and researchers, turns out to be utterly elusive. Yet we do not know what to replace them with, these inadequate descriptions, these exercises in stilted and partial translation.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>2. The Researcher’s Progress.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>I am preparing for my class about women and nineteenth-century print culture, which meets in the Peabody; we have reached the part of the syllabus where we look at gift books and annuals. I want students to examine several examples of these literary miscellanies, offering some illustration of their variety, and I have a list of such items that I have used in the past. But since I also want to show the students new acquisitions, I need to refresh my list. I will start with “gift book” as a keyword in the online catalogue.</blockquote>\r\nIn place of perfect and commensurate description—not possible—what we have are cataloguing systems that indexically represent collections through data and metadata that are, as I have already suggested, historically marked and inevitably inconsistent. In the case of the Peabody, these records are further compromised: Dewey cards developed from a nineteenth-century print index do not offer Library of Congress subject terms or detailed tables of contents; they also frequently lack other kinds of information. [note number=\'37\']Many of the electronic records for Peabody books have been copy-cataloged, that is, developed from records for identical books in other libraries. But these records might also be incomplete or inconsistent, given that many are quite old. The expense of original cataloging prevents our staff from creating full, new records for every item in the Peabody’s collection of over 300,000 titles.[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'11\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-11-ddc-cards/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-400\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-400\" title=\"fig 11 ddc cards\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Dewey cards for “gift books.”[/note] My search for “gift book” will turn up bequests—the term “gift book” is often attached to these donations—and it will miss many of the nineteenth-century gift books and annuals in our collection whose records lack subject classifications, or whose subject classifications reference the book’s contents, not its format. For example, the 1848 Rough and Ready Annual: or, Military Souvenir published by Appleton’s has been assigned the subject “Mexican War, 1846-1848—Anecdotes.” [note number=\'38\']Rough and Ready Annual (New York: D. Appleton; Philadelphia: G.S. Appleton, 1848).[/note]\r\n\r\nThe problem of finding is perhaps only a sub-set of the problem of description, but I want to give it special attention because it introduces another variable: the physical space of the object. My search for gift books in the Peabody also entails the privilege of retrieving the books from the stacks. There are two search processes, the intellectual and the physical, that I must navigate. The intellectual search in this case requires a variety of keyword/date range combinations, and ultimately, recourse to my prepared bibliography—a holdover from pre-catalogue research methods. Now the second search begins.\r\n\r\nThe Rough and Ready Annual is at 973.62 A5121, in the “general history of North America; United States” category. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'12\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-12-rr/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-401\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-401\" title=\"fig 12 r&amp;r\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.[/note] This call number range is on the second floor, west side. Other items on my list are in very different parts of the library. Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them, edited by the temperance writer T. S. Arthur and published in London, has been given the call number 813 A7910 duodecimo—fourth floor east, in the “American literature in English, fiction” section. [note number=\'39\']Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them (London: Knight &amp; Co., [1857]). This title does not appear in at least one Arthur bibliography; see Donald A Koch, \"Timothy Shay Arthur,\" Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, ed. Joel Myerson (Detroit: Gale Research, 1979), from Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Feb. 2011. To check on this, I need Mitchell Sharpe Jr.’s A Bibliography of the Published Books of Timothy Shay Arthur (Atlanta: Emory University, 1954), a typewritten quarto at 012 A791S, but it seems to be missing.[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'13\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-13-orange/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-402\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-402\" title=\"fig 13 orange\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Orange Blossoms in the stacks.[/note] Arthur shows up again as co-editor of The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present, which has received more extensive description as it contains the first printing of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Siope.” [note number=\'40\']The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present (Baltimore: Bayly and Burns, [1838]).[/note] We have two copies of this very genteel little gift book, one at 808.83 B2175 (rhetoric &amp; collections of literature), and one at 810.8 C297 (American literature in English). The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons is in the rare book room at the south end of the third floor. [note number=\'41\']The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons (London: The Religious Tract Society, ca. 1850).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'14\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-14-rbr/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-403\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-403\" title=\"fig 14 rbr\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The rare book room.[/note] In this case, the book’s rarity has to do with a lovely fore-edge painting. It has been assigned to 820.8 N42017 (general books about literature). On the other end of the “rare” continuum is The Family Circle and Parlor Annual, volume 5 in a series, which is shelved up on the sixth floor with the periodicals at 051 F198 (serials in American English). [note number=\'42\']The Family Circle and Parlor Annual (New York: Comstock, 1847).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'15\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-15-parlor/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-404\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-404\" title=\"fig 15 parlor\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Parlor Annual in the stacks.[/note]\r\n\r\nI’ll fill out call slips for each book, stick the slips into red flags, and put the flags in an order that will help me chart a logical course through the stacks. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'16\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-16-slips/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-405\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-405\" title=\"fig 16 slips\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Call slips and flags.[/note] It’s easiest to start on the sixth floor and work one’s way down, picking up books along the way. Usually I find other interesting items as I go, so I carry a batch of blank call slips and extra flags. (On this occasion, for example, I find The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse; published in 1813 and inscribed by its owner in 1817, it pre-dates by several years the official beginning of the gift book phenomenon. It might be more of a “literary almanac.” [note number=\'43\']The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse (Philadelphia: David Hogan, 1813).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'17\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-17-new-reader/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-406\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-406\" title=\"fig 17 new reader\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Inscription in The New American Reader.[/note]) Usually I am also unable to locate at least one of the books I have set out to find. Most likely the book has been misshelved, so I’ll check the quartos and folios, which are shelved separately; then I’ll check the rare book room’s octavo, duodecimo and quarto shelving areas. It used to astonish me that books were still shelved by format in the Peabody, but it does save space. At the same time, this shelving system—along with the multiple distinct areas within the library where books may reside, eg the rare book room, the reference section, the genealogy books, the Limited Editions Club, and several discrete named collections—means that retrieving a few books can take quite a long time, as I traipse up and down the six floors of the library, thread through stacks, open secured doors with multiple keys, turn lights on and off, and maneuver a book truck in and out of a tiny service elevator built in the 1920s. By the end of the journey, the library and I will have exchanged dust; I’ll take on a few streaks of red rot, and the library will have taken in particles from my body as well.\r\n\r\nWhile the Peabody is unique, these conditions are not in the end very unusual. In terms of the intellectual search, the absence of “gift book” from many of the catalogue records is no less egregious than the absence of other information—the names of all the contributors; the subjects of the illustrations. The metadata is potentially infinite. The “gift book” only exists as a category because of scholars who teased out this cultural phenomenon; it would be very difficult to define its absolute borders. In terms of the physical search, the Peabody might be messier than, say, a rare book library that has assigned current LC call numbers to all its contents and houses them in compact shelving, but it exemplifies the general on-the-ground situation. As I wind my way through the Peabody stacks, I remember how much more difficult it is to gather research materials from several different institutions.\r\n\r\nThe fact is, for scholars who rely on archives, research is something you do only after you have already undertaken a rigorous search. It is the search that provides you with the foundational sense of your subject. But the search is rarely acknowledged or accredited; even the foot-soldier craft of bibliography, the link between “librarianship” and “scholarship,” has largely lost its scholarly status.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>3. An Architecture of Disctinction.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>A non-affiliate researcher contacts the Peabody about our H. L. Mencken collections. Since she will bring a couple of graduate students with her, I set up a group work space in one of the library alcoves where the three of them can share materials and talk without disturbing other readers. I pull the requested volumes with the help of some students and set the cart up within easy reach of the alcove. When the researchers arrive, I show them the Mencken collections on the ground floor. Then I lead them to their group work space and leave them, returning to the glassed-in office behind the reading room, the vantage point that allows me to monitor the otherwise empty reading room.</blockquote>\r\nIn “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” a team of Dutch sociologists investigates the library as a space that is strongly marked by situational norms—“knowledge-based beliefs about how to behave in particular situations that are shaped by social influence.” [note number=\'44\']Henk Aarts and Ap Dijksterhuis, “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84.1 (2003), 19.[/note] Their research leads them to argue, however, that such norms do not require direct social influences to be triggered; in fact, “the situation can activate mental representations of normative behaviors automatically. And once activated, these representations provide the knowledge necessary for guiding one’s own situationally appropriate behavior.” [note number=\'45\']Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 19.[/note] Physical environments do not necessarily prompt these behaviors; rather, the behavior “depend[s] on whether the environment is of immediate behavioral relevance.” [note number=\'46\']Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 20.[/note] Talking in a quiet voice in the library, a normative behavior, is only activated for those who plan to visit the library.\r\n\r\nTen years ago, when the research for this article was conducted, the “silence of the library” was still a widespread norm. While the situation is now often reversed—in our main campus library, we must designate specific quiet areas because otherwise a sociable undergraduate din would take over—the norm of silence does continue to preside at the Peabody. Because it is off campus, the Peabody is often attractively under-populated compared to the crowded main library; it is mostly used by advanced researchers and those who seek a quiet place to study. The large central open area catches and amplifies even the smallest noises. The shelf-lined alcoves on either side of this central area offer the appearance of privacy, but in fact are little echo chambers. Visitors immediately detect these acoustics, and—except for the periodic tour groups—most spend their time in the Peabody in silence. But it is not just the physics of sound that shape behaviors here, as the Dutch researchers show; the social expectations of the space prefigure those behaviors.\r\n\r\nIn setting up a group work space for the Mencken researchers, I have quite deliberately contravened the usual norm of silence. Clearly, I am not inviting them to shout, and by putting them in an alcove in back, I have taken measures to protect any quiet-seeking visitors who might arrive. But in accordance with new ideas about the use of library space, my colleagues and I have decided that we must accommodate group study even if it might occasionally disrupt the silence desired by others. As it happens, the Mencken researchers’ conversation is eventually interrupted by a tour group, and the two activities play out side by side.\r\n\r\nI must admit that at moments I have mixed feelings about the tour groups and even the study cohorts. While my pedagogical instincts tend towards cheerful hub-bub, there is a part of me that is still in awe of the sanctuary-like atmosphere of the Peabody. John Morris called the library a “cathedral of books,” and clearly that’s what architect Edmund G. Lind had in mind. The central area with its grand skylight and the alcoves on its sides is like a nave bordered with chapels. Lind didn’t need a psychological study of environment-based situational norms to tell him that he might activate different behaviors within his building. The great central space inspires reverence—your eye is drawn to the skylight the way it would be drawn to the rose windows of Chartres, and on its way up catches row upon solemn row of books stowed behind gilded railings, a testament to the accumulated wisdom of the ages. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'18\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-18-skylight/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-407\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-407\" title=\"fig 18 skylight\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"448\" /></a>The skylight in the George Peabody Library.[/note] But step into an alcove, especially on the ground floor where each is filled with an immense wooden table, and you instantly feel something else, something no less grand but more human. The alcoves are study-sized, and once you sit down at one of those dark, gleaming, broad tables, it is like you are the master of your own private library. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'19\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-19-alcove/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-408\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-408\" title=\"fig 19 alcove\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Alcove in the George Peabody Library.[/note]\r\n\r\nIronically, the Peabody’s architecture was out-dated by the time it was completed. With the professionalization of librarianship and the evolution of library science in the late nineteenth century, librarians like William Frederick Poole advocated for a functional rather than decorative design of interior library space. [note number=\'47\']See William Frederick Poole, Remarks on Library Construction (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1884).[/note] Moreover, the actual use of space in the Peabody in the late nineteenth century was at odds with its symbolic appeal. The main library was known as the “stack room”; readers were seated in a comparatively plain reading room on the other side of the main doors. In this arrangement, the librarians reigned inside the gorgeous “cathedral of books,” but the building’s potential to civilize the masses was lost.\r\n\r\nNow, of course, we do not send readers outside. Inside the “stack room,” we explicitly call visitors’ attention to its beauty to explain the connections between the library’s architecture and its collections—how both speak eloquently of Victorian values. At the same time, we who staff the library have relegated ourselves to its periphery. We work in the glassed-in room at one end that serves as a monitoring point and occasional classroom; the official “librarian’s office” in one corner—its luxurious proportions suggesting something like a sacristy and something like a robber baron’s lair—is now shared work-space stuffed with several desks and laden book trucks. There is another monitoring station near the main doors. I often do my work at the photography station, in the back of one of the alcoves [note type=\'figure\' number=\'20\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-20-station/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-409\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-409\" title=\"fig 20 station\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Photography station in the George Peabody Library.[/note]. It offers some privacy but is close enough to the central reading tables to be accessible to readers.\r\n\r\nThe space of the Peabody initiates other situational behaviors besides the norm of silence, and our work-station arrangements testify to this. The spatial re-centralizing of readers and marginalization of staff is not merely practical; it is a reflection of the modern office of librarianship. We are there to be of service, in a para-textual position. Consequently, our work should be out of sight; it should be separate from and secondary to the work that readers do. Our locations call upon us, in other words, to support the scholar’s effort to hide the “seams of [her] findings” by hiding the ways we contribute to that work—by the ways we sometimes do that work.\r\n\r\nI think about these complications as I escort the Mencken researchers to their table and walk back to the glassed-in office, where there is nothing pressing for me to do. I’d rather spend more time talking with them. I’d like to learn about their research and introduce them to some underappreciated parts of the collection. I’d like to share with them what I learned curating an exhibition of Mencken-related magazines and writing about one of those magazines. But I don’t want to get in their way; it’s likely that they are ready to get on with work that they don’t see as connected to mine. The professional norms of the archive are strong, and although I know how to talk about my research in many contexts—in presentations, interviews, hotel elevators—I haven’t figured out how to mix my scholarly role with the curatorial role I am supposed to play here, in the Peabody. In the end, I say nothing. Professional segregation is another kind of silence in the library.\r\n\r\nWe cannot change the archaeological record beneath our feet, but we can rearrange the fossils we dig up to create new narratives. We can tell different kinds of archive stories, including the story of what research in the archive was and is. Is it too idealistic to expect that dissolving the entrenched fantasies about archival research will make room for new methods? Is it naïve to imagine a space that, in putting into practice the archival turn’s preliminary insights about disciplinary and disorder, can support experimentation, facilitate connection across professions and disciplines, and enable new discoveries?','Disciplinarity and Disorder','','inherit','open','open','','2199-revision-31','','','2013-07-10 06:15:24','2013-07-10 06:15:24','',2199,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/2199-revision-31/',0,'revision','',0),(5044,10,'2013-06-27 22:08:10','2013-06-27 22:08:10','The primal scene of archival research takes place in a dreary reading room. A researcher sits at her table, inert. An archivist enters, pushing a cart that bears a dozen dusty gray boxes.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ykY6moIaDE?rel=0\" height=\"250\" width=\"333\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe>\r\n\r\nThe archivist unhinges a box, removes a numbered file folder and, placing it at the researcher’s elbow, steps back. The researcher stirs, then sits upright with a mechanical jolt. She turns sharply in the direction of the folder, flips it open and cocks her head towards the flimsy leaves inside; now she is reading. (Zoom in on the eyes as they click into focus.) Now she is reading, and now she truly comes alive; she bends towards the papers, taps her forehead in thought. A sheaf of blank paper and a pencil appear on her table, and she begins taking notes. Her fingers fly—and soon, so do the pages she is writing upon. Caught up in eddies of excitement, they swoop to the ceiling and around the room and down to the floor, where they fall together into perfect piles. Bindings sprout from the outer strata; the pages sew themselves into bright, tight, hard-cover books. These the archivist gathers up and places on the shelves that line the room, next to other books and gray boxes.\r\n\r\nI may have it backwards: in other versions of the fantasy, it is the archive that is first animated by the presence of the researcher, a Dr. Coppelius who waves a pencil and sets the dusty boxes to dancing. But either way, the archival imaginary posits a symbiotic relationship between researcher and source, a photogenic pas de deux that leads to a finished scholarly product. This work, in turn, enters the archive for the next generation of researchers; it might even be taken apart again so that its secret ingredients (notes, drafts, letters) can themselves be served up in a series of boxes. Such a strangely private form of publication it creates, the coupling of researcher and source.\r\n\r\nWhat Freudian trauma results from witnessing this sight? Only the harm that myth inflicts. This primal scene is a fiction, a dream of perfect union between researcher and source that ignores, first of all, the full cast of characters. What about the archivist, who is rendered invisible? What about all those within and without the archive, upon whose labor—acquiring, preserving, organizing, reading, cataloging, describing, interpreting, analyzing, debating, teaching, writing, editing, digitizing, referencing and publishing—the current project depends? More a barn dance than a pas de deux: an archival encounter is an enactment of social authorship long before the researcher enters the room. ((See Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) on the idea of social authorship, which could be described as “the dialectic between the historically located individual author and the historically developed institutions of literary production” that help create a work, e.g., printers, publishers, editors and readers (81).))\r\n\r\nBut even a barn dance is much too mannered a metaphor. The sketch above misleads us more generally about the experience on the ground. Doing time in an archive is often tedious, uncomfortable and bewildering. For librarians, there is the struggle to promote and simultaneously protect what you have; the difficulty of fitting unruly materials into arrangements and workflows; and worries about space and time—where to put it all, how to address your backlog. For researchers, there is the struggle to locate the archives you need and what matters to you inside them; the uncertainty created by unruly data; and worries about time and space— how to access what you need during your research trip, how to record and organize the information you gather. At both ends, the archival encounter is counter-cinematic and erratic, days of monotonous sifting and dead-ends punctuated by one or two, or maybe zero, hidden moments of vivid, peculiar joy.\r\n\r\nSo archival research does not fulfill its ideal outline. So what? Who cares? Why dredge up the fantasy? Because the fantasy continues to structure our archival encounters—what we expect and undertake in the reading room, what we allow it to mean. Twenty years ago, Alice Kaplan observed that “conventional academic discourse requires that when you write up the results of your archival work, you tell a story about what you found, but not about how you found it. The less the seams of your findings show, the better your discoveries lend themselves to use by others… tell[ing] these stories breaks their spell and violates the spirit of the archives.” ((Alice Yaeger Kaplan, “Working in the Archives,” Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 103-116; 103, 107.)) With a few word changes, the same could be said about what counts as professional archivist discourse: the impersonal, neutral genre of the finding aid, for example, should say what is in a collection, but should not discuss what is confusing or missing in it, or the problems it posed in processing. ((See, for example, James M. O’Toole and Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006).)) Despite the growing recognition that this sequestration is never completely possible—that the material conditions and social relations of the archive shape the work we do in it—that work continues to be represented in professional and scholarly publications as if it is. Despite the recent call to move to the fore “the backstage of the archives—how they are constructed, policed, experienced, and manipulated” in order to support historiography “not merely [as] a project of fact-retrieval” but as “a set of complex processes of selection, interpretation, and even creative invention,” the “backstage” stays in the background. ((Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 7-8.)) Antoinette Burton may be correct that “many if not most historians operate under the assumption that history is a highly interpretive act,” but this belief is not yet reflected in the archival encounter: the ways that researchers (not just historians) and librarians report their experiences with primary sources; the ways that librarians and researchers work together; the ways librarians and researchers regard the involvement of “non specialists.” ((Burton, 8. Burton notes that “whether historians concede or fully countenance the impact of such contingencies on their work is another question. They rarely speak of them, and even more rarely do they do so in print” (8). Her books recuperates some of those archive stories but this effort, I’ll suggest below, is hampered by other kinds of obligations.)) While the advent of digitization and electronic resource sharing has revolutionized the research landscape, making primary sources public in unprecedented ways, there remains in the archive a habitus of secret knowledge—the “spell” that Kaplan is loathe to break. This is not necessarily intentional. It is rather the effect of layering recent shifts in technology, theory and professional definition onto older foundations: petrified conditions, relations, expectations and systems that continue to operate in part through the enduring power of fantasies about research. What we have in the archive is a stratified groundwork that still governs our archival encounters.\r\n\r\nBut, you will object, the archive has already changed. Now we have the “archival turn”—the scholarly interest in the archive not just as a source of evidence but as an epistemological mode. Surely, this attention to the constructedness of the archive has led to a revealing reconsideration of what actually goes on inside an archive; surely, as a result, those archaic fantasies have diminished. Have they? In what follows, I begin by unearthing one stratum of the archival turn, the decade of the 1990s, as represented by three texts: Kaplan’s essay mentioned above, “Working in the Archives” (1990)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_369\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-369 \" alt=\"fig 2 kaplan\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan-300x224.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"224\" /></a> Photocopy of Alice Yaeger Kaplan’s “Working in the Archives.”; Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1994/95)[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_372\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-372 \" alt=\"Print out of Jacque Derrida’s “Archive Fever” from Diacritics.; and Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida-300x224.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"224\" /></a> Print out of Jacque Derrida’s “Archive Fever” from Diacritics.; and Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_373\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-373 \" alt=\"Library copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust. (Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25.2 (Summer 1995): 9-63. Web. 1 Dec. 2010. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).) \" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman-300x224.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"224\" /></a> Library copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust. ((Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25.2 (Summer 1995): 9-63. Web. 1 Dec. 2010. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).))[/caption]\r\n\r\nA cross-examination of these three texts reveals a pattern of interests, a set of efforts to defy customary practices—but only, it turns out, “in theory.” While certain practices are challenged in these texts, they leave mostly intact the older strata of archival research fantasies and conventions. Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman do not dislodge the forces that organize the actual archival encounter.\r\n\r\nHow does this happen? Why is practice so stubborn? We need another take on archival practice: not practice in theory, but practice in action; not the 1990s, but now; not in terms of textual patterns, but in terms that suit the subject: the terms of the archival encounter itself, and the eccentric, anachronistic and even monotonous experience it generates. My second look at practice will take the form of a series of vignettes about a real-life archive, the George Peabody Library in Baltimore. While this narrative structure may seem to recreate the division of labor between theory and practice, my hope is that—by giving practice the last word—we’ll be in a better position to synthesize the two.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>I. “The library doubles as a detective’s office.” ((Kaplan, 114.))</strong>\r\n\r\nThe archival turn could be dated to the founding of “scientific” history in the mid-nineteenth century, or to the development a century later of the quantitative methods of the Annales School, or to other evidence-based movements in the history of history, but what is generally meant by this phrase corresponds with the formation of cultural studies and the use of the archive as a conceptual category. That is, the archival turn has to do with the notion of the “figuration” of the archive, a parallel decline in its empirical authority and a related expansion of its relevance within domains that are not exclusively historiographic, like art, literary criticism, textual studies, media studies and information studies. ((See the use of the term in, for example, Carolyn Hamilton et al, eds., Refiguring the Archive (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), Cheryl Simon, ed., Following the Archival Turn: Photography, the Museum, and the Archive, special issue of Visual Resources: A Journal of Documentation 18.2 (June 2002), and Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). This turn is partially construed as a “move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject,” but also by the earlier metaphorical interest in “the archive” that goes back to the 1980s (Stoler, 44-45) and by Foucauldian descriptions of archives as “‘monuments to particular configurations of power” (Hamilton, qtd. in Burton, 6).)) But it is not irrelevant that a devotion to archival methods precedes by many decades contemporary theories of the archive; if the archival turn lacks a precise origin, this (we will see) is completely in keeping with its own preoccupations.\r\n\r\nKaplan therefore represents in some ways an arbitrary beginning for this cross-examination—clearly the archive as a conceptual category predates 1990—but her article does initiate something new: the recognition that there is something called an “archive story” that must remain hidden in order for the official “results” to function authoritatively. In admitting this bit of professional legerdemain, and in telling her own archive story in a prestigious scholarly journal, Kaplan not only commits the violation she prohibits but also contradicts it. Through its publication, Kaplan’s own archive story is elevated to the status of “results”—a kind of research that shadows conventional academic discourse. Indeed, Kaplan notes, such “fables” of research “can be analyzed like a text,” a “mixed up genre” that combines the “redemptive detective fiction” with the epic and the dime novel. ((Kaplan, 106, 107.))\r\n\r\nKaplan’s archive story thus marks a distinctive moment in the archival turn—one which gained its most prominent authorization in 1994, with a paper that Jacques Derrida delivered (in English) to a conference sponsored by the Freud Museum, the Courtauld Institute and the Société International d’Histoire de la Psychiatrie et de la Psychoanalyse. Called initially “The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression,” the lecture was revised and published in 1995 as Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne in French; the published English version echoed the French publication with its 1995 title Archive Fever. As Carolyn Steedman points out in Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, however, this work that has been assigned a seminal status in archival studies “for the main part… is not about archives at all, but is rather a sustained contemplation of a work of history, of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (1991),” itself a sustained contemplation of Moses and Monotheism—which (according to Steedman) Yerushalmi examines through Freud’s description of the work as a “‘historical novel,’ or a kind of historical story,” undertaken “in order to understand the period of baroque anti-semitism through which he was living.” ((Steedman, 3.))\r\n\r\nDizzy yet? Let’s undertake a more careful reading of this splatter pattern of intra-references—or, to stick with the archaeological metaphor, let’s call them groups of potsherds buried in the 1990s layer of the “archival turn.” Digging down to reassemble them reveals a set of interests with special implications for archival practice.\r\n\r\nThe most prominent group of sherds to note are the fragments of disciplinarity: the inter-, multi- or perhaps simply anti-disciplinarity of the texts, authors and audiences caught up in these three archival addresses. Kaplan, an American scholar of French literature, calls the post-theory exchange between literature and history a “cross-pollination of desire between historians and literary critics” undertaken “with the curiosity and energetic passion of collectors.” ((Kaplan, 107-108.)) Steedman, a British historian, performs this cross-pollinating process without comment: her epigraph to Dust is from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, one chapter treats George Eliot’s Middlemarch in depth… in fact, almost every chapter depends on a literary text. ((Another chapter invokes Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel Mary Barton, a third is anchored by W. H. Auden’s poem “Homage to Clio,” and a fourth finds its most eloquent examples in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.)) Derrida, a French philosopher, produced a work that has been exceptionally mobile across disciplines, forms, languages and professional domains. He gave his initial talk to an audience drawing on three different kinds of institutions; Mal d’Archive was published in book form in both French and English, but also made an intermediate appearance as an essay in the journal diacritics. All of these texts, it seems, respond to the provocations of the archive—to the materials and circumstances of discovery—rather than to the disciplinary distinctions that arguably divide the archive from itself.\r\n\r\nArchive Fever has become a founding document even though, as Steedman notes in the very beginning of her book, many in Derrida’s audience “knew the ‘archival turn’ to be [already] well underway” at the time of his talk. ((Steedman, 2.)) As it happens—and this is the second group of sherds I see—these three essays have in common an investment in or a problem with origins, especially with the failure of origins. Derrida, for example, defines archive fever as a kind of Freudian death drive—a drive to fix and preserve which at the same time “works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own ‘proper’ traces… [it] is above all anarchivic, one could say, or archiviolithic… the archive always works, and a priori, against itself.” ((Derrida, 14.)) If the archival impulse is driven to destroy its own work, then the question of origins ultimately point to the larger question of disorder. The disorder of origins makes frequent appearances in the essay but one example will make the point—in the “Preamble” where he recounts how he titled the talk that he had not yet written and was to give at the Freud Museum. The “Preamble” starts with his reflections on the word “impression,” which has several simultaneous registers of meaning for him. One of these is the “scriptural or typographic” register: that of the graphic impression that marks a substrate. In English, “impression” is phonetically related to “repression” and “suppression,” key words in the Freudian vocabulary, translated respectively from the German Verdrängung and Unterdrückung. English, that is, retains the rhyming relationship of the two German terms, and “impression” in this company comes to have a vaguely Freudian meaning as well. But in French, Verdrängung is “refoulement,” which means something more like expulsion, a driving away. The Freudian sense of the French word “répression” has been reserved for Unterdrückung. So English “repression” defines a phenomenon that must be distinguished from the French “répression.” These translational shifts “directly concern the structures of archivization,” Derrida says, “because they touch on the topic differences and thus on the location of the substrates of traces\" (Derrida, 23). In other words, how do you classify concepts whose meanings shift across languages? Where do you store them in a disciplinary grammar—or in an archive? How do these asymmetrical linguistic structures shape the establishment and extension of a new science? For Derrida, the difference between “repression” and “répression” is “enough to disrupt the tranquil landscape of all historical knowledge, of all historiography, and even of all self-consistent ‘scholarship’” ((Derrida, 23.))\r\n\r\nOrigin failure appears both as deliberate performance and as unintentional oversight in these essays. Derrida stages his own inability to get past “go”; with an introductory section, and subsequent sections sub-titled “Exergue,” “Preamble,” “Foreword,” his essay functions, Steedman notes, like a “primer offering instruction in the principle of deferral.” ((A short notice called “Priere d’inserer,” published only in the French book version, carried the bulk of an argument for which there was no room in the lecture. Steedman, 7.)) For all her insight into Derrida’s titling adventures, however, Steedman’s title is marked by its own origin aporia. While her first chapter is devoted to Archive Fever—a “let’s begin at the beginning” homage to the seminal text—her book’s title, Dust, seems more indebted to the last sentence of Kaplan’s essay, published five years before Derrida’s: “Usually there is no mother lode, no original manuscript to be retrieved—the gold is all in the dust.” ((Kaplan, 116.)) Kaplan, however, is never mentioned. ((Kaplan also begins her essay with a brief consideration of the “arche,” the Greek and Latin term for the public records office, which is a major starting point for Derrida. Is he borrowing from her, or is she borrowing from him, given that this sort of etymological investigation was an established signature of Deconstruction?))\r\n\r\nKaplan, for her part, unravels her own archive story. She gives us a kind of “whodunit”—her search for the ephemeral sources of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s anti-semitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937). She uses this account to exemplify her effort to “move through the archival process and recover some of the stories that get deleted in the final scholarly form.” ((Kaplan, 104. For this reason, perhaps, Kaplan never reveals what she ultimately discovers in her successful search for Celine’s sources. In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether her pre-emptive and truncated treatment of her archive story is deliberate or not. Is this treatment meant to indirectly support her official claim about “results”? Or does the presence of the archive story suggest that telling it is an impulse she can’t quite control? Thanks, Lauren Coats, for helping tease this problem out.)) These beginnings are preemptively struck out, however, by what seems to be her main claim: “the passion of the archives must finally be used to eradicate all personal stories in the interests of the dry archival report, fit for a public.” ((Kaplan, 103.)) Only in the “para-text”—a preface, for example—can the archive story appear without “interrupt[ing] or complicat[ing] the narrative so much that no results could ever be understood or perceived.” ((Kaplan, 104.)) Despite this unequivocal assertion, the personal “whodunit” prevails in her essay, especially in the final section set in the Centre du documentation juive contemporain (CDJC). It is this library, where Kaplan solves the mystery of Céline’s sources, that “doubles as a detective’s office.”\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_423\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"333\"]<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-5-cdjc-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-423\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-423\" title=\"fig 5 cdjc\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1-333x250.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a> Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhile Kaplan’s research mystery resolves neatly, the truth about archives is that they are full of gaps, mistakes and excesses: in the words of one of the CDJC librarians, “‘ici on trouve tout’—there’s some of everything here”—but not, one could add, all of anything. ((Kaplan, 115.)) Kaplan’s essay ends by nullifying both her detective story success and her “dry archival report,” by recognizing the disorder on which both of these narratives are unsteadily perched: “The archive is constituted by these errors, these pieces out of place, which are then reintegrated into a story of some kind.” ((Kaplan, 115.)) “A story of some kind”? So much for “results.”\r\n\r\nKaplan sets us up to perceive one final potsherd pattern common to these three essays. If origin-less disorder is the order of the archive, it is a disorder that is generated out of human loss—a disorder that joins the body and the material world. The archive is always predicated on historical violence of some sort, whatever is censored, erased, excluded, trumped up, used up, misplaced, conquered, killed. Moreover, the archival categories that mark both the visible victories and hidden defeats do not stay within their walls; the archive is both a repository of existing schemas and a means of perpetuating them in the world beyond. While we might usually think of this disciplinary activity as a pact between the archive and its political authors, Steedman makes it clear that the dilemmas of order shape the archival body in many ways. For example, she takes literally the provocation of Derrida’s title Archive Fever to investigate the illness that researchers contract on the penultimate day of their trip to the archive: prompted by the anxiety of the task that remains unfinished, they end their research with night-sweats and head-aches. But what seems like a strangely specific malady is transformed by Steedman into a far-reaching social symptom: by relating the researcher’s “archive fever” to the terrible diseases suffered by tanners, skinners and other workers in the trades associated with paper and leather, Steedman expands our sense of who is in the archive—the bodies whose specialized labors populate our libraries with books, the many kinds of expertise the archive consumes.\r\n\r\nFor Derrida, the relation between the material archive and its human architects focuses on one kind of “graphic mark,” a particular “private inscription”: circumcision as the archival signature that is also the signature of patrimoine, with Freud’s relationship to his father as his main example. ((Derrida, 19.)) It is perhaps not a coincidence that the body in question in both Kaplan’s and Derrida’s archive is Jewish, for that is a body that has come to symbolize the destructive power of classificatory regimes. Despite her contention that the private passions motivating research must be kept secret, Kaplan is fascinated by the “missing person stories” at the CDJC: by the “quantity of people who are there for personal reasons,” the survivors of occupation or deportation or camps, or their descendants, quietly looking up their lost ones or noisily dropping off their memoirs. ((Kaplan, 113.)) This disorganized crowd of dead and living bodies tries to meet up with an equally disorganized crowd of materials—individual letters, trial transcripts, pamphlets, newspapers, first-person accounts, books, photographs, lists. The monumental task of match-making, the librarians’ work, is never complete. More papers are always generated or declassified or discovered, different human questions and needs emerge. The tidy choreography of the research fantasy, where the detective always finds her man, is not so much in evidence; what we have instead is corpora in excess of existing categories.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\nKaplan, Derrida and Steedman open up the archival body. They show us how paper meets the press of flesh; they make us feel just how intimate it is. [note number=\'26\']This interest in the corporeal dimensions and effects of order, its human and non-human components, has in common with their other gestures—an experimental attitude towards conventional disciplinarity and attention to the priority of disorder—the circumstances of the academic humanities in the 1990s. Since the archival turn came out of the ascent of cultural studies and allied intrigues in the 1970s and ‘80s, the circles in the Venn diagram of these ventures will necessarily overlap. We could also say that the archive took off when it did precisely because it made a clever new container for these preoccupations, thick in the humanities atmosphere at the time, where they were distilled and united. [/note] But for all their revelations about the limits of discipline and the multiplicities of disorder in the archive, these texts do not disclose the specific methods of engagement that led to their existence. While Kaplan offers up her own archival victory and outlines several other such stories, she still insists on their marginalization. [note number=\'27\']“Were the story of how you got the story really to be told inside the book, it would interrupt or complicate the narrative so much that no results could be understood or even perceived. Every story of success in the archives is emotionally charged, for only the most extreme emotions can drive people to the drudgery, to the discomfort, of sitting and sifting through dog-eared documents, manuscripts, microfilms. To reveal those emotions would not only gum up the narrative, it would threaten its credibility, by showing on what thin strands of coincidence, accident, or on what unfair forms of friendship, ownership, geographical proximity, the discoveries were based” (Kaplan, 104).[/note] If these texts are not concerned with actual practices in the archive or changes in its methodologies, what do they tell us?\r\n\r\nFirst, they suggest one reason for the perpetuation of myths about the archive. While Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman are eager to show how archival materials do not conform to disciplinary distinctions—an enthusiasm related to other disruptive tendencies in late twentieth-century humanist scholarship –they seem less cognizant of a related phenomenon: the archive does not obey strict professional divisions, either. In Kaplan’s library-as-detective’s-office metaphor, the scholar is the detective, but does the “Eureka” moment belong only to the scholar who pieces together a narrative? What about the people who prepared those pieces? The archivist is still missing in action. Likewise, these essays do not dwell on missing boxes, illegible papers, neglected citations. There are no descriptions of archival slogging, no admissions that some materials failed to be relevant. And of course, there are no prescriptions for a different order. It is not the main aim of Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman to effect an evolution of practice; archival turnistas are not interested in disorder in order to re-order. But it is worth remembering that it is not in their professional interest as scholars to make their practices more transparent.\r\n\r\nSecondly, along the same lines, these texts inform us of the duplicity of speculative practices that reveal but cannot live out the instability of their archival mandates. Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman are put into the position of saying, “Yes, the archive is biased, idiosyncratic and treacherous—but the observations I draw from it are flawless.” [note number=\'28\']Derrida, unlike Kaplan and Steedman, makes no claims to work inside an actual archive, unless we consider Yerushalmi’s book as a kind of archive. But the fact that the essay was written self-consciously for presentation at the Freud Museum suggests that it was made out of an archive indirectly—in its construction, if not in its contents. [/note]\r\n\r\nFinally, these texts suggest why archival studies that attempt to be explicit about the messy nature of the archive have become instead “archive studies.” In more recent works like Refiguring the Archive (2002), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (2005) and Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009), the archive appears as a subject in its own right. Although the archival scenarios that are put into play in each of these books incorporate different disciplines—art, history, anthropology, literature, post-colonial studies—they have essentially created a new discipline. “Archive studies” is something we might, in the taxonomy of disciplines, see as the love-child of cultural studies, history and archival methodology. Moreover, this new discipline has in common with other humanities disciplines a complete blindness about its professional investments; it does not register much awareness of the professional investments of librarians, archivists, curators and “non-specialists,” or invite insights from those perspectives. Perhaps this is inevitably what happens when academics must give legitimacy to something new, which in turn reflects the pressures of scholarly communication: a topic must be delineated in conventional terms in order to merit publication. [note number=\'29\']Perhaps this is also the moment to ask why we—I—have been using the term “archive” all along, with its statist resonances, rather than the term “collection,” which has institutional but also personal resonances. Does “archive” bring us closer to recognizably “serious scholarship”?[/note] But it is also true that in these more recent books, which openly investigate the archive’s power-politics, the disorderly drift of the archive and its hybrid corporeality have mostly been bent towards a particular narrative about the archive as an agent of history rather than as a set of ongoing practices. It is as if the historical archive has been assembled in ways that reflect and reiterate power relations, but the contemporary archive has not; it is as if the researcher’s own research travails remain a transparent layer over the body of work that it constructs. [note number=\'30\']Of course, this is precisely what Derrida meant about the “death drive” of the archival impulse. Archive Stories is something of an exception; researchers speak openly here about themselves as researchers. It is interesting, however, that this book—like Steedman’s—doesn’t cite Kaplan’s essay as a precursor text despite the clear titular link.[/note]\r\n\r\nPerhaps it would also be fair to note that, if archival studies are now being formulated as an interdisciplinary discipline called “archive studies,” this might be just another stage in the turn. It might be that what comes next reconfigures the premise of disciplinarity and the promise of disorder, with a different approach to the human/non-human interactions that the archive documents and realizes: a more diffuse and multi-vocal set of practices in place of a new field. One way to imagine this approach would be to fully embrace Kaplan’s idea of the archive story as an account of what one hoped for, looked for and found, what one did and did not do, in the archive—an account loosed from the quarantine she advocates. Some very basic genre precedents for the archive story do exist; the bibliographic essay and the methodology statement, for example, have played an important role in many disciplines in the past and still do in some. Instead of a para-textual nod towards that archive story (in Kaplan’s sense), why not create a parallel text written collaboratively by the researcher(s) and the librarian(s), or by one person acting in both professional capacities, that runs alongside the official “results”? Or in a set of expanded notes that address not just the “what” and “where” but the “how” and “why” of sources, which are lifted from their small-type, bottom-of-page basement up into the light? Or—to add yet another layer—parallel texts that also offer room for exchange with other researchers, archivists and even interested “non specialists,” like collectors, bibliophiles and fans?\r\n\r\nIf it is hasn’t been clear already that I have scrupulously avoided so far the other kind of archive, the digital archive, it will be now. What I am imagining would be far too complicated to produce or consult in print, but would not be at all difficult to organize as a digital object—as an archive in its own right. By avoiding the digital archive up to this point, I have also finessed the fact that our current archival research methods are completely reliant on the digital archive, along with the development of online research tools and electronic instruments of data discovery and organization. Those conditions probably bear the most responsibility for making the archive visible as something that warranted a “turn” in the first place. Even Derrida refers in each version of Archive Fever to the computer on which he is currently composing, predicting that email will not only totally transform the archive as he knows it, but will make his own essay obsolete.\r\n\r\nIn short, we already have in place both the theory and the media that will make it possible to enact a radical new archival practice. We have in place what we need to integrate the archive story into the archive itself, while making it visible as a new form of “results.”\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>II. The library doubles as a librarian’s office.</strong>\r\n\r\nI could end here, with a triumphant firing of the starter pistol and a rousing cheer. But that would be a bit disingenuous, given that the starter pistol for both the archival turn and the academic use of the internet actually went off decades ago. So the question remains, what stands in the way of the practical enactment of the archival turn’s speculative insights? I’d like to engage this question by following Kaplan’s example (but not her main claim): through some archive story-telling about the George Peabody Library. These three vignettes, identified as “typical” through conversations with my colleague Paul Espinosa, illustrate the intractable formations that present-day archival encounters come up against.\r\n\r\n<strong>1. The Perils of Description.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>A group of Russian speakers visits the Peabody Library. The dozen men and women sit down around the screen that Paul has set up. He narrates a brief slide-show about the Peabody’s history, then leads them to a table where a dozen books from the collection have been laid out in cradles. He tells them about each book: what it is, why it is interesting. Each phrase of his presentation is painstakingly translated by the group’s leader into Russian.</blockquote>\r\nWhen academic and community groups visit the Peabody, my colleagues and I draw upon a standard tour-guide’s repertoire to describe it. We explain that George Peabody was a tradesman cum financier cum philanthropist who decided in 1857 that Baltimore needed a cultural institution to support the arts and learning. We talk about the evolution of the Peabody Institute, the four-part athenaeum that resulted, with its art gallery, lecture series, conservatory and free, public, non-circulating library. We discuss the model of philanthropy that George Peabody initiated and its wide-ranging influence. We point out the signal features of the awe-inspiring architecture of the current library, built to accommodate a rapidly growing collection in 1878. But when it comes to the library itself, as a collection, it is hard to know what to say. How to accurately translate the library’s holdings into a succinct and memorable statement that conveys an appropriate level of detail to different audiences? While it poses specific challenges, the Peabody also exemplifies more general problems of collection description.\r\n\r\nWe do not lack evidence for the evolving contents of the Peabody. We have the two-volume printed list of “desiderata” drawn up by the Peabody’s first librarian, John G. Morris. [note number=\'31\']Alphabetical Catalogue of Books to be Purchased for the Library of the Peabody Institute, Baltimore, Vols. 1 and 2 (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1861, 1863).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'6\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-6-alpha-index-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-395\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-395\" title=\"fig 6 alpha index\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1-336x484.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"484\" /></a>Alphabetical index from Alphabetical Catalouge (“desiderata”).[/note] We have the collections register for several decades’-worth of acquisitions, recording bibliographic information and accession numbers that can still be found on the inside front end papers of many of the books in the collection. We have the librarians’ annual reports to the library trustees. [note number=\'32\']The Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore: The Founder’s Letters and the Papers Relating to its Dedication and History, Up to the 1st January, 1868 (Baltimore: William K. Boyle, 1868); and subsequent Annual Reports, 1869, etc.[/note] We have the library’s first printed catalogue, an unsurpassed achievement when first published in 1883, which listed 100,000 volumes by author and title. [note number=\'33\']Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Vols. 1-5 (Baltimore: Isaac Friedenwald, 1883; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, [1961?]; also on googlebooks), and Second Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Including the Additions Made Since 1882, Vols. 1-8 (Baltimore: Deutsch Lithographic and Printing, 1896; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, 1961).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'7\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-7-print-cat/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-396\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-396\" title=\"fig 7 print cat\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).[/note] We have the cards from the Dewey decimal system card catalogue, which replaced the printed catalogue in the 1910s. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'8\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-8-card-cat/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-397\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-397\" title=\"fig 8 card cat\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"448\" /></a>One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.[/note] Now, of course, the library’s collections are represented in an online catalogue that integrates them with other collections in the Hopkins library system.\r\n\r\nThese markers of the collection, however, fail to satisfy some contemporary research queries for reasons that are both practical and philosophical. The transfer of the printed index, organized by author, to the Dewey decimal system, organized by topic, represented a major epistemological shift that facilitated browsing by subject category. But of course, those categories are embedded in historically-bound notions about the subjects and structures of knowledge: Dewey was invented in the 1870s, and the 22 revisions it has undergone since then cannot overcome its essential organizational distortions. For example, the literature range—the 800s—offers only 10% of its categorical space to literatures in languages other than English, Germanic and Romance languages, Greek and Latin.\r\n\r\nIn the case of the Peabody, the Dewey arrangements overlay even older systems of knowledge hierarchy. Should we continue to offer, for example, a description of the Peabody’s “voyages and travels” books? This category represents a Renaissance schematic that was still in service in the mid-nineteenth century; while actual “voyages and travels” were extended by colonial ventures, the category was eventually disbanded. Dewey combined it with geography to make a sub-category of “history.” In keeping active the old-fashioned phrase “voyages and travels,” we are participating in a centuries-long project of euphemism about the material aims and actual activities of colonialism; we are privileging an early phase of the Peabody’s evolution over later phases; we may even be confusing modern researchers. And yet, as one of the topics in Morris’s “desiderata,” a considerable portion of the Peabody’s collection was acquired with the aim of fleshing out that descriptor. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'9\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-9-index-detail/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-398\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-398\" title=\"fig 9 index detail\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail-336x274.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"274\" /></a>Detail of subject index from Alphabetical Catalouge No. 2 (“desiderata”).[/note]\r\n\r\nYet another classificatory dilemma is expressed by George Peabody’s original statement of the library’s purpose: that it “be furnished in every department of knowledge, with the most approved literature… It should consist on the best works on every subject… to satisfy the researches of students who may be engaged in the pursuit of knowledge not ordinarily attainable in the private libraries of the country.” [note number=\'34\']“Letters from George Peabody, Esq.: Baltimore, February 12th, 1857,” in Founder’s Letters, 7.[/note] The Peabody was founded as a cultural institution for the people of Baltimore, but from the first, this democratic ambition was in conflict with the intellectual aspirations of the first librarians and their desire to facilitate civic “self-improvement.” Morris (a doctor of divinity), his successor Nathaniel Holmes Morison (a schoolmaster and poet), and Morison’s assistant and successor Philip Uhler (who had trained as an entomologist) were all devoted to the nineteenth-century idea of the scholar-librarian. Morison wrote in one annual report that “Education always proceeds from the above downward, from the best to the common minds, from the leaders of the people to the people themselves. Furnish... the foundations of intelligence and thought, and they will... stimulate and improve the whole community.\" [note number=\'35\']Qtd. in Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, “PIB Ref. Library. 8-Morison\'s Philosophy of Excellence,” in George Peabody (1795-1869): A-Z Handbook of the Massachusetts-Born Merchant in the South, London-Based Banker, and Philanthropist\'s Life, Influence, and Related People, Places, Events, and Institutions. . 11 Mar. 2011.[/note] When the Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876 in close proximity to the Peabody—in large part to take advantage of the library—the tendency of the librarians to address scholarly needs and “approved literature” over popular desires was given additional momentum. In keeping with these ideas, the Peabody’s librarians kept careful track of their readers’ choices, noting with special caution the numbers of novels that were requested. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'10\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-10-annual-report-detail/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-399\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-399\" title=\"fig 10 annual report detail\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail-336x452.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"452\" /></a>Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.[/note] This schism at the heart of the library’s collecting paradigm was not unique to the Peabody; the question of reading matter—should it offer leisure for the masses or the means of social uplift?—was central to the public library movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. [note number=\'36\']See, for example, Alexis McCrossen, “’One Cathedral More’ or ‘Mere Lounging Places for Bummers’? The Cultural Politics of Leisure and the Public Library in Gilded Age America,” Libraries &amp; Culture 41.2 (2006): 169-188; Paul Sturges, “The Public Library and Reading by the Masses: Historical Perspectives on the USA and Britain 1850-1900,” ; Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, Upon the Objects to be Attained by the Establishment of a Public Library, 12 Dec. 2010.[/note]\r\n\r\nFinally, the Peabody’s “desiderata” acquisitions and librarians’ selections were supplemented by book donations from local elites—bibliophiles with extensive private collections that included incunabula, classical authors in Renaissance editions, expensive illustrated atlases. At the same time, book donations came in from more plebian sources. The Peabody’s growth overlapped with the decline of the local social libraries, and it eventually absorbed some of the books from the Library Company of Baltimore, Robinson’s Circulating Library and several small professional and mechanics’ libraries. And I haven’t even touched on the Peabody’s twentieth-century fate.\r\n\r\nThe variety of philanthropic impulses, resource streams and classification philosophies that have fed the Peabody over the 150 years of its existence has led to a collection that does not so much map the nineteenth-century mind as signal its odd amalgam of popular and scholarly investments. The Peabody’s collection effectively evades succinct description—at least, any kind of description that pretends to be coherent, that is not perforated by its stakes in local history, library history, book history. But more importantly, it suggests the degree to which accident and opportunity and prejudice and wealth and the changing winds of cataloguing rules shape any archive. Description, which should be the most fundamental tool of communication between librarians and researchers, turns out to be utterly elusive. Yet we do not know what to replace them with, these inadequate descriptions, these exercises in stilted and partial translation.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>2. The Researcher’s Progress.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>I am preparing for my class about women and nineteenth-century print culture, which meets in the Peabody; we have reached the part of the syllabus where we look at gift books and annuals. I want students to examine several examples of these literary miscellanies, offering some illustration of their variety, and I have a list of such items that I have used in the past. But since I also want to show the students new acquisitions, I need to refresh my list. I will start with “gift book” as a keyword in the online catalogue.</blockquote>\r\nIn place of perfect and commensurate description—not possible—what we have are cataloguing systems that indexically represent collections through data and metadata that are, as I have already suggested, historically marked and inevitably inconsistent. In the case of the Peabody, these records are further compromised: Dewey cards developed from a nineteenth-century print index do not offer Library of Congress subject terms or detailed tables of contents; they also frequently lack other kinds of information. [note number=\'37\']Many of the electronic records for Peabody books have been copy-cataloged, that is, developed from records for identical books in other libraries. But these records might also be incomplete or inconsistent, given that many are quite old. The expense of original cataloging prevents our staff from creating full, new records for every item in the Peabody’s collection of over 300,000 titles.[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'11\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-11-ddc-cards/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-400\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-400\" title=\"fig 11 ddc cards\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Dewey cards for “gift books.”[/note] My search for “gift book” will turn up bequests—the term “gift book” is often attached to these donations—and it will miss many of the nineteenth-century gift books and annuals in our collection whose records lack subject classifications, or whose subject classifications reference the book’s contents, not its format. For example, the 1848 Rough and Ready Annual: or, Military Souvenir published by Appleton’s has been assigned the subject “Mexican War, 1846-1848—Anecdotes.” [note number=\'38\']Rough and Ready Annual (New York: D. Appleton; Philadelphia: G.S. Appleton, 1848).[/note]\r\n\r\nThe problem of finding is perhaps only a sub-set of the problem of description, but I want to give it special attention because it introduces another variable: the physical space of the object. My search for gift books in the Peabody also entails the privilege of retrieving the books from the stacks. There are two search processes, the intellectual and the physical, that I must navigate. The intellectual search in this case requires a variety of keyword/date range combinations, and ultimately, recourse to my prepared bibliography—a holdover from pre-catalogue research methods. Now the second search begins.\r\n\r\nThe Rough and Ready Annual is at 973.62 A5121, in the “general history of North America; United States” category. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'12\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-12-rr/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-401\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-401\" title=\"fig 12 r&amp;r\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.[/note] This call number range is on the second floor, west side. Other items on my list are in very different parts of the library. Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them, edited by the temperance writer T. S. Arthur and published in London, has been given the call number 813 A7910 duodecimo—fourth floor east, in the “American literature in English, fiction” section. [note number=\'39\']Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them (London: Knight &amp; Co., [1857]). This title does not appear in at least one Arthur bibliography; see Donald A Koch, \"Timothy Shay Arthur,\" Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, ed. Joel Myerson (Detroit: Gale Research, 1979), from Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Feb. 2011. To check on this, I need Mitchell Sharpe Jr.’s A Bibliography of the Published Books of Timothy Shay Arthur (Atlanta: Emory University, 1954), a typewritten quarto at 012 A791S, but it seems to be missing.[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'13\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-13-orange/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-402\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-402\" title=\"fig 13 orange\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Orange Blossoms in the stacks.[/note] Arthur shows up again as co-editor of The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present, which has received more extensive description as it contains the first printing of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Siope.” [note number=\'40\']The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present (Baltimore: Bayly and Burns, [1838]).[/note] We have two copies of this very genteel little gift book, one at 808.83 B2175 (rhetoric &amp; collections of literature), and one at 810.8 C297 (American literature in English). The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons is in the rare book room at the south end of the third floor. [note number=\'41\']The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons (London: The Religious Tract Society, ca. 1850).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'14\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-14-rbr/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-403\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-403\" title=\"fig 14 rbr\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The rare book room.[/note] In this case, the book’s rarity has to do with a lovely fore-edge painting. It has been assigned to 820.8 N42017 (general books about literature). On the other end of the “rare” continuum is The Family Circle and Parlor Annual, volume 5 in a series, which is shelved up on the sixth floor with the periodicals at 051 F198 (serials in American English). [note number=\'42\']The Family Circle and Parlor Annual (New York: Comstock, 1847).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'15\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-15-parlor/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-404\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-404\" title=\"fig 15 parlor\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Parlor Annual in the stacks.[/note]\r\n\r\nI’ll fill out call slips for each book, stick the slips into red flags, and put the flags in an order that will help me chart a logical course through the stacks. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'16\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-16-slips/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-405\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-405\" title=\"fig 16 slips\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Call slips and flags.[/note] It’s easiest to start on the sixth floor and work one’s way down, picking up books along the way. Usually I find other interesting items as I go, so I carry a batch of blank call slips and extra flags. (On this occasion, for example, I find The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse; published in 1813 and inscribed by its owner in 1817, it pre-dates by several years the official beginning of the gift book phenomenon. It might be more of a “literary almanac.” [note number=\'43\']The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse (Philadelphia: David Hogan, 1813).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'17\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-17-new-reader/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-406\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-406\" title=\"fig 17 new reader\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Inscription in The New American Reader.[/note]) Usually I am also unable to locate at least one of the books I have set out to find. Most likely the book has been misshelved, so I’ll check the quartos and folios, which are shelved separately; then I’ll check the rare book room’s octavo, duodecimo and quarto shelving areas. It used to astonish me that books were still shelved by format in the Peabody, but it does save space. At the same time, this shelving system—along with the multiple distinct areas within the library where books may reside, eg the rare book room, the reference section, the genealogy books, the Limited Editions Club, and several discrete named collections—means that retrieving a few books can take quite a long time, as I traipse up and down the six floors of the library, thread through stacks, open secured doors with multiple keys, turn lights on and off, and maneuver a book truck in and out of a tiny service elevator built in the 1920s. By the end of the journey, the library and I will have exchanged dust; I’ll take on a few streaks of red rot, and the library will have taken in particles from my body as well.\r\n\r\nWhile the Peabody is unique, these conditions are not in the end very unusual. In terms of the intellectual search, the absence of “gift book” from many of the catalogue records is no less egregious than the absence of other information—the names of all the contributors; the subjects of the illustrations. The metadata is potentially infinite. The “gift book” only exists as a category because of scholars who teased out this cultural phenomenon; it would be very difficult to define its absolute borders. In terms of the physical search, the Peabody might be messier than, say, a rare book library that has assigned current LC call numbers to all its contents and houses them in compact shelving, but it exemplifies the general on-the-ground situation. As I wind my way through the Peabody stacks, I remember how much more difficult it is to gather research materials from several different institutions.\r\n\r\nThe fact is, for scholars who rely on archives, research is something you do only after you have already undertaken a rigorous search. It is the search that provides you with the foundational sense of your subject. But the search is rarely acknowledged or accredited; even the foot-soldier craft of bibliography, the link between “librarianship” and “scholarship,” has largely lost its scholarly status.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>3. An Architecture of Disctinction.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>A non-affiliate researcher contacts the Peabody about our H. L. Mencken collections. Since she will bring a couple of graduate students with her, I set up a group work space in one of the library alcoves where the three of them can share materials and talk without disturbing other readers. I pull the requested volumes with the help of some students and set the cart up within easy reach of the alcove. When the researchers arrive, I show them the Mencken collections on the ground floor. Then I lead them to their group work space and leave them, returning to the glassed-in office behind the reading room, the vantage point that allows me to monitor the otherwise empty reading room.</blockquote>\r\nIn “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” a team of Dutch sociologists investigates the library as a space that is strongly marked by situational norms—“knowledge-based beliefs about how to behave in particular situations that are shaped by social influence.” [note number=\'44\']Henk Aarts and Ap Dijksterhuis, “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84.1 (2003), 19.[/note] Their research leads them to argue, however, that such norms do not require direct social influences to be triggered; in fact, “the situation can activate mental representations of normative behaviors automatically. And once activated, these representations provide the knowledge necessary for guiding one’s own situationally appropriate behavior.” [note number=\'45\']Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 19.[/note] Physical environments do not necessarily prompt these behaviors; rather, the behavior “depend[s] on whether the environment is of immediate behavioral relevance.” [note number=\'46\']Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 20.[/note] Talking in a quiet voice in the library, a normative behavior, is only activated for those who plan to visit the library.\r\n\r\nTen years ago, when the research for this article was conducted, the “silence of the library” was still a widespread norm. While the situation is now often reversed—in our main campus library, we must designate specific quiet areas because otherwise a sociable undergraduate din would take over—the norm of silence does continue to preside at the Peabody. Because it is off campus, the Peabody is often attractively under-populated compared to the crowded main library; it is mostly used by advanced researchers and those who seek a quiet place to study. The large central open area catches and amplifies even the smallest noises. The shelf-lined alcoves on either side of this central area offer the appearance of privacy, but in fact are little echo chambers. Visitors immediately detect these acoustics, and—except for the periodic tour groups—most spend their time in the Peabody in silence. But it is not just the physics of sound that shape behaviors here, as the Dutch researchers show; the social expectations of the space prefigure those behaviors.\r\n\r\nIn setting up a group work space for the Mencken researchers, I have quite deliberately contravened the usual norm of silence. Clearly, I am not inviting them to shout, and by putting them in an alcove in back, I have taken measures to protect any quiet-seeking visitors who might arrive. But in accordance with new ideas about the use of library space, my colleagues and I have decided that we must accommodate group study even if it might occasionally disrupt the silence desired by others. As it happens, the Mencken researchers’ conversation is eventually interrupted by a tour group, and the two activities play out side by side.\r\n\r\nI must admit that at moments I have mixed feelings about the tour groups and even the study cohorts. While my pedagogical instincts tend towards cheerful hub-bub, there is a part of me that is still in awe of the sanctuary-like atmosphere of the Peabody. John Morris called the library a “cathedral of books,” and clearly that’s what architect Edmund G. Lind had in mind. The central area with its grand skylight and the alcoves on its sides is like a nave bordered with chapels. Lind didn’t need a psychological study of environment-based situational norms to tell him that he might activate different behaviors within his building. The great central space inspires reverence—your eye is drawn to the skylight the way it would be drawn to the rose windows of Chartres, and on its way up catches row upon solemn row of books stowed behind gilded railings, a testament to the accumulated wisdom of the ages. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'18\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-18-skylight/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-407\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-407\" title=\"fig 18 skylight\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"448\" /></a>The skylight in the George Peabody Library.[/note] But step into an alcove, especially on the ground floor where each is filled with an immense wooden table, and you instantly feel something else, something no less grand but more human. The alcoves are study-sized, and once you sit down at one of those dark, gleaming, broad tables, it is like you are the master of your own private library. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'19\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-19-alcove/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-408\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-408\" title=\"fig 19 alcove\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Alcove in the George Peabody Library.[/note]\r\n\r\nIronically, the Peabody’s architecture was out-dated by the time it was completed. With the professionalization of librarianship and the evolution of library science in the late nineteenth century, librarians like William Frederick Poole advocated for a functional rather than decorative design of interior library space. [note number=\'47\']See William Frederick Poole, Remarks on Library Construction (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1884).[/note] Moreover, the actual use of space in the Peabody in the late nineteenth century was at odds with its symbolic appeal. The main library was known as the “stack room”; readers were seated in a comparatively plain reading room on the other side of the main doors. In this arrangement, the librarians reigned inside the gorgeous “cathedral of books,” but the building’s potential to civilize the masses was lost.\r\n\r\nNow, of course, we do not send readers outside. Inside the “stack room,” we explicitly call visitors’ attention to its beauty to explain the connections between the library’s architecture and its collections—how both speak eloquently of Victorian values. At the same time, we who staff the library have relegated ourselves to its periphery. We work in the glassed-in room at one end that serves as a monitoring point and occasional classroom; the official “librarian’s office” in one corner—its luxurious proportions suggesting something like a sacristy and something like a robber baron’s lair—is now shared work-space stuffed with several desks and laden book trucks. There is another monitoring station near the main doors. I often do my work at the photography station, in the back of one of the alcoves [note type=\'figure\' number=\'20\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-20-station/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-409\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-409\" title=\"fig 20 station\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Photography station in the George Peabody Library.[/note]. It offers some privacy but is close enough to the central reading tables to be accessible to readers.\r\n\r\nThe space of the Peabody initiates other situational behaviors besides the norm of silence, and our work-station arrangements testify to this. The spatial re-centralizing of readers and marginalization of staff is not merely practical; it is a reflection of the modern office of librarianship. We are there to be of service, in a para-textual position. Consequently, our work should be out of sight; it should be separate from and secondary to the work that readers do. Our locations call upon us, in other words, to support the scholar’s effort to hide the “seams of [her] findings” by hiding the ways we contribute to that work—by the ways we sometimes do that work.\r\n\r\nI think about these complications as I escort the Mencken researchers to their table and walk back to the glassed-in office, where there is nothing pressing for me to do. I’d rather spend more time talking with them. I’d like to learn about their research and introduce them to some underappreciated parts of the collection. I’d like to share with them what I learned curating an exhibition of Mencken-related magazines and writing about one of those magazines. But I don’t want to get in their way; it’s likely that they are ready to get on with work that they don’t see as connected to mine. The professional norms of the archive are strong, and although I know how to talk about my research in many contexts—in presentations, interviews, hotel elevators—I haven’t figured out how to mix my scholarly role with the curatorial role I am supposed to play here, in the Peabody. In the end, I say nothing. Professional segregation is another kind of silence in the library.\r\n\r\nWe cannot change the archaeological record beneath our feet, but we can rearrange the fossils we dig up to create new narratives. We can tell different kinds of archive stories, including the story of what research in the archive was and is. Is it too idealistic to expect that dissolving the entrenched fantasies about archival research will make room for new methods? Is it naïve to imagine a space that, in putting into practice the archival turn’s preliminary insights about disciplinary and disorder, can support experimentation, facilitate connection across professions and disciplines, and enable new discoveries?','Disciplinarity and Disorder','','inherit','open','open','','2199-revision-29','','','2013-06-27 22:08:10','2013-06-27 22:08:10','',2199,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/2199-revision-29/',0,'revision','',0),(5050,10,'2013-07-10 06:30:10','2013-07-10 06:30:10','The primal scene of archival research takes place in a dreary reading room. A researcher sits at her table, inert. An archivist enters, pushing a cart that bears a dozen dusty gray boxes. (See Figure 1.)\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ykY6moIaDE?rel=0\" height=\"250\" width=\"333\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe>\r\nA staged archival encounter.\r\n\r\nThe archivist unhinges a box, removes a numbered file folder and, placing it at the researcher’s elbow, steps back. The researcher stirs, then sits upright with a mechanical jolt. She turns sharply in the direction of the folder, flips it open and cocks her head towards the flimsy leaves inside; now she is reading. (Zoom in on the eyes as they click into focus.) Now she is reading, and now she truly comes alive; she bends towards the papers, taps her forehead in thought. A sheaf of blank paper and a pencil appear on her table, and she begins taking notes. Her fingers fly—and soon, so do the pages she is writing upon. Caught up in eddies of excitement, they swoop to the ceiling and around the room and down to the floor, where they fall together into perfect piles. Bindings sprout from the outer strata; the pages sew themselves into bright, tight, hard-cover books. These the archivist gathers up and places on the shelves that line the room, next to other books and gray boxes.\r\n\r\nI may have it backwards: in other versions of the fantasy, it is the archive that is first animated by the presence of the researcher, a Dr. Coppelius who waves a pencil and sets the dusty boxes to dancing. But either way, the archival imaginary posits a symbiotic relationship between researcher and source, a photogenic pas de deux that leads to a finished scholarly product. This work, in turn, enters the archive for the next generation of researchers; it might even be taken apart again so that its secret ingredients (notes, drafts, letters) can themselves be served up in a series of boxes. Such a strangely private form of publication it creates, the coupling of researcher and source.\r\n\r\nWhat Freudian trauma results from witnessing this sight? Only the harm that myth inflicts. This primal scene is a fiction, a dream of perfect union between researcher and source that ignores, first of all, the full cast of characters. What about the archivist, who is rendered invisible? What about all those within and without the archive, upon whose labor—acquiring, preserving, organizing, reading, cataloging, describing, interpreting, analyzing, debating, teaching, writing, editing, digitizing, referencing and publishing—the current project depends? More a barn dance than a pas de deux: an archival encounter is an enactment of social authorship long before the researcher enters the room. ((See Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) on the idea of social authorship, which could be described as “the dialectic between the historically located individual author and the historically developed institutions of literary production” that help create a work, e.g., printers, publishers, editors and readers (81).))\r\n\r\nBut even a barn dance is much too mannered a metaphor. The sketch above misleads us more generally about the experience on the ground. Doing time in an archive is often tedious, uncomfortable and bewildering. For librarians, there is the struggle to promote and simultaneously protect what you have; the difficulty of fitting unruly materials into arrangements and workflows; and worries about space and time—where to put it all, how to address your backlog. For researchers, there is the struggle to locate the archives you need and what matters to you inside them; the uncertainty created by unruly data; and worries about time and space— how to access what you need during your research trip, how to record and organize the information you gather. At both ends, the archival encounter is counter-cinematic and erratic, days of monotonous sifting and dead-ends punctuated by one or two, or maybe zero, hidden moments of vivid, peculiar joy.\r\n\r\nSo archival research does not fulfill its ideal outline. So what? Who cares? Why dredge up the fantasy? Because the fantasy continues to structure our archival encounters—what we expect and undertake in the reading room, what we allow it to mean. Twenty years ago, Alice Kaplan observed that “conventional academic discourse requires that when you write up the results of your archival work, you tell a story about what you found, but not about how you found it. The less the seams of your findings show, the better your discoveries lend themselves to use by others… tell[ing] these stories breaks their spell and violates the spirit of the archives.” ((Alice Yaeger Kaplan, “Working in the Archives,” Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 103-116; 103, 107.)) With a few word changes, the same could be said about what counts as professional archivist discourse: the impersonal, neutral genre of the finding aid, for example, should say what is in a collection, but should not discuss what is confusing or missing in it, or the problems it posed in processing. ((See, for example, James M. O’Toole and Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006).)) Despite the growing recognition that this sequestration is never completely possible—that the material conditions and social relations of the archive shape the work we do in it—that work continues to be represented in professional and scholarly publications as if it is. Despite the recent call to move to the fore “the backstage of the archives—how they are constructed, policed, experienced, and manipulated” in order to support historiography “not merely [as] a project of fact-retrieval” but as “a set of complex processes of selection, interpretation, and even creative invention,” the “backstage” stays in the background. ((Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 7-8.)) Antoinette Burton may be correct that “many if not most historians operate under the assumption that history is a highly interpretive act,” but this belief is not yet reflected in the archival encounter: the ways that researchers (not just historians) and librarians report their experiences with primary sources; the ways that librarians and researchers work together; the ways librarians and researchers regard the involvement of “non specialists.” ((Burton, 8. Burton notes that “whether historians concede or fully countenance the impact of such contingencies on their work is another question. They rarely speak of them, and even more rarely do they do so in print” (8). Her books recuperates some of those archive stories but this effort, I’ll suggest below, is hampered by other kinds of obligations.)) While the advent of digitization and electronic resource sharing has revolutionized the research landscape, making primary sources public in unprecedented ways, there remains in the archive a habitus of secret knowledge—the “spell” that Kaplan is loathe to break. This is not necessarily intentional. It is rather the effect of layering recent shifts in technology, theory and professional definition onto older foundations: petrified conditions, relations, expectations and systems that continue to operate in part through the enduring power of fantasies about research. What we have in the archive is a stratified groundwork that still governs our archival encounters.\r\n\r\nBut, you will object, the archive has already changed. Now we have the “archival turn”—the scholarly interest in the archive not just as a source of evidence but as an epistemological mode. Surely, this attention to the constructedness of the archive has led to a revealing reconsideration of what actually goes on inside an archive; surely, as a result, those archaic fantasies have diminished. Have they? In what follows, I begin by unearthing one stratum of the archival turn, the decade of the 1990s, as represented by three texts: Kaplan’s essay mentioned above, “Working in the Archives” (1990)\r\n\r\n[gallery ids=\"373,372,369\"]\r\n\r\nA cross-examination of these three texts reveals a pattern of interests, a set of efforts to defy customary practices—but only, it turns out, “in theory.” While certain practices are challenged in these texts, they leave mostly intact the older strata of archival research fantasies and conventions. Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman do not dislodge the forces that organize the actual archival encounter.\r\n\r\nHow does this happen? Why is practice so stubborn? We need another take on archival practice: not practice in theory, but practice in action; not the 1990s, but now; not in terms of textual patterns, but in terms that suit the subject: the terms of the archival encounter itself, and the eccentric, anachronistic and even monotonous experience it generates. My second look at practice will take the form of a series of vignettes about a real-life archive, the George Peabody Library in Baltimore. While this narrative structure may seem to recreate the division of labor between theory and practice, my hope is that—by giving practice the last word—we’ll be in a better position to synthesize the two.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>I. “The library doubles as a detective’s office.” ((Kaplan, 114.))</strong>\r\n\r\nThe archival turn could be dated to the founding of “scientific” history in the mid-nineteenth century, or to the development a century later of the quantitative methods of the Annales School, or to other evidence-based movements in the history of history, but what is generally meant by this phrase corresponds with the formation of cultural studies and the use of the archive as a conceptual category. That is, the archival turn has to do with the notion of the “figuration” of the archive, a parallel decline in its empirical authority and a related expansion of its relevance within domains that are not exclusively historiographic, like art, literary criticism, textual studies, media studies and information studies. ((See the use of the term in, for example, Carolyn Hamilton et al, eds., Refiguring the Archive (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), Cheryl Simon, ed., Following the Archival Turn: Photography, the Museum, and the Archive, special issue of Visual Resources: A Journal of Documentation 18.2 (June 2002), and Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). This turn is partially construed as a “move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject,” but also by the earlier metaphorical interest in “the archive” that goes back to the 1980s (Stoler, 44-45) and by Foucauldian descriptions of archives as “‘monuments to particular configurations of power” (Hamilton, qtd. in Burton, 6).)) But it is not irrelevant that a devotion to archival methods precedes by many decades contemporary theories of the archive; if the archival turn lacks a precise origin, this (we will see) is completely in keeping with its own preoccupations.\r\n\r\nKaplan therefore represents in some ways an arbitrary beginning for this cross-examination—clearly the archive as a conceptual category predates 1990—but her article does initiate something new: the recognition that there is something called an “archive story” that must remain hidden in order for the official “results” to function authoritatively. In admitting this bit of professional legerdemain, and in telling her own archive story in a prestigious scholarly journal, Kaplan not only commits the violation she prohibits but also contradicts it. Through its publication, Kaplan’s own archive story is elevated to the status of “results”—a kind of research that shadows conventional academic discourse. Indeed, Kaplan notes, such “fables” of research “can be analyzed like a text,” a “mixed up genre” that combines the “redemptive detective fiction” with the epic and the dime novel. ((Kaplan, 106, 107.))\r\n\r\nKaplan’s archive story thus marks a distinctive moment in the archival turn—one which gained its most prominent authorization in 1994, with a paper that Jacques Derrida delivered (in English) to a conference sponsored by the Freud Museum, the Courtauld Institute and the Société International d’Histoire de la Psychiatrie et de la Psychoanalyse. Called initially “The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression,” the lecture was revised and published in 1995 as Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne in French; the published English version echoed the French publication with its 1995 title Archive Fever. As Carolyn Steedman points out in Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, however, this work that has been assigned a seminal status in archival studies “for the main part… is not about archives at all, but is rather a sustained contemplation of a work of history, of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (1991),” itself a sustained contemplation of Moses and Monotheism—which (according to Steedman) Yerushalmi examines through Freud’s description of the work as a “‘historical novel,’ or a kind of historical story,” undertaken “in order to understand the period of baroque anti-semitism through which he was living.” ((Steedman, 3.))\r\n\r\nDizzy yet? Let’s undertake a more careful reading of this splatter pattern of intra-references—or, to stick with the archaeological metaphor, let’s call them groups of potsherds buried in the 1990s layer of the “archival turn.” Digging down to reassemble them reveals a set of interests with special implications for archival practice.\r\n\r\nThe most prominent group of sherds to note are the fragments of disciplinarity: the inter-, multi- or perhaps simply anti-disciplinarity of the texts, authors and audiences caught up in these three archival addresses. Kaplan, an American scholar of French literature, calls the post-theory exchange between literature and history a “cross-pollination of desire between historians and literary critics” undertaken “with the curiosity and energetic passion of collectors.” ((Kaplan, 107-108.)) Steedman, a British historian, performs this cross-pollinating process without comment: her epigraph to Dust is from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, one chapter treats George Eliot’s Middlemarch in depth… in fact, almost every chapter depends on a literary text. ((Another chapter invokes Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel Mary Barton, a third is anchored by W. H. Auden’s poem “Homage to Clio,” and a fourth finds its most eloquent examples in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.)) Derrida, a French philosopher, produced a work that has been exceptionally mobile across disciplines, forms, languages and professional domains. He gave his initial talk to an audience drawing on three different kinds of institutions; Mal d’Archive was published in book form in both French and English, but also made an intermediate appearance as an essay in the journal diacritics. All of these texts, it seems, respond to the provocations of the archive—to the materials and circumstances of discovery—rather than to the disciplinary distinctions that arguably divide the archive from itself.\r\n\r\nArchive Fever has become a founding document even though, as Steedman notes in the very beginning of her book, many in Derrida’s audience “knew the ‘archival turn’ to be [already] well underway” at the time of his talk. ((Steedman, 2.)) As it happens—and this is the second group of sherds I see—these three essays have in common an investment in or a problem with origins, especially with the failure of origins. Derrida, for example, defines archive fever as a kind of Freudian death drive—a drive to fix and preserve which at the same time “works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own ‘proper’ traces… [it] is above all anarchivic, one could say, or archiviolithic… the archive always works, and a priori, against itself.” ((Derrida, 14.)) If the archival impulse is driven to destroy its own work, then the question of origins ultimately point to the larger question of disorder. The disorder of origins makes frequent appearances in the essay but one example will make the point—in the “Preamble” where he recounts how he titled the talk that he had not yet written and was to give at the Freud Museum. The “Preamble” starts with his reflections on the word “impression,” which has several simultaneous registers of meaning for him. One of these is the “scriptural or typographic” register: that of the graphic impression that marks a substrate. In English, “impression” is phonetically related to “repression” and “suppression,” key words in the Freudian vocabulary, translated respectively from the German Verdrängung and Unterdrückung. English, that is, retains the rhyming relationship of the two German terms, and “impression” in this company comes to have a vaguely Freudian meaning as well. But in French, Verdrängung is “refoulement,” which means something more like expulsion, a driving away. The Freudian sense of the French word “répression” has been reserved for Unterdrückung. So English “repression” defines a phenomenon that must be distinguished from the French “répression.” These translational shifts “directly concern the structures of archivization,” Derrida says, “because they touch on the topic differences and thus on the location of the substrates of traces\" (Derrida, 23). In other words, how do you classify concepts whose meanings shift across languages? Where do you store them in a disciplinary grammar—or in an archive? How do these asymmetrical linguistic structures shape the establishment and extension of a new science? For Derrida, the difference between “repression” and “répression” is “enough to disrupt the tranquil landscape of all historical knowledge, of all historiography, and even of all self-consistent ‘scholarship’” ((Derrida, 23.))\r\n\r\nOrigin failure appears both as deliberate performance and as unintentional oversight in these essays. Derrida stages his own inability to get past “go”; with an introductory section, and subsequent sections sub-titled “Exergue,” “Preamble,” “Foreword,” his essay functions, Steedman notes, like a “primer offering instruction in the principle of deferral.” ((A short notice called “Priere d’inserer,” published only in the French book version, carried the bulk of an argument for which there was no room in the lecture. Steedman, 7.)) For all her insight into Derrida’s titling adventures, however, Steedman’s title is marked by its own origin aporia. While her first chapter is devoted to Archive Fever—a “let’s begin at the beginning” homage to the seminal text—her book’s title, Dust, seems more indebted to the last sentence of Kaplan’s essay, published five years before Derrida’s: “Usually there is no mother lode, no original manuscript to be retrieved—the gold is all in the dust.” ((Kaplan, 116.)) Kaplan, however, is never mentioned. ((Kaplan also begins her essay with a brief consideration of the “arche,” the Greek and Latin term for the public records office, which is a major starting point for Derrida. Is he borrowing from her, or is she borrowing from him, given that this sort of etymological investigation was an established signature of Deconstruction?))\r\n\r\nKaplan, for her part, unravels her own archive story. She gives us a kind of “whodunit”—her search for the ephemeral sources of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s anti-semitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937). She uses this account to exemplify her effort to “move through the archival process and recover some of the stories that get deleted in the final scholarly form.” ((Kaplan, 104. For this reason, perhaps, Kaplan never reveals what she ultimately discovers in her successful search for Celine’s sources. In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether her pre-emptive and truncated treatment of her archive story is deliberate or not. Is this treatment meant to indirectly support her official claim about “results”? Or does the presence of the archive story suggest that telling it is an impulse she can’t quite control? Thanks, Lauren Coats, for helping tease this problem out.)) These beginnings are preemptively struck out, however, by what seems to be her main claim: “the passion of the archives must finally be used to eradicate all personal stories in the interests of the dry archival report, fit for a public.” ((Kaplan, 103.)) Only in the “para-text”—a preface, for example—can the archive story appear without “interrupt[ing] or complicat[ing] the narrative so much that no results could ever be understood or perceived.” ((Kaplan, 104.)) Despite this unequivocal assertion, the personal “whodunit” prevails in her essay, especially in the final section set in the Centre du documentation juive contemporain (CDJC). It is this library, where Kaplan solves the mystery of Céline’s sources, that “doubles as a detective’s office.”\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_423\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"333\"]<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-5-cdjc-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-423\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-423\" title=\"fig 5 cdjc\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1-333x250.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a> Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhile Kaplan’s research mystery resolves neatly, the truth about archives is that they are full of gaps, mistakes and excesses: in the words of one of the CDJC librarians, “‘ici on trouve tout’—there’s some of everything here”—but not, one could add, all of anything. ((Kaplan, 115.)) Kaplan’s essay ends by nullifying both her detective story success and her “dry archival report,” by recognizing the disorder on which both of these narratives are unsteadily perched: “The archive is constituted by these errors, these pieces out of place, which are then reintegrated into a story of some kind.” ((Kaplan, 115.)) “A story of some kind”? So much for “results.”\r\n\r\nKaplan sets us up to perceive one final potsherd pattern common to these three essays. If origin-less disorder is the order of the archive, it is a disorder that is generated out of human loss—a disorder that joins the body and the material world. The archive is always predicated on historical violence of some sort, whatever is censored, erased, excluded, trumped up, used up, misplaced, conquered, killed. Moreover, the archival categories that mark both the visible victories and hidden defeats do not stay within their walls; the archive is both a repository of existing schemas and a means of perpetuating them in the world beyond. While we might usually think of this disciplinary activity as a pact between the archive and its political authors, Steedman makes it clear that the dilemmas of order shape the archival body in many ways. For example, she takes literally the provocation of Derrida’s title Archive Fever to investigate the illness that researchers contract on the penultimate day of their trip to the archive: prompted by the anxiety of the task that remains unfinished, they end their research with night-sweats and head-aches. But what seems like a strangely specific malady is transformed by Steedman into a far-reaching social symptom: by relating the researcher’s “archive fever” to the terrible diseases suffered by tanners, skinners and other workers in the trades associated with paper and leather, Steedman expands our sense of who is in the archive—the bodies whose specialized labors populate our libraries with books, the many kinds of expertise the archive consumes.\r\n\r\nFor Derrida, the relation between the material archive and its human architects focuses on one kind of “graphic mark,” a particular “private inscription”: circumcision as the archival signature that is also the signature of patrimoine, with Freud’s relationship to his father as his main example. ((Derrida, 19.)) It is perhaps not a coincidence that the body in question in both Kaplan’s and Derrida’s archive is Jewish, for that is a body that has come to symbolize the destructive power of classificatory regimes. Despite her contention that the private passions motivating research must be kept secret, Kaplan is fascinated by the “missing person stories” at the CDJC: by the “quantity of people who are there for personal reasons,” the survivors of occupation or deportation or camps, or their descendants, quietly looking up their lost ones or noisily dropping off their memoirs. ((Kaplan, 113.)) This disorganized crowd of dead and living bodies tries to meet up with an equally disorganized crowd of materials—individual letters, trial transcripts, pamphlets, newspapers, first-person accounts, books, photographs, lists. The monumental task of match-making, the librarians’ work, is never complete. More papers are always generated or declassified or discovered, different human questions and needs emerge. The tidy choreography of the research fantasy, where the detective always finds her man, is not so much in evidence; what we have instead is corpora in excess of existing categories.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\nKaplan, Derrida and Steedman open up the archival body. They show us how paper meets the press of flesh; they make us feel just how intimate it is. [note number=\'26\']This interest in the corporeal dimensions and effects of order, its human and non-human components, has in common with their other gestures—an experimental attitude towards conventional disciplinarity and attention to the priority of disorder—the circumstances of the academic humanities in the 1990s. Since the archival turn came out of the ascent of cultural studies and allied intrigues in the 1970s and ‘80s, the circles in the Venn diagram of these ventures will necessarily overlap. We could also say that the archive took off when it did precisely because it made a clever new container for these preoccupations, thick in the humanities atmosphere at the time, where they were distilled and united. [/note] But for all their revelations about the limits of discipline and the multiplicities of disorder in the archive, these texts do not disclose the specific methods of engagement that led to their existence. While Kaplan offers up her own archival victory and outlines several other such stories, she still insists on their marginalization. [note number=\'27\']“Were the story of how you got the story really to be told inside the book, it would interrupt or complicate the narrative so much that no results could be understood or even perceived. Every story of success in the archives is emotionally charged, for only the most extreme emotions can drive people to the drudgery, to the discomfort, of sitting and sifting through dog-eared documents, manuscripts, microfilms. To reveal those emotions would not only gum up the narrative, it would threaten its credibility, by showing on what thin strands of coincidence, accident, or on what unfair forms of friendship, ownership, geographical proximity, the discoveries were based” (Kaplan, 104).[/note] If these texts are not concerned with actual practices in the archive or changes in its methodologies, what do they tell us?\r\n\r\nFirst, they suggest one reason for the perpetuation of myths about the archive. While Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman are eager to show how archival materials do not conform to disciplinary distinctions—an enthusiasm related to other disruptive tendencies in late twentieth-century humanist scholarship –they seem less cognizant of a related phenomenon: the archive does not obey strict professional divisions, either. In Kaplan’s library-as-detective’s-office metaphor, the scholar is the detective, but does the “Eureka” moment belong only to the scholar who pieces together a narrative? What about the people who prepared those pieces? The archivist is still missing in action. Likewise, these essays do not dwell on missing boxes, illegible papers, neglected citations. There are no descriptions of archival slogging, no admissions that some materials failed to be relevant. And of course, there are no prescriptions for a different order. It is not the main aim of Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman to effect an evolution of practice; archival turnistas are not interested in disorder in order to re-order. But it is worth remembering that it is not in their professional interest as scholars to make their practices more transparent.\r\n\r\nSecondly, along the same lines, these texts inform us of the duplicity of speculative practices that reveal but cannot live out the instability of their archival mandates. Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman are put into the position of saying, “Yes, the archive is biased, idiosyncratic and treacherous—but the observations I draw from it are flawless.” [note number=\'28\']Derrida, unlike Kaplan and Steedman, makes no claims to work inside an actual archive, unless we consider Yerushalmi’s book as a kind of archive. But the fact that the essay was written self-consciously for presentation at the Freud Museum suggests that it was made out of an archive indirectly—in its construction, if not in its contents. [/note]\r\n\r\nFinally, these texts suggest why archival studies that attempt to be explicit about the messy nature of the archive have become instead “archive studies.” In more recent works like Refiguring the Archive (2002), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (2005) and Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009), the archive appears as a subject in its own right. Although the archival scenarios that are put into play in each of these books incorporate different disciplines—art, history, anthropology, literature, post-colonial studies—they have essentially created a new discipline. “Archive studies” is something we might, in the taxonomy of disciplines, see as the love-child of cultural studies, history and archival methodology. Moreover, this new discipline has in common with other humanities disciplines a complete blindness about its professional investments; it does not register much awareness of the professional investments of librarians, archivists, curators and “non-specialists,” or invite insights from those perspectives. Perhaps this is inevitably what happens when academics must give legitimacy to something new, which in turn reflects the pressures of scholarly communication: a topic must be delineated in conventional terms in order to merit publication. [note number=\'29\']Perhaps this is also the moment to ask why we—I—have been using the term “archive” all along, with its statist resonances, rather than the term “collection,” which has institutional but also personal resonances. Does “archive” bring us closer to recognizably “serious scholarship”?[/note] But it is also true that in these more recent books, which openly investigate the archive’s power-politics, the disorderly drift of the archive and its hybrid corporeality have mostly been bent towards a particular narrative about the archive as an agent of history rather than as a set of ongoing practices. It is as if the historical archive has been assembled in ways that reflect and reiterate power relations, but the contemporary archive has not; it is as if the researcher’s own research travails remain a transparent layer over the body of work that it constructs. [note number=\'30\']Of course, this is precisely what Derrida meant about the “death drive” of the archival impulse. Archive Stories is something of an exception; researchers speak openly here about themselves as researchers. It is interesting, however, that this book—like Steedman’s—doesn’t cite Kaplan’s essay as a precursor text despite the clear titular link.[/note]\r\n\r\nPerhaps it would also be fair to note that, if archival studies are now being formulated as an interdisciplinary discipline called “archive studies,” this might be just another stage in the turn. It might be that what comes next reconfigures the premise of disciplinarity and the promise of disorder, with a different approach to the human/non-human interactions that the archive documents and realizes: a more diffuse and multi-vocal set of practices in place of a new field. One way to imagine this approach would be to fully embrace Kaplan’s idea of the archive story as an account of what one hoped for, looked for and found, what one did and did not do, in the archive—an account loosed from the quarantine she advocates. Some very basic genre precedents for the archive story do exist; the bibliographic essay and the methodology statement, for example, have played an important role in many disciplines in the past and still do in some. Instead of a para-textual nod towards that archive story (in Kaplan’s sense), why not create a parallel text written collaboratively by the researcher(s) and the librarian(s), or by one person acting in both professional capacities, that runs alongside the official “results”? Or in a set of expanded notes that address not just the “what” and “where” but the “how” and “why” of sources, which are lifted from their small-type, bottom-of-page basement up into the light? Or—to add yet another layer—parallel texts that also offer room for exchange with other researchers, archivists and even interested “non specialists,” like collectors, bibliophiles and fans?\r\n\r\nIf it is hasn’t been clear already that I have scrupulously avoided so far the other kind of archive, the digital archive, it will be now. What I am imagining would be far too complicated to produce or consult in print, but would not be at all difficult to organize as a digital object—as an archive in its own right. By avoiding the digital archive up to this point, I have also finessed the fact that our current archival research methods are completely reliant on the digital archive, along with the development of online research tools and electronic instruments of data discovery and organization. Those conditions probably bear the most responsibility for making the archive visible as something that warranted a “turn” in the first place. Even Derrida refers in each version of Archive Fever to the computer on which he is currently composing, predicting that email will not only totally transform the archive as he knows it, but will make his own essay obsolete.\r\n\r\nIn short, we already have in place both the theory and the media that will make it possible to enact a radical new archival practice. We have in place what we need to integrate the archive story into the archive itself, while making it visible as a new form of “results.”\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>II. The library doubles as a librarian’s office.</strong>\r\n\r\nI could end here, with a triumphant firing of the starter pistol and a rousing cheer. But that would be a bit disingenuous, given that the starter pistol for both the archival turn and the academic use of the internet actually went off decades ago. So the question remains, what stands in the way of the practical enactment of the archival turn’s speculative insights? I’d like to engage this question by following Kaplan’s example (but not her main claim): through some archive story-telling about the George Peabody Library. These three vignettes, identified as “typical” through conversations with my colleague Paul Espinosa, illustrate the intractable formations that present-day archival encounters come up against.\r\n\r\n<strong>1. The Perils of Description.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>A group of Russian speakers visits the Peabody Library. The dozen men and women sit down around the screen that Paul has set up. He narrates a brief slide-show about the Peabody’s history, then leads them to a table where a dozen books from the collection have been laid out in cradles. He tells them about each book: what it is, why it is interesting. Each phrase of his presentation is painstakingly translated by the group’s leader into Russian.</blockquote>\r\nWhen academic and community groups visit the Peabody, my colleagues and I draw upon a standard tour-guide’s repertoire to describe it. We explain that George Peabody was a tradesman cum financier cum philanthropist who decided in 1857 that Baltimore needed a cultural institution to support the arts and learning. We talk about the evolution of the Peabody Institute, the four-part athenaeum that resulted, with its art gallery, lecture series, conservatory and free, public, non-circulating library. We discuss the model of philanthropy that George Peabody initiated and its wide-ranging influence. We point out the signal features of the awe-inspiring architecture of the current library, built to accommodate a rapidly growing collection in 1878. But when it comes to the library itself, as a collection, it is hard to know what to say. How to accurately translate the library’s holdings into a succinct and memorable statement that conveys an appropriate level of detail to different audiences? While it poses specific challenges, the Peabody also exemplifies more general problems of collection description.\r\n\r\nWe do not lack evidence for the evolving contents of the Peabody. We have the two-volume printed list of “desiderata” drawn up by the Peabody’s first librarian, John G. Morris. [note number=\'31\']Alphabetical Catalogue of Books to be Purchased for the Library of the Peabody Institute, Baltimore, Vols. 1 and 2 (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1861, 1863).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'6\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-6-alpha-index-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-395\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-395\" title=\"fig 6 alpha index\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1-336x484.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"484\" /></a>Alphabetical index from Alphabetical Catalouge (“desiderata”).[/note] We have the collections register for several decades’-worth of acquisitions, recording bibliographic information and accession numbers that can still be found on the inside front end papers of many of the books in the collection. We have the librarians’ annual reports to the library trustees. [note number=\'32\']The Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore: The Founder’s Letters and the Papers Relating to its Dedication and History, Up to the 1st January, 1868 (Baltimore: William K. Boyle, 1868); and subsequent Annual Reports, 1869, etc.[/note] We have the library’s first printed catalogue, an unsurpassed achievement when first published in 1883, which listed 100,000 volumes by author and title. [note number=\'33\']Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Vols. 1-5 (Baltimore: Isaac Friedenwald, 1883; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, [1961?]; also on googlebooks), and Second Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Including the Additions Made Since 1882, Vols. 1-8 (Baltimore: Deutsch Lithographic and Printing, 1896; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, 1961).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'7\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-7-print-cat/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-396\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-396\" title=\"fig 7 print cat\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).[/note] We have the cards from the Dewey decimal system card catalogue, which replaced the printed catalogue in the 1910s. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'8\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-8-card-cat/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-397\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-397\" title=\"fig 8 card cat\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"448\" /></a>One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.[/note] Now, of course, the library’s collections are represented in an online catalogue that integrates them with other collections in the Hopkins library system.\r\n\r\nThese markers of the collection, however, fail to satisfy some contemporary research queries for reasons that are both practical and philosophical. The transfer of the printed index, organized by author, to the Dewey decimal system, organized by topic, represented a major epistemological shift that facilitated browsing by subject category. But of course, those categories are embedded in historically-bound notions about the subjects and structures of knowledge: Dewey was invented in the 1870s, and the 22 revisions it has undergone since then cannot overcome its essential organizational distortions. For example, the literature range—the 800s—offers only 10% of its categorical space to literatures in languages other than English, Germanic and Romance languages, Greek and Latin.\r\n\r\nIn the case of the Peabody, the Dewey arrangements overlay even older systems of knowledge hierarchy. Should we continue to offer, for example, a description of the Peabody’s “voyages and travels” books? This category represents a Renaissance schematic that was still in service in the mid-nineteenth century; while actual “voyages and travels” were extended by colonial ventures, the category was eventually disbanded. Dewey combined it with geography to make a sub-category of “history.” In keeping active the old-fashioned phrase “voyages and travels,” we are participating in a centuries-long project of euphemism about the material aims and actual activities of colonialism; we are privileging an early phase of the Peabody’s evolution over later phases; we may even be confusing modern researchers. And yet, as one of the topics in Morris’s “desiderata,” a considerable portion of the Peabody’s collection was acquired with the aim of fleshing out that descriptor. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'9\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-9-index-detail/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-398\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-398\" title=\"fig 9 index detail\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail-336x274.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"274\" /></a>Detail of subject index from Alphabetical Catalouge No. 2 (“desiderata”).[/note]\r\n\r\nYet another classificatory dilemma is expressed by George Peabody’s original statement of the library’s purpose: that it “be furnished in every department of knowledge, with the most approved literature… It should consist on the best works on every subject… to satisfy the researches of students who may be engaged in the pursuit of knowledge not ordinarily attainable in the private libraries of the country.” [note number=\'34\']“Letters from George Peabody, Esq.: Baltimore, February 12th, 1857,” in Founder’s Letters, 7.[/note] The Peabody was founded as a cultural institution for the people of Baltimore, but from the first, this democratic ambition was in conflict with the intellectual aspirations of the first librarians and their desire to facilitate civic “self-improvement.” Morris (a doctor of divinity), his successor Nathaniel Holmes Morison (a schoolmaster and poet), and Morison’s assistant and successor Philip Uhler (who had trained as an entomologist) were all devoted to the nineteenth-century idea of the scholar-librarian. Morison wrote in one annual report that “Education always proceeds from the above downward, from the best to the common minds, from the leaders of the people to the people themselves. Furnish... the foundations of intelligence and thought, and they will... stimulate and improve the whole community.\" [note number=\'35\']Qtd. in Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, “PIB Ref. Library. 8-Morison\'s Philosophy of Excellence,” in George Peabody (1795-1869): A-Z Handbook of the Massachusetts-Born Merchant in the South, London-Based Banker, and Philanthropist\'s Life, Influence, and Related People, Places, Events, and Institutions. . 11 Mar. 2011.[/note] When the Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876 in close proximity to the Peabody—in large part to take advantage of the library—the tendency of the librarians to address scholarly needs and “approved literature” over popular desires was given additional momentum. In keeping with these ideas, the Peabody’s librarians kept careful track of their readers’ choices, noting with special caution the numbers of novels that were requested. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'10\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-10-annual-report-detail/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-399\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-399\" title=\"fig 10 annual report detail\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail-336x452.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"452\" /></a>Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.[/note] This schism at the heart of the library’s collecting paradigm was not unique to the Peabody; the question of reading matter—should it offer leisure for the masses or the means of social uplift?—was central to the public library movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. [note number=\'36\']See, for example, Alexis McCrossen, “’One Cathedral More’ or ‘Mere Lounging Places for Bummers’? The Cultural Politics of Leisure and the Public Library in Gilded Age America,” Libraries &amp; Culture 41.2 (2006): 169-188; Paul Sturges, “The Public Library and Reading by the Masses: Historical Perspectives on the USA and Britain 1850-1900,” ; Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, Upon the Objects to be Attained by the Establishment of a Public Library, 12 Dec. 2010.[/note]\r\n\r\nFinally, the Peabody’s “desiderata” acquisitions and librarians’ selections were supplemented by book donations from local elites—bibliophiles with extensive private collections that included incunabula, classical authors in Renaissance editions, expensive illustrated atlases. At the same time, book donations came in from more plebian sources. The Peabody’s growth overlapped with the decline of the local social libraries, and it eventually absorbed some of the books from the Library Company of Baltimore, Robinson’s Circulating Library and several small professional and mechanics’ libraries. And I haven’t even touched on the Peabody’s twentieth-century fate.\r\n\r\nThe variety of philanthropic impulses, resource streams and classification philosophies that have fed the Peabody over the 150 years of its existence has led to a collection that does not so much map the nineteenth-century mind as signal its odd amalgam of popular and scholarly investments. The Peabody’s collection effectively evades succinct description—at least, any kind of description that pretends to be coherent, that is not perforated by its stakes in local history, library history, book history. But more importantly, it suggests the degree to which accident and opportunity and prejudice and wealth and the changing winds of cataloguing rules shape any archive. Description, which should be the most fundamental tool of communication between librarians and researchers, turns out to be utterly elusive. Yet we do not know what to replace them with, these inadequate descriptions, these exercises in stilted and partial translation.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>2. The Researcher’s Progress.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>I am preparing for my class about women and nineteenth-century print culture, which meets in the Peabody; we have reached the part of the syllabus where we look at gift books and annuals. I want students to examine several examples of these literary miscellanies, offering some illustration of their variety, and I have a list of such items that I have used in the past. But since I also want to show the students new acquisitions, I need to refresh my list. I will start with “gift book” as a keyword in the online catalogue.</blockquote>\r\nIn place of perfect and commensurate description—not possible—what we have are cataloguing systems that indexically represent collections through data and metadata that are, as I have already suggested, historically marked and inevitably inconsistent. In the case of the Peabody, these records are further compromised: Dewey cards developed from a nineteenth-century print index do not offer Library of Congress subject terms or detailed tables of contents; they also frequently lack other kinds of information. [note number=\'37\']Many of the electronic records for Peabody books have been copy-cataloged, that is, developed from records for identical books in other libraries. But these records might also be incomplete or inconsistent, given that many are quite old. The expense of original cataloging prevents our staff from creating full, new records for every item in the Peabody’s collection of over 300,000 titles.[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'11\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-11-ddc-cards/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-400\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-400\" title=\"fig 11 ddc cards\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Dewey cards for “gift books.”[/note] My search for “gift book” will turn up bequests—the term “gift book” is often attached to these donations—and it will miss many of the nineteenth-century gift books and annuals in our collection whose records lack subject classifications, or whose subject classifications reference the book’s contents, not its format. For example, the 1848 Rough and Ready Annual: or, Military Souvenir published by Appleton’s has been assigned the subject “Mexican War, 1846-1848—Anecdotes.” [note number=\'38\']Rough and Ready Annual (New York: D. Appleton; Philadelphia: G.S. Appleton, 1848).[/note]\r\n\r\nThe problem of finding is perhaps only a sub-set of the problem of description, but I want to give it special attention because it introduces another variable: the physical space of the object. My search for gift books in the Peabody also entails the privilege of retrieving the books from the stacks. There are two search processes, the intellectual and the physical, that I must navigate. The intellectual search in this case requires a variety of keyword/date range combinations, and ultimately, recourse to my prepared bibliography—a holdover from pre-catalogue research methods. Now the second search begins.\r\n\r\nThe Rough and Ready Annual is at 973.62 A5121, in the “general history of North America; United States” category. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'12\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-12-rr/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-401\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-401\" title=\"fig 12 r&amp;r\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.[/note] This call number range is on the second floor, west side. Other items on my list are in very different parts of the library. Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them, edited by the temperance writer T. S. Arthur and published in London, has been given the call number 813 A7910 duodecimo—fourth floor east, in the “American literature in English, fiction” section. [note number=\'39\']Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them (London: Knight &amp; Co., [1857]). This title does not appear in at least one Arthur bibliography; see Donald A Koch, \"Timothy Shay Arthur,\" Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, ed. Joel Myerson (Detroit: Gale Research, 1979), from Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Feb. 2011. To check on this, I need Mitchell Sharpe Jr.’s A Bibliography of the Published Books of Timothy Shay Arthur (Atlanta: Emory University, 1954), a typewritten quarto at 012 A791S, but it seems to be missing.[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'13\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-13-orange/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-402\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-402\" title=\"fig 13 orange\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Orange Blossoms in the stacks.[/note] Arthur shows up again as co-editor of The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present, which has received more extensive description as it contains the first printing of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Siope.” [note number=\'40\']The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present (Baltimore: Bayly and Burns, [1838]).[/note] We have two copies of this very genteel little gift book, one at 808.83 B2175 (rhetoric &amp; collections of literature), and one at 810.8 C297 (American literature in English). The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons is in the rare book room at the south end of the third floor. [note number=\'41\']The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons (London: The Religious Tract Society, ca. 1850).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'14\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-14-rbr/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-403\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-403\" title=\"fig 14 rbr\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The rare book room.[/note] In this case, the book’s rarity has to do with a lovely fore-edge painting. It has been assigned to 820.8 N42017 (general books about literature). On the other end of the “rare” continuum is The Family Circle and Parlor Annual, volume 5 in a series, which is shelved up on the sixth floor with the periodicals at 051 F198 (serials in American English). [note number=\'42\']The Family Circle and Parlor Annual (New York: Comstock, 1847).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'15\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-15-parlor/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-404\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-404\" title=\"fig 15 parlor\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Parlor Annual in the stacks.[/note]\r\n\r\nI’ll fill out call slips for each book, stick the slips into red flags, and put the flags in an order that will help me chart a logical course through the stacks. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'16\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-16-slips/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-405\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-405\" title=\"fig 16 slips\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Call slips and flags.[/note] It’s easiest to start on the sixth floor and work one’s way down, picking up books along the way. Usually I find other interesting items as I go, so I carry a batch of blank call slips and extra flags. (On this occasion, for example, I find The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse; published in 1813 and inscribed by its owner in 1817, it pre-dates by several years the official beginning of the gift book phenomenon. It might be more of a “literary almanac.” [note number=\'43\']The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse (Philadelphia: David Hogan, 1813).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'17\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-17-new-reader/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-406\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-406\" title=\"fig 17 new reader\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Inscription in The New American Reader.[/note]) Usually I am also unable to locate at least one of the books I have set out to find. Most likely the book has been misshelved, so I’ll check the quartos and folios, which are shelved separately; then I’ll check the rare book room’s octavo, duodecimo and quarto shelving areas. It used to astonish me that books were still shelved by format in the Peabody, but it does save space. At the same time, this shelving system—along with the multiple distinct areas within the library where books may reside, eg the rare book room, the reference section, the genealogy books, the Limited Editions Club, and several discrete named collections—means that retrieving a few books can take quite a long time, as I traipse up and down the six floors of the library, thread through stacks, open secured doors with multiple keys, turn lights on and off, and maneuver a book truck in and out of a tiny service elevator built in the 1920s. By the end of the journey, the library and I will have exchanged dust; I’ll take on a few streaks of red rot, and the library will have taken in particles from my body as well.\r\n\r\nWhile the Peabody is unique, these conditions are not in the end very unusual. In terms of the intellectual search, the absence of “gift book” from many of the catalogue records is no less egregious than the absence of other information—the names of all the contributors; the subjects of the illustrations. The metadata is potentially infinite. The “gift book” only exists as a category because of scholars who teased out this cultural phenomenon; it would be very difficult to define its absolute borders. In terms of the physical search, the Peabody might be messier than, say, a rare book library that has assigned current LC call numbers to all its contents and houses them in compact shelving, but it exemplifies the general on-the-ground situation. As I wind my way through the Peabody stacks, I remember how much more difficult it is to gather research materials from several different institutions.\r\n\r\nThe fact is, for scholars who rely on archives, research is something you do only after you have already undertaken a rigorous search. It is the search that provides you with the foundational sense of your subject. But the search is rarely acknowledged or accredited; even the foot-soldier craft of bibliography, the link between “librarianship” and “scholarship,” has largely lost its scholarly status.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>3. An Architecture of Disctinction.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>A non-affiliate researcher contacts the Peabody about our H. L. Mencken collections. Since she will bring a couple of graduate students with her, I set up a group work space in one of the library alcoves where the three of them can share materials and talk without disturbing other readers. I pull the requested volumes with the help of some students and set the cart up within easy reach of the alcove. When the researchers arrive, I show them the Mencken collections on the ground floor. Then I lead them to their group work space and leave them, returning to the glassed-in office behind the reading room, the vantage point that allows me to monitor the otherwise empty reading room.</blockquote>\r\nIn “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” a team of Dutch sociologists investigates the library as a space that is strongly marked by situational norms—“knowledge-based beliefs about how to behave in particular situations that are shaped by social influence.” [note number=\'44\']Henk Aarts and Ap Dijksterhuis, “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84.1 (2003), 19.[/note] Their research leads them to argue, however, that such norms do not require direct social influences to be triggered; in fact, “the situation can activate mental representations of normative behaviors automatically. And once activated, these representations provide the knowledge necessary for guiding one’s own situationally appropriate behavior.” [note number=\'45\']Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 19.[/note] Physical environments do not necessarily prompt these behaviors; rather, the behavior “depend[s] on whether the environment is of immediate behavioral relevance.” [note number=\'46\']Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 20.[/note] Talking in a quiet voice in the library, a normative behavior, is only activated for those who plan to visit the library.\r\n\r\nTen years ago, when the research for this article was conducted, the “silence of the library” was still a widespread norm. While the situation is now often reversed—in our main campus library, we must designate specific quiet areas because otherwise a sociable undergraduate din would take over—the norm of silence does continue to preside at the Peabody. Because it is off campus, the Peabody is often attractively under-populated compared to the crowded main library; it is mostly used by advanced researchers and those who seek a quiet place to study. The large central open area catches and amplifies even the smallest noises. The shelf-lined alcoves on either side of this central area offer the appearance of privacy, but in fact are little echo chambers. Visitors immediately detect these acoustics, and—except for the periodic tour groups—most spend their time in the Peabody in silence. But it is not just the physics of sound that shape behaviors here, as the Dutch researchers show; the social expectations of the space prefigure those behaviors.\r\n\r\nIn setting up a group work space for the Mencken researchers, I have quite deliberately contravened the usual norm of silence. Clearly, I am not inviting them to shout, and by putting them in an alcove in back, I have taken measures to protect any quiet-seeking visitors who might arrive. But in accordance with new ideas about the use of library space, my colleagues and I have decided that we must accommodate group study even if it might occasionally disrupt the silence desired by others. As it happens, the Mencken researchers’ conversation is eventually interrupted by a tour group, and the two activities play out side by side.\r\n\r\nI must admit that at moments I have mixed feelings about the tour groups and even the study cohorts. While my pedagogical instincts tend towards cheerful hub-bub, there is a part of me that is still in awe of the sanctuary-like atmosphere of the Peabody. John Morris called the library a “cathedral of books,” and clearly that’s what architect Edmund G. Lind had in mind. The central area with its grand skylight and the alcoves on its sides is like a nave bordered with chapels. Lind didn’t need a psychological study of environment-based situational norms to tell him that he might activate different behaviors within his building. The great central space inspires reverence—your eye is drawn to the skylight the way it would be drawn to the rose windows of Chartres, and on its way up catches row upon solemn row of books stowed behind gilded railings, a testament to the accumulated wisdom of the ages. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'18\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-18-skylight/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-407\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-407\" title=\"fig 18 skylight\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"448\" /></a>The skylight in the George Peabody Library.[/note] But step into an alcove, especially on the ground floor where each is filled with an immense wooden table, and you instantly feel something else, something no less grand but more human. The alcoves are study-sized, and once you sit down at one of those dark, gleaming, broad tables, it is like you are the master of your own private library. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'19\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-19-alcove/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-408\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-408\" title=\"fig 19 alcove\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Alcove in the George Peabody Library.[/note]\r\n\r\nIronically, the Peabody’s architecture was out-dated by the time it was completed. With the professionalization of librarianship and the evolution of library science in the late nineteenth century, librarians like William Frederick Poole advocated for a functional rather than decorative design of interior library space. [note number=\'47\']See William Frederick Poole, Remarks on Library Construction (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1884).[/note] Moreover, the actual use of space in the Peabody in the late nineteenth century was at odds with its symbolic appeal. The main library was known as the “stack room”; readers were seated in a comparatively plain reading room on the other side of the main doors. In this arrangement, the librarians reigned inside the gorgeous “cathedral of books,” but the building’s potential to civilize the masses was lost.\r\n\r\nNow, of course, we do not send readers outside. Inside the “stack room,” we explicitly call visitors’ attention to its beauty to explain the connections between the library’s architecture and its collections—how both speak eloquently of Victorian values. At the same time, we who staff the library have relegated ourselves to its periphery. We work in the glassed-in room at one end that serves as a monitoring point and occasional classroom; the official “librarian’s office” in one corner—its luxurious proportions suggesting something like a sacristy and something like a robber baron’s lair—is now shared work-space stuffed with several desks and laden book trucks. There is another monitoring station near the main doors. I often do my work at the photography station, in the back of one of the alcoves [note type=\'figure\' number=\'20\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-20-station/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-409\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-409\" title=\"fig 20 station\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Photography station in the George Peabody Library.[/note]. It offers some privacy but is close enough to the central reading tables to be accessible to readers.\r\n\r\nThe space of the Peabody initiates other situational behaviors besides the norm of silence, and our work-station arrangements testify to this. The spatial re-centralizing of readers and marginalization of staff is not merely practical; it is a reflection of the modern office of librarianship. We are there to be of service, in a para-textual position. Consequently, our work should be out of sight; it should be separate from and secondary to the work that readers do. Our locations call upon us, in other words, to support the scholar’s effort to hide the “seams of [her] findings” by hiding the ways we contribute to that work—by the ways we sometimes do that work.\r\n\r\nI think about these complications as I escort the Mencken researchers to their table and walk back to the glassed-in office, where there is nothing pressing for me to do. I’d rather spend more time talking with them. I’d like to learn about their research and introduce them to some underappreciated parts of the collection. I’d like to share with them what I learned curating an exhibition of Mencken-related magazines and writing about one of those magazines. But I don’t want to get in their way; it’s likely that they are ready to get on with work that they don’t see as connected to mine. The professional norms of the archive are strong, and although I know how to talk about my research in many contexts—in presentations, interviews, hotel elevators—I haven’t figured out how to mix my scholarly role with the curatorial role I am supposed to play here, in the Peabody. In the end, I say nothing. Professional segregation is another kind of silence in the library.\r\n\r\nWe cannot change the archaeological record beneath our feet, but we can rearrange the fossils we dig up to create new narratives. We can tell different kinds of archive stories, including the story of what research in the archive was and is. Is it too idealistic to expect that dissolving the entrenched fantasies about archival research will make room for new methods? Is it naïve to imagine a space that, in putting into practice the archival turn’s preliminary insights about disciplinary and disorder, can support experimentation, facilitate connection across professions and disciplines, and enable new discoveries?','Disciplinarity and Disorder','','inherit','open','open','','2199-revision-33','','','2013-07-10 06:30:10','2013-07-10 06:30:10','',2199,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/2199-revision-33/',0,'revision','',0),(5045,10,'2013-07-10 06:14:25','2013-07-10 06:14:25','The primal scene of archival research takes place in a dreary reading room. A researcher sits at her table, inert. An archivist enters, pushing a cart that bears a dozen dusty gray boxes. (See Figure 1.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4725\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"480\"]\r\n<iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ykY6moIaDE?rel=0\" height=\"250\" width=\"333\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe> A staged archival encounter.[/caption]\r\n\r\nThe archivist unhinges a box, removes a numbered file folder and, placing it at the researcher’s elbow, steps back. The researcher stirs, then sits upright with a mechanical jolt. She turns sharply in the direction of the folder, flips it open and cocks her head towards the flimsy leaves inside; now she is reading. (Zoom in on the eyes as they click into focus.) Now she is reading, and now she truly comes alive; she bends towards the papers, taps her forehead in thought. A sheaf of blank paper and a pencil appear on her table, and she begins taking notes. Her fingers fly—and soon, so do the pages she is writing upon. Caught up in eddies of excitement, they swoop to the ceiling and around the room and down to the floor, where they fall together into perfect piles. Bindings sprout from the outer strata; the pages sew themselves into bright, tight, hard-cover books. These the archivist gathers up and places on the shelves that line the room, next to other books and gray boxes.\r\n\r\nI may have it backwards: in other versions of the fantasy, it is the archive that is first animated by the presence of the researcher, a Dr. Coppelius who waves a pencil and sets the dusty boxes to dancing. But either way, the archival imaginary posits a symbiotic relationship between researcher and source, a photogenic pas de deux that leads to a finished scholarly product. This work, in turn, enters the archive for the next generation of researchers; it might even be taken apart again so that its secret ingredients (notes, drafts, letters) can themselves be served up in a series of boxes. Such a strangely private form of publication it creates, the coupling of researcher and source.\r\n\r\nWhat Freudian trauma results from witnessing this sight? Only the harm that myth inflicts. This primal scene is a fiction, a dream of perfect union between researcher and source that ignores, first of all, the full cast of characters. What about the archivist, who is rendered invisible? What about all those within and without the archive, upon whose labor—acquiring, preserving, organizing, reading, cataloging, describing, interpreting, analyzing, debating, teaching, writing, editing, digitizing, referencing and publishing—the current project depends? More a barn dance than a pas de deux: an archival encounter is an enactment of social authorship long before the researcher enters the room. ((See Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) on the idea of social authorship, which could be described as “the dialectic between the historically located individual author and the historically developed institutions of literary production” that help create a work, e.g., printers, publishers, editors and readers (81).))\r\n\r\nBut even a barn dance is much too mannered a metaphor. The sketch above misleads us more generally about the experience on the ground. Doing time in an archive is often tedious, uncomfortable and bewildering. For librarians, there is the struggle to promote and simultaneously protect what you have; the difficulty of fitting unruly materials into arrangements and workflows; and worries about space and time—where to put it all, how to address your backlog. For researchers, there is the struggle to locate the archives you need and what matters to you inside them; the uncertainty created by unruly data; and worries about time and space— how to access what you need during your research trip, how to record and organize the information you gather. At both ends, the archival encounter is counter-cinematic and erratic, days of monotonous sifting and dead-ends punctuated by one or two, or maybe zero, hidden moments of vivid, peculiar joy.\r\n\r\nSo archival research does not fulfill its ideal outline. So what? Who cares? Why dredge up the fantasy? Because the fantasy continues to structure our archival encounters—what we expect and undertake in the reading room, what we allow it to mean. Twenty years ago, Alice Kaplan observed that “conventional academic discourse requires that when you write up the results of your archival work, you tell a story about what you found, but not about how you found it. The less the seams of your findings show, the better your discoveries lend themselves to use by others… tell[ing] these stories breaks their spell and violates the spirit of the archives.” ((Alice Yaeger Kaplan, “Working in the Archives,” Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 103-116; 103, 107.)) With a few word changes, the same could be said about what counts as professional archivist discourse: the impersonal, neutral genre of the finding aid, for example, should say what is in a collection, but should not discuss what is confusing or missing in it, or the problems it posed in processing. ((See, for example, James M. O’Toole and Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006).)) Despite the growing recognition that this sequestration is never completely possible—that the material conditions and social relations of the archive shape the work we do in it—that work continues to be represented in professional and scholarly publications as if it is. Despite the recent call to move to the fore “the backstage of the archives—how they are constructed, policed, experienced, and manipulated” in order to support historiography “not merely [as] a project of fact-retrieval” but as “a set of complex processes of selection, interpretation, and even creative invention,” the “backstage” stays in the background. ((Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 7-8.)) Antoinette Burton may be correct that “many if not most historians operate under the assumption that history is a highly interpretive act,” but this belief is not yet reflected in the archival encounter: the ways that researchers (not just historians) and librarians report their experiences with primary sources; the ways that librarians and researchers work together; the ways librarians and researchers regard the involvement of “non specialists.” ((Burton, 8. Burton notes that “whether historians concede or fully countenance the impact of such contingencies on their work is another question. They rarely speak of them, and even more rarely do they do so in print” (8). Her books recuperates some of those archive stories but this effort, I’ll suggest below, is hampered by other kinds of obligations.)) While the advent of digitization and electronic resource sharing has revolutionized the research landscape, making primary sources public in unprecedented ways, there remains in the archive a habitus of secret knowledge—the “spell” that Kaplan is loathe to break. This is not necessarily intentional. It is rather the effect of layering recent shifts in technology, theory and professional definition onto older foundations: petrified conditions, relations, expectations and systems that continue to operate in part through the enduring power of fantasies about research. What we have in the archive is a stratified groundwork that still governs our archival encounters.\r\n\r\nBut, you will object, the archive has already changed. Now we have the “archival turn”—the scholarly interest in the archive not just as a source of evidence but as an epistemological mode. Surely, this attention to the constructedness of the archive has led to a revealing reconsideration of what actually goes on inside an archive; surely, as a result, those archaic fantasies have diminished. Have they? In what follows, I begin by unearthing one stratum of the archival turn, the decade of the 1990s, as represented by three texts: Kaplan’s essay mentioned above, “Working in the Archives” (1990)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_369\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-369 \" alt=\"fig 2 kaplan\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan-300x224.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"224\" /></a> Photocopy of Alice Yaeger Kaplan’s “Working in the Archives.”; Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1994/95)[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_372\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-372 \" alt=\"Print out of Jacque Derrida’s “Archive Fever” from Diacritics.; and Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida-300x224.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"224\" /></a> Print out of Jacque Derrida’s “Archive Fever” from Diacritics.; and Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_373\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-373 \" alt=\"Library copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust. (Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25.2 (Summer 1995): 9-63. Web. 1 Dec. 2010. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).) \" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman-300x224.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"224\" /></a> Library copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust. ((Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25.2 (Summer 1995): 9-63. Web. 1 Dec. 2010. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).))[/caption]\r\n\r\nA cross-examination of these three texts reveals a pattern of interests, a set of efforts to defy customary practices—but only, it turns out, “in theory.” While certain practices are challenged in these texts, they leave mostly intact the older strata of archival research fantasies and conventions. Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman do not dislodge the forces that organize the actual archival encounter.\r\n\r\nHow does this happen? Why is practice so stubborn? We need another take on archival practice: not practice in theory, but practice in action; not the 1990s, but now; not in terms of textual patterns, but in terms that suit the subject: the terms of the archival encounter itself, and the eccentric, anachronistic and even monotonous experience it generates. My second look at practice will take the form of a series of vignettes about a real-life archive, the George Peabody Library in Baltimore. While this narrative structure may seem to recreate the division of labor between theory and practice, my hope is that—by giving practice the last word—we’ll be in a better position to synthesize the two.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>I. “The library doubles as a detective’s office.” ((Kaplan, 114.))</strong>\r\n\r\nThe archival turn could be dated to the founding of “scientific” history in the mid-nineteenth century, or to the development a century later of the quantitative methods of the Annales School, or to other evidence-based movements in the history of history, but what is generally meant by this phrase corresponds with the formation of cultural studies and the use of the archive as a conceptual category. That is, the archival turn has to do with the notion of the “figuration” of the archive, a parallel decline in its empirical authority and a related expansion of its relevance within domains that are not exclusively historiographic, like art, literary criticism, textual studies, media studies and information studies. ((See the use of the term in, for example, Carolyn Hamilton et al, eds., Refiguring the Archive (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), Cheryl Simon, ed., Following the Archival Turn: Photography, the Museum, and the Archive, special issue of Visual Resources: A Journal of Documentation 18.2 (June 2002), and Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). This turn is partially construed as a “move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject,” but also by the earlier metaphorical interest in “the archive” that goes back to the 1980s (Stoler, 44-45) and by Foucauldian descriptions of archives as “‘monuments to particular configurations of power” (Hamilton, qtd. in Burton, 6).)) But it is not irrelevant that a devotion to archival methods precedes by many decades contemporary theories of the archive; if the archival turn lacks a precise origin, this (we will see) is completely in keeping with its own preoccupations.\r\n\r\nKaplan therefore represents in some ways an arbitrary beginning for this cross-examination—clearly the archive as a conceptual category predates 1990—but her article does initiate something new: the recognition that there is something called an “archive story” that must remain hidden in order for the official “results” to function authoritatively. In admitting this bit of professional legerdemain, and in telling her own archive story in a prestigious scholarly journal, Kaplan not only commits the violation she prohibits but also contradicts it. Through its publication, Kaplan’s own archive story is elevated to the status of “results”—a kind of research that shadows conventional academic discourse. Indeed, Kaplan notes, such “fables” of research “can be analyzed like a text,” a “mixed up genre” that combines the “redemptive detective fiction” with the epic and the dime novel. ((Kaplan, 106, 107.))\r\n\r\nKaplan’s archive story thus marks a distinctive moment in the archival turn—one which gained its most prominent authorization in 1994, with a paper that Jacques Derrida delivered (in English) to a conference sponsored by the Freud Museum, the Courtauld Institute and the Société International d’Histoire de la Psychiatrie et de la Psychoanalyse. Called initially “The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression,” the lecture was revised and published in 1995 as Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne in French; the published English version echoed the French publication with its 1995 title Archive Fever. As Carolyn Steedman points out in Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, however, this work that has been assigned a seminal status in archival studies “for the main part… is not about archives at all, but is rather a sustained contemplation of a work of history, of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (1991),” itself a sustained contemplation of Moses and Monotheism—which (according to Steedman) Yerushalmi examines through Freud’s description of the work as a “‘historical novel,’ or a kind of historical story,” undertaken “in order to understand the period of baroque anti-semitism through which he was living.” ((Steedman, 3.))\r\n\r\nDizzy yet? Let’s undertake a more careful reading of this splatter pattern of intra-references—or, to stick with the archaeological metaphor, let’s call them groups of potsherds buried in the 1990s layer of the “archival turn.” Digging down to reassemble them reveals a set of interests with special implications for archival practice.\r\n\r\nThe most prominent group of sherds to note are the fragments of disciplinarity: the inter-, multi- or perhaps simply anti-disciplinarity of the texts, authors and audiences caught up in these three archival addresses. Kaplan, an American scholar of French literature, calls the post-theory exchange between literature and history a “cross-pollination of desire between historians and literary critics” undertaken “with the curiosity and energetic passion of collectors.” ((Kaplan, 107-108.)) Steedman, a British historian, performs this cross-pollinating process without comment: her epigraph to Dust is from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, one chapter treats George Eliot’s Middlemarch in depth… in fact, almost every chapter depends on a literary text. ((Another chapter invokes Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel Mary Barton, a third is anchored by W. H. Auden’s poem “Homage to Clio,” and a fourth finds its most eloquent examples in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.)) Derrida, a French philosopher, produced a work that has been exceptionally mobile across disciplines, forms, languages and professional domains. He gave his initial talk to an audience drawing on three different kinds of institutions; Mal d’Archive was published in book form in both French and English, but also made an intermediate appearance as an essay in the journal diacritics. All of these texts, it seems, respond to the provocations of the archive—to the materials and circumstances of discovery—rather than to the disciplinary distinctions that arguably divide the archive from itself.\r\n\r\nArchive Fever has become a founding document even though, as Steedman notes in the very beginning of her book, many in Derrida’s audience “knew the ‘archival turn’ to be [already] well underway” at the time of his talk. ((Steedman, 2.)) As it happens—and this is the second group of sherds I see—these three essays have in common an investment in or a problem with origins, especially with the failure of origins. Derrida, for example, defines archive fever as a kind of Freudian death drive—a drive to fix and preserve which at the same time “works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own ‘proper’ traces… [it] is above all anarchivic, one could say, or archiviolithic… the archive always works, and a priori, against itself.” ((Derrida, 14.)) If the archival impulse is driven to destroy its own work, then the question of origins ultimately point to the larger question of disorder. The disorder of origins makes frequent appearances in the essay but one example will make the point—in the “Preamble” where he recounts how he titled the talk that he had not yet written and was to give at the Freud Museum. The “Preamble” starts with his reflections on the word “impression,” which has several simultaneous registers of meaning for him. One of these is the “scriptural or typographic” register: that of the graphic impression that marks a substrate. In English, “impression” is phonetically related to “repression” and “suppression,” key words in the Freudian vocabulary, translated respectively from the German Verdrängung and Unterdrückung. English, that is, retains the rhyming relationship of the two German terms, and “impression” in this company comes to have a vaguely Freudian meaning as well. But in French, Verdrängung is “refoulement,” which means something more like expulsion, a driving away. The Freudian sense of the French word “répression” has been reserved for Unterdrückung. So English “repression” defines a phenomenon that must be distinguished from the French “répression.” These translational shifts “directly concern the structures of archivization,” Derrida says, “because they touch on the topic differences and thus on the location of the substrates of traces\" (Derrida, 23). In other words, how do you classify concepts whose meanings shift across languages? Where do you store them in a disciplinary grammar—or in an archive? How do these asymmetrical linguistic structures shape the establishment and extension of a new science? For Derrida, the difference between “repression” and “répression” is “enough to disrupt the tranquil landscape of all historical knowledge, of all historiography, and even of all self-consistent ‘scholarship’” ((Derrida, 23.))\r\n\r\nOrigin failure appears both as deliberate performance and as unintentional oversight in these essays. Derrida stages his own inability to get past “go”; with an introductory section, and subsequent sections sub-titled “Exergue,” “Preamble,” “Foreword,” his essay functions, Steedman notes, like a “primer offering instruction in the principle of deferral.” ((A short notice called “Priere d’inserer,” published only in the French book version, carried the bulk of an argument for which there was no room in the lecture. Steedman, 7.)) For all her insight into Derrida’s titling adventures, however, Steedman’s title is marked by its own origin aporia. While her first chapter is devoted to Archive Fever—a “let’s begin at the beginning” homage to the seminal text—her book’s title, Dust, seems more indebted to the last sentence of Kaplan’s essay, published five years before Derrida’s: “Usually there is no mother lode, no original manuscript to be retrieved—the gold is all in the dust.” ((Kaplan, 116.)) Kaplan, however, is never mentioned. ((Kaplan also begins her essay with a brief consideration of the “arche,” the Greek and Latin term for the public records office, which is a major starting point for Derrida. Is he borrowing from her, or is she borrowing from him, given that this sort of etymological investigation was an established signature of Deconstruction?))\r\n\r\nKaplan, for her part, unravels her own archive story. She gives us a kind of “whodunit”—her search for the ephemeral sources of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s anti-semitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937). She uses this account to exemplify her effort to “move through the archival process and recover some of the stories that get deleted in the final scholarly form.” ((Kaplan, 104. For this reason, perhaps, Kaplan never reveals what she ultimately discovers in her successful search for Celine’s sources. In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether her pre-emptive and truncated treatment of her archive story is deliberate or not. Is this treatment meant to indirectly support her official claim about “results”? Or does the presence of the archive story suggest that telling it is an impulse she can’t quite control? Thanks, Lauren Coats, for helping tease this problem out.)) These beginnings are preemptively struck out, however, by what seems to be her main claim: “the passion of the archives must finally be used to eradicate all personal stories in the interests of the dry archival report, fit for a public.” ((Kaplan, 103.)) Only in the “para-text”—a preface, for example—can the archive story appear without “interrupt[ing] or complicat[ing] the narrative so much that no results could ever be understood or perceived.” ((Kaplan, 104.)) Despite this unequivocal assertion, the personal “whodunit” prevails in her essay, especially in the final section set in the Centre du documentation juive contemporain (CDJC). It is this library, where Kaplan solves the mystery of Céline’s sources, that “doubles as a detective’s office.”\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_423\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"333\"]<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-5-cdjc-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-423\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-423\" title=\"fig 5 cdjc\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1-333x250.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a> Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhile Kaplan’s research mystery resolves neatly, the truth about archives is that they are full of gaps, mistakes and excesses: in the words of one of the CDJC librarians, “‘ici on trouve tout’—there’s some of everything here”—but not, one could add, all of anything. ((Kaplan, 115.)) Kaplan’s essay ends by nullifying both her detective story success and her “dry archival report,” by recognizing the disorder on which both of these narratives are unsteadily perched: “The archive is constituted by these errors, these pieces out of place, which are then reintegrated into a story of some kind.” ((Kaplan, 115.)) “A story of some kind”? So much for “results.”\r\n\r\nKaplan sets us up to perceive one final potsherd pattern common to these three essays. If origin-less disorder is the order of the archive, it is a disorder that is generated out of human loss—a disorder that joins the body and the material world. The archive is always predicated on historical violence of some sort, whatever is censored, erased, excluded, trumped up, used up, misplaced, conquered, killed. Moreover, the archival categories that mark both the visible victories and hidden defeats do not stay within their walls; the archive is both a repository of existing schemas and a means of perpetuating them in the world beyond. While we might usually think of this disciplinary activity as a pact between the archive and its political authors, Steedman makes it clear that the dilemmas of order shape the archival body in many ways. For example, she takes literally the provocation of Derrida’s title Archive Fever to investigate the illness that researchers contract on the penultimate day of their trip to the archive: prompted by the anxiety of the task that remains unfinished, they end their research with night-sweats and head-aches. But what seems like a strangely specific malady is transformed by Steedman into a far-reaching social symptom: by relating the researcher’s “archive fever” to the terrible diseases suffered by tanners, skinners and other workers in the trades associated with paper and leather, Steedman expands our sense of who is in the archive—the bodies whose specialized labors populate our libraries with books, the many kinds of expertise the archive consumes.\r\n\r\nFor Derrida, the relation between the material archive and its human architects focuses on one kind of “graphic mark,” a particular “private inscription”: circumcision as the archival signature that is also the signature of patrimoine, with Freud’s relationship to his father as his main example. ((Derrida, 19.)) It is perhaps not a coincidence that the body in question in both Kaplan’s and Derrida’s archive is Jewish, for that is a body that has come to symbolize the destructive power of classificatory regimes. Despite her contention that the private passions motivating research must be kept secret, Kaplan is fascinated by the “missing person stories” at the CDJC: by the “quantity of people who are there for personal reasons,” the survivors of occupation or deportation or camps, or their descendants, quietly looking up their lost ones or noisily dropping off their memoirs. ((Kaplan, 113.)) This disorganized crowd of dead and living bodies tries to meet up with an equally disorganized crowd of materials—individual letters, trial transcripts, pamphlets, newspapers, first-person accounts, books, photographs, lists. The monumental task of match-making, the librarians’ work, is never complete. More papers are always generated or declassified or discovered, different human questions and needs emerge. The tidy choreography of the research fantasy, where the detective always finds her man, is not so much in evidence; what we have instead is corpora in excess of existing categories.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\nKaplan, Derrida and Steedman open up the archival body. They show us how paper meets the press of flesh; they make us feel just how intimate it is. [note number=\'26\']This interest in the corporeal dimensions and effects of order, its human and non-human components, has in common with their other gestures—an experimental attitude towards conventional disciplinarity and attention to the priority of disorder—the circumstances of the academic humanities in the 1990s. Since the archival turn came out of the ascent of cultural studies and allied intrigues in the 1970s and ‘80s, the circles in the Venn diagram of these ventures will necessarily overlap. We could also say that the archive took off when it did precisely because it made a clever new container for these preoccupations, thick in the humanities atmosphere at the time, where they were distilled and united. [/note] But for all their revelations about the limits of discipline and the multiplicities of disorder in the archive, these texts do not disclose the specific methods of engagement that led to their existence. While Kaplan offers up her own archival victory and outlines several other such stories, she still insists on their marginalization. [note number=\'27\']“Were the story of how you got the story really to be told inside the book, it would interrupt or complicate the narrative so much that no results could be understood or even perceived. Every story of success in the archives is emotionally charged, for only the most extreme emotions can drive people to the drudgery, to the discomfort, of sitting and sifting through dog-eared documents, manuscripts, microfilms. To reveal those emotions would not only gum up the narrative, it would threaten its credibility, by showing on what thin strands of coincidence, accident, or on what unfair forms of friendship, ownership, geographical proximity, the discoveries were based” (Kaplan, 104).[/note] If these texts are not concerned with actual practices in the archive or changes in its methodologies, what do they tell us?\r\n\r\nFirst, they suggest one reason for the perpetuation of myths about the archive. While Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman are eager to show how archival materials do not conform to disciplinary distinctions—an enthusiasm related to other disruptive tendencies in late twentieth-century humanist scholarship –they seem less cognizant of a related phenomenon: the archive does not obey strict professional divisions, either. In Kaplan’s library-as-detective’s-office metaphor, the scholar is the detective, but does the “Eureka” moment belong only to the scholar who pieces together a narrative? What about the people who prepared those pieces? The archivist is still missing in action. Likewise, these essays do not dwell on missing boxes, illegible papers, neglected citations. There are no descriptions of archival slogging, no admissions that some materials failed to be relevant. And of course, there are no prescriptions for a different order. It is not the main aim of Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman to effect an evolution of practice; archival turnistas are not interested in disorder in order to re-order. But it is worth remembering that it is not in their professional interest as scholars to make their practices more transparent.\r\n\r\nSecondly, along the same lines, these texts inform us of the duplicity of speculative practices that reveal but cannot live out the instability of their archival mandates. Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman are put into the position of saying, “Yes, the archive is biased, idiosyncratic and treacherous—but the observations I draw from it are flawless.” [note number=\'28\']Derrida, unlike Kaplan and Steedman, makes no claims to work inside an actual archive, unless we consider Yerushalmi’s book as a kind of archive. But the fact that the essay was written self-consciously for presentation at the Freud Museum suggests that it was made out of an archive indirectly—in its construction, if not in its contents. [/note]\r\n\r\nFinally, these texts suggest why archival studies that attempt to be explicit about the messy nature of the archive have become instead “archive studies.” In more recent works like Refiguring the Archive (2002), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (2005) and Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009), the archive appears as a subject in its own right. Although the archival scenarios that are put into play in each of these books incorporate different disciplines—art, history, anthropology, literature, post-colonial studies—they have essentially created a new discipline. “Archive studies” is something we might, in the taxonomy of disciplines, see as the love-child of cultural studies, history and archival methodology. Moreover, this new discipline has in common with other humanities disciplines a complete blindness about its professional investments; it does not register much awareness of the professional investments of librarians, archivists, curators and “non-specialists,” or invite insights from those perspectives. Perhaps this is inevitably what happens when academics must give legitimacy to something new, which in turn reflects the pressures of scholarly communication: a topic must be delineated in conventional terms in order to merit publication. [note number=\'29\']Perhaps this is also the moment to ask why we—I—have been using the term “archive” all along, with its statist resonances, rather than the term “collection,” which has institutional but also personal resonances. Does “archive” bring us closer to recognizably “serious scholarship”?[/note] But it is also true that in these more recent books, which openly investigate the archive’s power-politics, the disorderly drift of the archive and its hybrid corporeality have mostly been bent towards a particular narrative about the archive as an agent of history rather than as a set of ongoing practices. It is as if the historical archive has been assembled in ways that reflect and reiterate power relations, but the contemporary archive has not; it is as if the researcher’s own research travails remain a transparent layer over the body of work that it constructs. [note number=\'30\']Of course, this is precisely what Derrida meant about the “death drive” of the archival impulse. Archive Stories is something of an exception; researchers speak openly here about themselves as researchers. It is interesting, however, that this book—like Steedman’s—doesn’t cite Kaplan’s essay as a precursor text despite the clear titular link.[/note]\r\n\r\nPerhaps it would also be fair to note that, if archival studies are now being formulated as an interdisciplinary discipline called “archive studies,” this might be just another stage in the turn. It might be that what comes next reconfigures the premise of disciplinarity and the promise of disorder, with a different approach to the human/non-human interactions that the archive documents and realizes: a more diffuse and multi-vocal set of practices in place of a new field. One way to imagine this approach would be to fully embrace Kaplan’s idea of the archive story as an account of what one hoped for, looked for and found, what one did and did not do, in the archive—an account loosed from the quarantine she advocates. Some very basic genre precedents for the archive story do exist; the bibliographic essay and the methodology statement, for example, have played an important role in many disciplines in the past and still do in some. Instead of a para-textual nod towards that archive story (in Kaplan’s sense), why not create a parallel text written collaboratively by the researcher(s) and the librarian(s), or by one person acting in both professional capacities, that runs alongside the official “results”? Or in a set of expanded notes that address not just the “what” and “where” but the “how” and “why” of sources, which are lifted from their small-type, bottom-of-page basement up into the light? Or—to add yet another layer—parallel texts that also offer room for exchange with other researchers, archivists and even interested “non specialists,” like collectors, bibliophiles and fans?\r\n\r\nIf it is hasn’t been clear already that I have scrupulously avoided so far the other kind of archive, the digital archive, it will be now. What I am imagining would be far too complicated to produce or consult in print, but would not be at all difficult to organize as a digital object—as an archive in its own right. By avoiding the digital archive up to this point, I have also finessed the fact that our current archival research methods are completely reliant on the digital archive, along with the development of online research tools and electronic instruments of data discovery and organization. Those conditions probably bear the most responsibility for making the archive visible as something that warranted a “turn” in the first place. Even Derrida refers in each version of Archive Fever to the computer on which he is currently composing, predicting that email will not only totally transform the archive as he knows it, but will make his own essay obsolete.\r\n\r\nIn short, we already have in place both the theory and the media that will make it possible to enact a radical new archival practice. We have in place what we need to integrate the archive story into the archive itself, while making it visible as a new form of “results.”\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>II. The library doubles as a librarian’s office.</strong>\r\n\r\nI could end here, with a triumphant firing of the starter pistol and a rousing cheer. But that would be a bit disingenuous, given that the starter pistol for both the archival turn and the academic use of the internet actually went off decades ago. So the question remains, what stands in the way of the practical enactment of the archival turn’s speculative insights? I’d like to engage this question by following Kaplan’s example (but not her main claim): through some archive story-telling about the George Peabody Library. These three vignettes, identified as “typical” through conversations with my colleague Paul Espinosa, illustrate the intractable formations that present-day archival encounters come up against.\r\n\r\n<strong>1. The Perils of Description.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>A group of Russian speakers visits the Peabody Library. The dozen men and women sit down around the screen that Paul has set up. He narrates a brief slide-show about the Peabody’s history, then leads them to a table where a dozen books from the collection have been laid out in cradles. He tells them about each book: what it is, why it is interesting. Each phrase of his presentation is painstakingly translated by the group’s leader into Russian.</blockquote>\r\nWhen academic and community groups visit the Peabody, my colleagues and I draw upon a standard tour-guide’s repertoire to describe it. We explain that George Peabody was a tradesman cum financier cum philanthropist who decided in 1857 that Baltimore needed a cultural institution to support the arts and learning. We talk about the evolution of the Peabody Institute, the four-part athenaeum that resulted, with its art gallery, lecture series, conservatory and free, public, non-circulating library. We discuss the model of philanthropy that George Peabody initiated and its wide-ranging influence. We point out the signal features of the awe-inspiring architecture of the current library, built to accommodate a rapidly growing collection in 1878. But when it comes to the library itself, as a collection, it is hard to know what to say. How to accurately translate the library’s holdings into a succinct and memorable statement that conveys an appropriate level of detail to different audiences? While it poses specific challenges, the Peabody also exemplifies more general problems of collection description.\r\n\r\nWe do not lack evidence for the evolving contents of the Peabody. We have the two-volume printed list of “desiderata” drawn up by the Peabody’s first librarian, John G. Morris. [note number=\'31\']Alphabetical Catalogue of Books to be Purchased for the Library of the Peabody Institute, Baltimore, Vols. 1 and 2 (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1861, 1863).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'6\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-6-alpha-index-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-395\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-395\" title=\"fig 6 alpha index\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1-336x484.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"484\" /></a>Alphabetical index from Alphabetical Catalouge (“desiderata”).[/note] We have the collections register for several decades’-worth of acquisitions, recording bibliographic information and accession numbers that can still be found on the inside front end papers of many of the books in the collection. We have the librarians’ annual reports to the library trustees. [note number=\'32\']The Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore: The Founder’s Letters and the Papers Relating to its Dedication and History, Up to the 1st January, 1868 (Baltimore: William K. Boyle, 1868); and subsequent Annual Reports, 1869, etc.[/note] We have the library’s first printed catalogue, an unsurpassed achievement when first published in 1883, which listed 100,000 volumes by author and title. [note number=\'33\']Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Vols. 1-5 (Baltimore: Isaac Friedenwald, 1883; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, [1961?]; also on googlebooks), and Second Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Including the Additions Made Since 1882, Vols. 1-8 (Baltimore: Deutsch Lithographic and Printing, 1896; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, 1961).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'7\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-7-print-cat/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-396\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-396\" title=\"fig 7 print cat\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).[/note] We have the cards from the Dewey decimal system card catalogue, which replaced the printed catalogue in the 1910s. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'8\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-8-card-cat/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-397\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-397\" title=\"fig 8 card cat\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"448\" /></a>One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.[/note] Now, of course, the library’s collections are represented in an online catalogue that integrates them with other collections in the Hopkins library system.\r\n\r\nThese markers of the collection, however, fail to satisfy some contemporary research queries for reasons that are both practical and philosophical. The transfer of the printed index, organized by author, to the Dewey decimal system, organized by topic, represented a major epistemological shift that facilitated browsing by subject category. But of course, those categories are embedded in historically-bound notions about the subjects and structures of knowledge: Dewey was invented in the 1870s, and the 22 revisions it has undergone since then cannot overcome its essential organizational distortions. For example, the literature range—the 800s—offers only 10% of its categorical space to literatures in languages other than English, Germanic and Romance languages, Greek and Latin.\r\n\r\nIn the case of the Peabody, the Dewey arrangements overlay even older systems of knowledge hierarchy. Should we continue to offer, for example, a description of the Peabody’s “voyages and travels” books? This category represents a Renaissance schematic that was still in service in the mid-nineteenth century; while actual “voyages and travels” were extended by colonial ventures, the category was eventually disbanded. Dewey combined it with geography to make a sub-category of “history.” In keeping active the old-fashioned phrase “voyages and travels,” we are participating in a centuries-long project of euphemism about the material aims and actual activities of colonialism; we are privileging an early phase of the Peabody’s evolution over later phases; we may even be confusing modern researchers. And yet, as one of the topics in Morris’s “desiderata,” a considerable portion of the Peabody’s collection was acquired with the aim of fleshing out that descriptor. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'9\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-9-index-detail/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-398\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-398\" title=\"fig 9 index detail\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail-336x274.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"274\" /></a>Detail of subject index from Alphabetical Catalouge No. 2 (“desiderata”).[/note]\r\n\r\nYet another classificatory dilemma is expressed by George Peabody’s original statement of the library’s purpose: that it “be furnished in every department of knowledge, with the most approved literature… It should consist on the best works on every subject… to satisfy the researches of students who may be engaged in the pursuit of knowledge not ordinarily attainable in the private libraries of the country.” [note number=\'34\']“Letters from George Peabody, Esq.: Baltimore, February 12th, 1857,” in Founder’s Letters, 7.[/note] The Peabody was founded as a cultural institution for the people of Baltimore, but from the first, this democratic ambition was in conflict with the intellectual aspirations of the first librarians and their desire to facilitate civic “self-improvement.” Morris (a doctor of divinity), his successor Nathaniel Holmes Morison (a schoolmaster and poet), and Morison’s assistant and successor Philip Uhler (who had trained as an entomologist) were all devoted to the nineteenth-century idea of the scholar-librarian. Morison wrote in one annual report that “Education always proceeds from the above downward, from the best to the common minds, from the leaders of the people to the people themselves. Furnish... the foundations of intelligence and thought, and they will... stimulate and improve the whole community.\" [note number=\'35\']Qtd. in Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, “PIB Ref. Library. 8-Morison\'s Philosophy of Excellence,” in George Peabody (1795-1869): A-Z Handbook of the Massachusetts-Born Merchant in the South, London-Based Banker, and Philanthropist\'s Life, Influence, and Related People, Places, Events, and Institutions. . 11 Mar. 2011.[/note] When the Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876 in close proximity to the Peabody—in large part to take advantage of the library—the tendency of the librarians to address scholarly needs and “approved literature” over popular desires was given additional momentum. In keeping with these ideas, the Peabody’s librarians kept careful track of their readers’ choices, noting with special caution the numbers of novels that were requested. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'10\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-10-annual-report-detail/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-399\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-399\" title=\"fig 10 annual report detail\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail-336x452.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"452\" /></a>Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.[/note] This schism at the heart of the library’s collecting paradigm was not unique to the Peabody; the question of reading matter—should it offer leisure for the masses or the means of social uplift?—was central to the public library movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. [note number=\'36\']See, for example, Alexis McCrossen, “’One Cathedral More’ or ‘Mere Lounging Places for Bummers’? The Cultural Politics of Leisure and the Public Library in Gilded Age America,” Libraries &amp; Culture 41.2 (2006): 169-188; Paul Sturges, “The Public Library and Reading by the Masses: Historical Perspectives on the USA and Britain 1850-1900,” ; Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, Upon the Objects to be Attained by the Establishment of a Public Library, 12 Dec. 2010.[/note]\r\n\r\nFinally, the Peabody’s “desiderata” acquisitions and librarians’ selections were supplemented by book donations from local elites—bibliophiles with extensive private collections that included incunabula, classical authors in Renaissance editions, expensive illustrated atlases. At the same time, book donations came in from more plebian sources. The Peabody’s growth overlapped with the decline of the local social libraries, and it eventually absorbed some of the books from the Library Company of Baltimore, Robinson’s Circulating Library and several small professional and mechanics’ libraries. And I haven’t even touched on the Peabody’s twentieth-century fate.\r\n\r\nThe variety of philanthropic impulses, resource streams and classification philosophies that have fed the Peabody over the 150 years of its existence has led to a collection that does not so much map the nineteenth-century mind as signal its odd amalgam of popular and scholarly investments. The Peabody’s collection effectively evades succinct description—at least, any kind of description that pretends to be coherent, that is not perforated by its stakes in local history, library history, book history. But more importantly, it suggests the degree to which accident and opportunity and prejudice and wealth and the changing winds of cataloguing rules shape any archive. Description, which should be the most fundamental tool of communication between librarians and researchers, turns out to be utterly elusive. Yet we do not know what to replace them with, these inadequate descriptions, these exercises in stilted and partial translation.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>2. The Researcher’s Progress.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>I am preparing for my class about women and nineteenth-century print culture, which meets in the Peabody; we have reached the part of the syllabus where we look at gift books and annuals. I want students to examine several examples of these literary miscellanies, offering some illustration of their variety, and I have a list of such items that I have used in the past. But since I also want to show the students new acquisitions, I need to refresh my list. I will start with “gift book” as a keyword in the online catalogue.</blockquote>\r\nIn place of perfect and commensurate description—not possible—what we have are cataloguing systems that indexically represent collections through data and metadata that are, as I have already suggested, historically marked and inevitably inconsistent. In the case of the Peabody, these records are further compromised: Dewey cards developed from a nineteenth-century print index do not offer Library of Congress subject terms or detailed tables of contents; they also frequently lack other kinds of information. [note number=\'37\']Many of the electronic records for Peabody books have been copy-cataloged, that is, developed from records for identical books in other libraries. But these records might also be incomplete or inconsistent, given that many are quite old. The expense of original cataloging prevents our staff from creating full, new records for every item in the Peabody’s collection of over 300,000 titles.[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'11\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-11-ddc-cards/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-400\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-400\" title=\"fig 11 ddc cards\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Dewey cards for “gift books.”[/note] My search for “gift book” will turn up bequests—the term “gift book” is often attached to these donations—and it will miss many of the nineteenth-century gift books and annuals in our collection whose records lack subject classifications, or whose subject classifications reference the book’s contents, not its format. For example, the 1848 Rough and Ready Annual: or, Military Souvenir published by Appleton’s has been assigned the subject “Mexican War, 1846-1848—Anecdotes.” [note number=\'38\']Rough and Ready Annual (New York: D. Appleton; Philadelphia: G.S. Appleton, 1848).[/note]\r\n\r\nThe problem of finding is perhaps only a sub-set of the problem of description, but I want to give it special attention because it introduces another variable: the physical space of the object. My search for gift books in the Peabody also entails the privilege of retrieving the books from the stacks. There are two search processes, the intellectual and the physical, that I must navigate. The intellectual search in this case requires a variety of keyword/date range combinations, and ultimately, recourse to my prepared bibliography—a holdover from pre-catalogue research methods. Now the second search begins.\r\n\r\nThe Rough and Ready Annual is at 973.62 A5121, in the “general history of North America; United States” category. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'12\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-12-rr/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-401\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-401\" title=\"fig 12 r&amp;r\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.[/note] This call number range is on the second floor, west side. Other items on my list are in very different parts of the library. Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them, edited by the temperance writer T. S. Arthur and published in London, has been given the call number 813 A7910 duodecimo—fourth floor east, in the “American literature in English, fiction” section. [note number=\'39\']Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them (London: Knight &amp; Co., [1857]). This title does not appear in at least one Arthur bibliography; see Donald A Koch, \"Timothy Shay Arthur,\" Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, ed. Joel Myerson (Detroit: Gale Research, 1979), from Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Feb. 2011. To check on this, I need Mitchell Sharpe Jr.’s A Bibliography of the Published Books of Timothy Shay Arthur (Atlanta: Emory University, 1954), a typewritten quarto at 012 A791S, but it seems to be missing.[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'13\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-13-orange/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-402\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-402\" title=\"fig 13 orange\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Orange Blossoms in the stacks.[/note] Arthur shows up again as co-editor of The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present, which has received more extensive description as it contains the first printing of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Siope.” [note number=\'40\']The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present (Baltimore: Bayly and Burns, [1838]).[/note] We have two copies of this very genteel little gift book, one at 808.83 B2175 (rhetoric &amp; collections of literature), and one at 810.8 C297 (American literature in English). The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons is in the rare book room at the south end of the third floor. [note number=\'41\']The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons (London: The Religious Tract Society, ca. 1850).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'14\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-14-rbr/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-403\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-403\" title=\"fig 14 rbr\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The rare book room.[/note] In this case, the book’s rarity has to do with a lovely fore-edge painting. It has been assigned to 820.8 N42017 (general books about literature). On the other end of the “rare” continuum is The Family Circle and Parlor Annual, volume 5 in a series, which is shelved up on the sixth floor with the periodicals at 051 F198 (serials in American English). [note number=\'42\']The Family Circle and Parlor Annual (New York: Comstock, 1847).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'15\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-15-parlor/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-404\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-404\" title=\"fig 15 parlor\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Parlor Annual in the stacks.[/note]\r\n\r\nI’ll fill out call slips for each book, stick the slips into red flags, and put the flags in an order that will help me chart a logical course through the stacks. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'16\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-16-slips/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-405\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-405\" title=\"fig 16 slips\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Call slips and flags.[/note] It’s easiest to start on the sixth floor and work one’s way down, picking up books along the way. Usually I find other interesting items as I go, so I carry a batch of blank call slips and extra flags. (On this occasion, for example, I find The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse; published in 1813 and inscribed by its owner in 1817, it pre-dates by several years the official beginning of the gift book phenomenon. It might be more of a “literary almanac.” [note number=\'43\']The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse (Philadelphia: David Hogan, 1813).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'17\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-17-new-reader/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-406\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-406\" title=\"fig 17 new reader\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Inscription in The New American Reader.[/note]) Usually I am also unable to locate at least one of the books I have set out to find. Most likely the book has been misshelved, so I’ll check the quartos and folios, which are shelved separately; then I’ll check the rare book room’s octavo, duodecimo and quarto shelving areas. It used to astonish me that books were still shelved by format in the Peabody, but it does save space. At the same time, this shelving system—along with the multiple distinct areas within the library where books may reside, eg the rare book room, the reference section, the genealogy books, the Limited Editions Club, and several discrete named collections—means that retrieving a few books can take quite a long time, as I traipse up and down the six floors of the library, thread through stacks, open secured doors with multiple keys, turn lights on and off, and maneuver a book truck in and out of a tiny service elevator built in the 1920s. By the end of the journey, the library and I will have exchanged dust; I’ll take on a few streaks of red rot, and the library will have taken in particles from my body as well.\r\n\r\nWhile the Peabody is unique, these conditions are not in the end very unusual. In terms of the intellectual search, the absence of “gift book” from many of the catalogue records is no less egregious than the absence of other information—the names of all the contributors; the subjects of the illustrations. The metadata is potentially infinite. The “gift book” only exists as a category because of scholars who teased out this cultural phenomenon; it would be very difficult to define its absolute borders. In terms of the physical search, the Peabody might be messier than, say, a rare book library that has assigned current LC call numbers to all its contents and houses them in compact shelving, but it exemplifies the general on-the-ground situation. As I wind my way through the Peabody stacks, I remember how much more difficult it is to gather research materials from several different institutions.\r\n\r\nThe fact is, for scholars who rely on archives, research is something you do only after you have already undertaken a rigorous search. It is the search that provides you with the foundational sense of your subject. But the search is rarely acknowledged or accredited; even the foot-soldier craft of bibliography, the link between “librarianship” and “scholarship,” has largely lost its scholarly status.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>3. An Architecture of Disctinction.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>A non-affiliate researcher contacts the Peabody about our H. L. Mencken collections. Since she will bring a couple of graduate students with her, I set up a group work space in one of the library alcoves where the three of them can share materials and talk without disturbing other readers. I pull the requested volumes with the help of some students and set the cart up within easy reach of the alcove. When the researchers arrive, I show them the Mencken collections on the ground floor. Then I lead them to their group work space and leave them, returning to the glassed-in office behind the reading room, the vantage point that allows me to monitor the otherwise empty reading room.</blockquote>\r\nIn “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” a team of Dutch sociologists investigates the library as a space that is strongly marked by situational norms—“knowledge-based beliefs about how to behave in particular situations that are shaped by social influence.” [note number=\'44\']Henk Aarts and Ap Dijksterhuis, “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84.1 (2003), 19.[/note] Their research leads them to argue, however, that such norms do not require direct social influences to be triggered; in fact, “the situation can activate mental representations of normative behaviors automatically. And once activated, these representations provide the knowledge necessary for guiding one’s own situationally appropriate behavior.” [note number=\'45\']Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 19.[/note] Physical environments do not necessarily prompt these behaviors; rather, the behavior “depend[s] on whether the environment is of immediate behavioral relevance.” [note number=\'46\']Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 20.[/note] Talking in a quiet voice in the library, a normative behavior, is only activated for those who plan to visit the library.\r\n\r\nTen years ago, when the research for this article was conducted, the “silence of the library” was still a widespread norm. While the situation is now often reversed—in our main campus library, we must designate specific quiet areas because otherwise a sociable undergraduate din would take over—the norm of silence does continue to preside at the Peabody. Because it is off campus, the Peabody is often attractively under-populated compared to the crowded main library; it is mostly used by advanced researchers and those who seek a quiet place to study. The large central open area catches and amplifies even the smallest noises. The shelf-lined alcoves on either side of this central area offer the appearance of privacy, but in fact are little echo chambers. Visitors immediately detect these acoustics, and—except for the periodic tour groups—most spend their time in the Peabody in silence. But it is not just the physics of sound that shape behaviors here, as the Dutch researchers show; the social expectations of the space prefigure those behaviors.\r\n\r\nIn setting up a group work space for the Mencken researchers, I have quite deliberately contravened the usual norm of silence. Clearly, I am not inviting them to shout, and by putting them in an alcove in back, I have taken measures to protect any quiet-seeking visitors who might arrive. But in accordance with new ideas about the use of library space, my colleagues and I have decided that we must accommodate group study even if it might occasionally disrupt the silence desired by others. As it happens, the Mencken researchers’ conversation is eventually interrupted by a tour group, and the two activities play out side by side.\r\n\r\nI must admit that at moments I have mixed feelings about the tour groups and even the study cohorts. While my pedagogical instincts tend towards cheerful hub-bub, there is a part of me that is still in awe of the sanctuary-like atmosphere of the Peabody. John Morris called the library a “cathedral of books,” and clearly that’s what architect Edmund G. Lind had in mind. The central area with its grand skylight and the alcoves on its sides is like a nave bordered with chapels. Lind didn’t need a psychological study of environment-based situational norms to tell him that he might activate different behaviors within his building. The great central space inspires reverence—your eye is drawn to the skylight the way it would be drawn to the rose windows of Chartres, and on its way up catches row upon solemn row of books stowed behind gilded railings, a testament to the accumulated wisdom of the ages. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'18\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-18-skylight/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-407\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-407\" title=\"fig 18 skylight\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"448\" /></a>The skylight in the George Peabody Library.[/note] But step into an alcove, especially on the ground floor where each is filled with an immense wooden table, and you instantly feel something else, something no less grand but more human. The alcoves are study-sized, and once you sit down at one of those dark, gleaming, broad tables, it is like you are the master of your own private library. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'19\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-19-alcove/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-408\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-408\" title=\"fig 19 alcove\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Alcove in the George Peabody Library.[/note]\r\n\r\nIronically, the Peabody’s architecture was out-dated by the time it was completed. With the professionalization of librarianship and the evolution of library science in the late nineteenth century, librarians like William Frederick Poole advocated for a functional rather than decorative design of interior library space. [note number=\'47\']See William Frederick Poole, Remarks on Library Construction (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1884).[/note] Moreover, the actual use of space in the Peabody in the late nineteenth century was at odds with its symbolic appeal. The main library was known as the “stack room”; readers were seated in a comparatively plain reading room on the other side of the main doors. In this arrangement, the librarians reigned inside the gorgeous “cathedral of books,” but the building’s potential to civilize the masses was lost.\r\n\r\nNow, of course, we do not send readers outside. Inside the “stack room,” we explicitly call visitors’ attention to its beauty to explain the connections between the library’s architecture and its collections—how both speak eloquently of Victorian values. At the same time, we who staff the library have relegated ourselves to its periphery. We work in the glassed-in room at one end that serves as a monitoring point and occasional classroom; the official “librarian’s office” in one corner—its luxurious proportions suggesting something like a sacristy and something like a robber baron’s lair—is now shared work-space stuffed with several desks and laden book trucks. There is another monitoring station near the main doors. I often do my work at the photography station, in the back of one of the alcoves [note type=\'figure\' number=\'20\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-20-station/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-409\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-409\" title=\"fig 20 station\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Photography station in the George Peabody Library.[/note]. It offers some privacy but is close enough to the central reading tables to be accessible to readers.\r\n\r\nThe space of the Peabody initiates other situational behaviors besides the norm of silence, and our work-station arrangements testify to this. The spatial re-centralizing of readers and marginalization of staff is not merely practical; it is a reflection of the modern office of librarianship. We are there to be of service, in a para-textual position. Consequently, our work should be out of sight; it should be separate from and secondary to the work that readers do. Our locations call upon us, in other words, to support the scholar’s effort to hide the “seams of [her] findings” by hiding the ways we contribute to that work—by the ways we sometimes do that work.\r\n\r\nI think about these complications as I escort the Mencken researchers to their table and walk back to the glassed-in office, where there is nothing pressing for me to do. I’d rather spend more time talking with them. I’d like to learn about their research and introduce them to some underappreciated parts of the collection. I’d like to share with them what I learned curating an exhibition of Mencken-related magazines and writing about one of those magazines. But I don’t want to get in their way; it’s likely that they are ready to get on with work that they don’t see as connected to mine. The professional norms of the archive are strong, and although I know how to talk about my research in many contexts—in presentations, interviews, hotel elevators—I haven’t figured out how to mix my scholarly role with the curatorial role I am supposed to play here, in the Peabody. In the end, I say nothing. Professional segregation is another kind of silence in the library.\r\n\r\nWe cannot change the archaeological record beneath our feet, but we can rearrange the fossils we dig up to create new narratives. We can tell different kinds of archive stories, including the story of what research in the archive was and is. Is it too idealistic to expect that dissolving the entrenched fantasies about archival research will make room for new methods? Is it naïve to imagine a space that, in putting into practice the archival turn’s preliminary insights about disciplinary and disorder, can support experimentation, facilitate connection across professions and disciplines, and enable new discoveries?','Disciplinarity and Disorder','','inherit','open','open','','2199-revision-30','','','2013-07-10 06:14:25','2013-07-10 06:14:25','',2199,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/2199-revision-30/',0,'revision','',0),(5046,10,'2013-07-10 06:23:10','2013-07-10 06:23:10','[gallery ids=\"373,372,369\"]','3Texts','','trash','open','open','','3texts','','','2013-07-11 21:37:54','2013-07-11 21:37:54','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?p=5046',0,'post','',0),(5047,10,'2013-07-10 06:22:18','2013-07-10 06:22:18','[gallery ids=\"373,372,369\"]','3Texts','','inherit','open','open','','5046-revision','','','2013-07-10 06:22:18','2013-07-10 06:22:18','',5046,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/5046-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(5053,10,'2013-07-10 06:50:19','2013-07-10 06:50:19','The primal scene of archival research takes place in a dreary reading room. A researcher sits at her table, inert. An archivist enters, pushing a cart that bears a dozen dusty gray boxes. (See Figure 1.)\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ykY6moIaDE?rel=0\" height=\"250\" width=\"333\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe>\r\n[caption]Figure 1. A staged archival encounter.[/caption]\r\n\r\nThe archivist unhinges a box, removes a numbered file folder and, placing it at the researcher’s elbow, steps back. The researcher stirs, then sits upright with a mechanical jolt. She turns sharply in the direction of the folder, flips it open and cocks her head towards the flimsy leaves inside; now she is reading. (Zoom in on the eyes as they click into focus.) Now she is reading, and now she truly comes alive; she bends towards the papers, taps her forehead in thought. A sheaf of blank paper and a pencil appear on her table, and she begins taking notes. Her fingers fly—and soon, so do the pages she is writing upon. Caught up in eddies of excitement, they swoop to the ceiling and around the room and down to the floor, where they fall together into perfect piles. Bindings sprout from the outer strata; the pages sew themselves into bright, tight, hard-cover books. These the archivist gathers up and places on the shelves that line the room, next to other books and gray boxes.\r\n\r\nI may have it backwards: in other versions of the fantasy, it is the archive that is first animated by the presence of the researcher, a Dr. Coppelius who waves a pencil and sets the dusty boxes to dancing. But either way, the archival imaginary posits a symbiotic relationship between researcher and source, a photogenic pas de deux that leads to a finished scholarly product. This work, in turn, enters the archive for the next generation of researchers; it might even be taken apart again so that its secret ingredients (notes, drafts, letters) can themselves be served up in a series of boxes. Such a strangely private form of publication it creates, the coupling of researcher and source.\r\n\r\nWhat Freudian trauma results from witnessing this sight? Only the harm that myth inflicts. This primal scene is a fiction, a dream of perfect union between researcher and source that ignores, first of all, the full cast of characters. What about the archivist, who is rendered invisible? What about all those within and without the archive, upon whose labor—acquiring, preserving, organizing, reading, cataloging, describing, interpreting, analyzing, debating, teaching, writing, editing, digitizing, referencing and publishing—the current project depends? More a barn dance than a pas de deux: an archival encounter is an enactment of social authorship long before the researcher enters the room. ((See Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) on the idea of social authorship, which could be described as “the dialectic between the historically located individual author and the historically developed institutions of literary production” that help create a work, e.g., printers, publishers, editors and readers (81).))\r\n\r\nBut even a barn dance is much too mannered a metaphor. The sketch above misleads us more generally about the experience on the ground. Doing time in an archive is often tedious, uncomfortable and bewildering. For librarians, there is the struggle to promote and simultaneously protect what you have; the difficulty of fitting unruly materials into arrangements and workflows; and worries about space and time—where to put it all, how to address your backlog. For researchers, there is the struggle to locate the archives you need and what matters to you inside them; the uncertainty created by unruly data; and worries about time and space— how to access what you need during your research trip, how to record and organize the information you gather. At both ends, the archival encounter is counter-cinematic and erratic, days of monotonous sifting and dead-ends punctuated by one or two, or maybe zero, hidden moments of vivid, peculiar joy.\r\n\r\nSo archival research does not fulfill its ideal outline. So what? Who cares? Why dredge up the fantasy? Because the fantasy continues to structure our archival encounters—what we expect and undertake in the reading room, what we allow it to mean. Twenty years ago, Alice Kaplan observed that “conventional academic discourse requires that when you write up the results of your archival work, you tell a story about what you found, but not about how you found it. The less the seams of your findings show, the better your discoveries lend themselves to use by others… tell[ing] these stories breaks their spell and violates the spirit of the archives.” ((Alice Yaeger Kaplan, “Working in the Archives,” Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 103-116; 103, 107.)) With a few word changes, the same could be said about what counts as professional archivist discourse: the impersonal, neutral genre of the finding aid, for example, should say what is in a collection, but should not discuss what is confusing or missing in it, or the problems it posed in processing. ((See, for example, James M. O’Toole and Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006).)) Despite the growing recognition that this sequestration is never completely possible—that the material conditions and social relations of the archive shape the work we do in it—that work continues to be represented in professional and scholarly publications as if it is. Despite the recent call to move to the fore “the backstage of the archives—how they are constructed, policed, experienced, and manipulated” in order to support historiography “not merely [as] a project of fact-retrieval” but as “a set of complex processes of selection, interpretation, and even creative invention,” the “backstage” stays in the background. ((Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 7-8.)) Antoinette Burton may be correct that “many if not most historians operate under the assumption that history is a highly interpretive act,” but this belief is not yet reflected in the archival encounter: the ways that researchers (not just historians) and librarians report their experiences with primary sources; the ways that librarians and researchers work together; the ways librarians and researchers regard the involvement of “non specialists.” ((Burton, 8. Burton notes that “whether historians concede or fully countenance the impact of such contingencies on their work is another question. They rarely speak of them, and even more rarely do they do so in print” (8). Her books recuperates some of those archive stories but this effort, I’ll suggest below, is hampered by other kinds of obligations.)) While the advent of digitization and electronic resource sharing has revolutionized the research landscape, making primary sources public in unprecedented ways, there remains in the archive a habitus of secret knowledge—the “spell” that Kaplan is loathe to break. This is not necessarily intentional. It is rather the effect of layering recent shifts in technology, theory and professional definition onto older foundations: petrified conditions, relations, expectations and systems that continue to operate in part through the enduring power of fantasies about research. What we have in the archive is a stratified groundwork that still governs our archival encounters.\r\n\r\nBut, you will object, the archive has already changed. Now we have the “archival turn”—the scholarly interest in the archive not just as a source of evidence but as an epistemological mode. Surely, this attention to the constructedness of the archive has led to a revealing reconsideration of what actually goes on inside an archive; surely, as a result, those archaic fantasies have diminished. Have they? In what follows, I begin by unearthing one stratum of the archival turn, the decade of the 1990s, as represented by three texts: Kaplan’s essay mentioned above, “Working in the Archives” (1990). (See Figure 2.)\r\n\r\nFigure 2.\r\n[gallery ids=\"373,372,369\"]\r\nA cross-examination of these three texts reveals a pattern of interests, a set of efforts to defy customary practices—but only, it turns out, “in theory.” While certain practices are challenged in these texts, they leave mostly intact the older strata of archival research fantasies and conventions. Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman do not dislodge the forces that organize the actual archival encounter.\r\n\r\nHow does this happen? Why is practice so stubborn? We need another take on archival practice: not practice in theory, but practice in action; not the 1990s, but now; not in terms of textual patterns, but in terms that suit the subject: the terms of the archival encounter itself, and the eccentric, anachronistic and even monotonous experience it generates. My second look at practice will take the form of a series of vignettes about a real-life archive, the George Peabody Library in Baltimore. While this narrative structure may seem to recreate the division of labor between theory and practice, my hope is that—by giving practice the last word—we’ll be in a better position to synthesize the two.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>I. “The library doubles as a detective’s office.” ((Kaplan, 114.))</strong>\r\n\r\nThe archival turn could be dated to the founding of “scientific” history in the mid-nineteenth century, or to the development a century later of the quantitative methods of the Annales School, or to other evidence-based movements in the history of history, but what is generally meant by this phrase corresponds with the formation of cultural studies and the use of the archive as a conceptual category. That is, the archival turn has to do with the notion of the “figuration” of the archive, a parallel decline in its empirical authority and a related expansion of its relevance within domains that are not exclusively historiographic, like art, literary criticism, textual studies, media studies and information studies. ((See the use of the term in, for example, Carolyn Hamilton et al, eds., Refiguring the Archive (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), Cheryl Simon, ed., Following the Archival Turn: Photography, the Museum, and the Archive, special issue of Visual Resources: A Journal of Documentation 18.2 (June 2002), and Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). This turn is partially construed as a “move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject,” but also by the earlier metaphorical interest in “the archive” that goes back to the 1980s (Stoler, 44-45) and by Foucauldian descriptions of archives as “‘monuments to particular configurations of power” (Hamilton, qtd. in Burton, 6).)) But it is not irrelevant that a devotion to archival methods precedes by many decades contemporary theories of the archive; if the archival turn lacks a precise origin, this (we will see) is completely in keeping with its own preoccupations.\r\n\r\nKaplan therefore represents in some ways an arbitrary beginning for this cross-examination—clearly the archive as a conceptual category predates 1990—but her article does initiate something new: the recognition that there is something called an “archive story” that must remain hidden in order for the official “results” to function authoritatively. In admitting this bit of professional legerdemain, and in telling her own archive story in a prestigious scholarly journal, Kaplan not only commits the violation she prohibits but also contradicts it. Through its publication, Kaplan’s own archive story is elevated to the status of “results”—a kind of research that shadows conventional academic discourse. Indeed, Kaplan notes, such “fables” of research “can be analyzed like a text,” a “mixed up genre” that combines the “redemptive detective fiction” with the epic and the dime novel. ((Kaplan, 106, 107.))\r\n\r\nKaplan’s archive story thus marks a distinctive moment in the archival turn—one which gained its most prominent authorization in 1994, with a paper that Jacques Derrida delivered (in English) to a conference sponsored by the Freud Museum, the Courtauld Institute and the Société International d’Histoire de la Psychiatrie et de la Psychoanalyse. Called initially “The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression,” the lecture was revised and published in 1995 as Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne in French; the published English version echoed the French publication with its 1995 title Archive Fever. As Carolyn Steedman points out in Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, however, this work that has been assigned a seminal status in archival studies “for the main part… is not about archives at all, but is rather a sustained contemplation of a work of history, of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (1991),” itself a sustained contemplation of Moses and Monotheism—which (according to Steedman) Yerushalmi examines through Freud’s description of the work as a “‘historical novel,’ or a kind of historical story,” undertaken “in order to understand the period of baroque anti-semitism through which he was living.” ((Steedman, 3.))\r\n\r\nDizzy yet? Let’s undertake a more careful reading of this splatter pattern of intra-references—or, to stick with the archaeological metaphor, let’s call them groups of potsherds buried in the 1990s layer of the “archival turn.” Digging down to reassemble them reveals a set of interests with special implications for archival practice.\r\n\r\nThe most prominent group of sherds to note are the fragments of disciplinarity: the inter-, multi- or perhaps simply anti-disciplinarity of the texts, authors and audiences caught up in these three archival addresses. Kaplan, an American scholar of French literature, calls the post-theory exchange between literature and history a “cross-pollination of desire between historians and literary critics” undertaken “with the curiosity and energetic passion of collectors.” ((Kaplan, 107-108.)) Steedman, a British historian, performs this cross-pollinating process without comment: her epigraph to Dust is from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, one chapter treats George Eliot’s Middlemarch in depth… in fact, almost every chapter depends on a literary text. ((Another chapter invokes Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel Mary Barton, a third is anchored by W. H. Auden’s poem “Homage to Clio,” and a fourth finds its most eloquent examples in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.)) Derrida, a French philosopher, produced a work that has been exceptionally mobile across disciplines, forms, languages and professional domains. He gave his initial talk to an audience drawing on three different kinds of institutions; Mal d’Archive was published in book form in both French and English, but also made an intermediate appearance as an essay in the journal diacritics. All of these texts, it seems, respond to the provocations of the archive—to the materials and circumstances of discovery—rather than to the disciplinary distinctions that arguably divide the archive from itself.\r\n\r\nArchive Fever has become a founding document even though, as Steedman notes in the very beginning of her book, many in Derrida’s audience “knew the ‘archival turn’ to be [already] well underway” at the time of his talk. ((Steedman, 2.)) As it happens—and this is the second group of sherds I see—these three essays have in common an investment in or a problem with origins, especially with the failure of origins. Derrida, for example, defines archive fever as a kind of Freudian death drive—a drive to fix and preserve which at the same time “works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own ‘proper’ traces… [it] is above all anarchivic, one could say, or archiviolithic… the archive always works, and a priori, against itself.” ((Derrida, 14.)) If the archival impulse is driven to destroy its own work, then the question of origins ultimately point to the larger question of disorder. The disorder of origins makes frequent appearances in the essay but one example will make the point—in the “Preamble” where he recounts how he titled the talk that he had not yet written and was to give at the Freud Museum. The “Preamble” starts with his reflections on the word “impression,” which has several simultaneous registers of meaning for him. One of these is the “scriptural or typographic” register: that of the graphic impression that marks a substrate. In English, “impression” is phonetically related to “repression” and “suppression,” key words in the Freudian vocabulary, translated respectively from the German Verdrängung and Unterdrückung. English, that is, retains the rhyming relationship of the two German terms, and “impression” in this company comes to have a vaguely Freudian meaning as well. But in French, Verdrängung is “refoulement,” which means something more like expulsion, a driving away. The Freudian sense of the French word “répression” has been reserved for Unterdrückung. So English “repression” defines a phenomenon that must be distinguished from the French “répression.” These translational shifts “directly concern the structures of archivization,” Derrida says, “because they touch on the topic differences and thus on the location of the substrates of traces\" (Derrida, 23). In other words, how do you classify concepts whose meanings shift across languages? Where do you store them in a disciplinary grammar—or in an archive? How do these asymmetrical linguistic structures shape the establishment and extension of a new science? For Derrida, the difference between “repression” and “répression” is “enough to disrupt the tranquil landscape of all historical knowledge, of all historiography, and even of all self-consistent ‘scholarship’” ((Derrida, 23.))\r\n\r\nOrigin failure appears both as deliberate performance and as unintentional oversight in these essays. Derrida stages his own inability to get past “go”; with an introductory section, and subsequent sections sub-titled “Exergue,” “Preamble,” “Foreword,” his essay functions, Steedman notes, like a “primer offering instruction in the principle of deferral.” ((A short notice called “Priere d’inserer,” published only in the French book version, carried the bulk of an argument for which there was no room in the lecture. Steedman, 7.)) For all her insight into Derrida’s titling adventures, however, Steedman’s title is marked by its own origin aporia. While her first chapter is devoted to Archive Fever—a “let’s begin at the beginning” homage to the seminal text—her book’s title, Dust, seems more indebted to the last sentence of Kaplan’s essay, published five years before Derrida’s: “Usually there is no mother lode, no original manuscript to be retrieved—the gold is all in the dust.” ((Kaplan, 116.)) Kaplan, however, is never mentioned. ((Kaplan also begins her essay with a brief consideration of the “arche,” the Greek and Latin term for the public records office, which is a major starting point for Derrida. Is he borrowing from her, or is she borrowing from him, given that this sort of etymological investigation was an established signature of Deconstruction?))\r\n\r\nKaplan, for her part, unravels her own archive story. She gives us a kind of “whodunit”—her search for the ephemeral sources of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s anti-semitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937). She uses this account to exemplify her effort to “move through the archival process and recover some of the stories that get deleted in the final scholarly form.” ((Kaplan, 104. For this reason, perhaps, Kaplan never reveals what she ultimately discovers in her successful search for Celine’s sources. In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether her pre-emptive and truncated treatment of her archive story is deliberate or not. Is this treatment meant to indirectly support her official claim about “results”? Or does the presence of the archive story suggest that telling it is an impulse she can’t quite control? Thanks, Lauren Coats, for helping tease this problem out.)) These beginnings are preemptively struck out, however, by what seems to be her main claim: “the passion of the archives must finally be used to eradicate all personal stories in the interests of the dry archival report, fit for a public.” ((Kaplan, 103.)) Only in the “para-text”—a preface, for example—can the archive story appear without “interrupt[ing] or complicat[ing] the narrative so much that no results could ever be understood or perceived.” ((Kaplan, 104.)) Despite this unequivocal assertion, the personal “whodunit” prevails in her essay, especially in the final section set in the Centre du documentation juive contemporain (CDJC). (See Figure 3.) It is this library, where Kaplan solves the mystery of Céline’s sources, that “doubles as a detective’s office.”\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_423\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"333\"]<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-5-cdjc-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-423\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-423\" title=\"fig 5 cdjc\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1-333x250.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a> Figure 3. Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhile Kaplan’s research mystery resolves neatly, the truth about archives is that they are full of gaps, mistakes and excesses: in the words of one of the CDJC librarians, “‘ici on trouve tout’—there’s some of everything here”—but not, one could add, all of anything. ((Kaplan, 115.)) Kaplan’s essay ends by nullifying both her detective story success and her “dry archival report,” by recognizing the disorder on which both of these narratives are unsteadily perched: “The archive is constituted by these errors, these pieces out of place, which are then reintegrated into a story of some kind.” ((Kaplan, 115.)) “A story of some kind”? So much for “results.”\r\n\r\nKaplan sets us up to perceive one final potsherd pattern common to these three essays. If origin-less disorder is the order of the archive, it is a disorder that is generated out of human loss—a disorder that joins the body and the material world. The archive is always predicated on historical violence of some sort, whatever is censored, erased, excluded, trumped up, used up, misplaced, conquered, killed. Moreover, the archival categories that mark both the visible victories and hidden defeats do not stay within their walls; the archive is both a repository of existing schemas and a means of perpetuating them in the world beyond. While we might usually think of this disciplinary activity as a pact between the archive and its political authors, Steedman makes it clear that the dilemmas of order shape the archival body in many ways. For example, she takes literally the provocation of Derrida’s title Archive Fever to investigate the illness that researchers contract on the penultimate day of their trip to the archive: prompted by the anxiety of the task that remains unfinished, they end their research with night-sweats and head-aches. But what seems like a strangely specific malady is transformed by Steedman into a far-reaching social symptom: by relating the researcher’s “archive fever” to the terrible diseases suffered by tanners, skinners and other workers in the trades associated with paper and leather, Steedman expands our sense of who is in the archive—the bodies whose specialized labors populate our libraries with books, the many kinds of expertise the archive consumes.\r\n\r\nFor Derrida, the relation between the material archive and its human architects focuses on one kind of “graphic mark,” a particular “private inscription”: circumcision as the archival signature that is also the signature of patrimoine, with Freud’s relationship to his father as his main example. ((Derrida, 19.)) It is perhaps not a coincidence that the body in question in both Kaplan’s and Derrida’s archive is Jewish, for that is a body that has come to symbolize the destructive power of classificatory regimes. Despite her contention that the private passions motivating research must be kept secret, Kaplan is fascinated by the “missing person stories” at the CDJC: by the “quantity of people who are there for personal reasons,” the survivors of occupation or deportation or camps, or their descendants, quietly looking up their lost ones or noisily dropping off their memoirs. ((Kaplan, 113.)) This disorganized crowd of dead and living bodies tries to meet up with an equally disorganized crowd of materials—individual letters, trial transcripts, pamphlets, newspapers, first-person accounts, books, photographs, lists. The monumental task of match-making, the librarians’ work, is never complete. More papers are always generated or declassified or discovered, different human questions and needs emerge. The tidy choreography of the research fantasy, where the detective always finds her man, is not so much in evidence; what we have instead is corpora in excess of existing categories.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\nKaplan, Derrida and Steedman open up the archival body. They show us how paper meets the press of flesh; they make us feel just how intimate it is. ((This interest in the corporeal dimensions and effects of order, its human and non-human components, has in common with their other gestures—an experimental attitude towards conventional disciplinarity and attention to the priority of disorder—the circumstances of the academic humanities in the 1990s. Since the archival turn came out of the ascent of cultural studies and allied intrigues in the 1970s and ‘80s, the circles in the Venn diagram of these ventures will necessarily overlap. We could also say that the archive took off when it did precisely because it made a clever new container for these preoccupations, thick in the humanities atmosphere at the time, where they were distilled and united. )) But for all their revelations about the limits of discipline and the multiplicities of disorder in the archive, these texts do not disclose the specific methods of engagement that led to their existence. While Kaplan offers up her own archival victory and outlines several other such stories, she still insists on their marginalization. ((“Were the story of how you got the story really to be told inside the book, it would interrupt or complicate the narrative so much that no results could be understood or even perceived. Every story of success in the archives is emotionally charged, for only the most extreme emotions can drive people to the drudgery, to the discomfort, of sitting and sifting through dog-eared documents, manuscripts, microfilms. To reveal those emotions would not only gum up the narrative, it would threaten its credibility, by showing on what thin strands of coincidence, accident, or on what unfair forms of friendship, ownership, geographical proximity, the discoveries were based” (Kaplan, 104).)) If these texts are not concerned with actual practices in the archive or changes in its methodologies, what do they tell us?\r\n\r\nFirst, they suggest one reason for the perpetuation of myths about the archive. While Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman are eager to show how archival materials do not conform to disciplinary distinctions—an enthusiasm related to other disruptive tendencies in late twentieth-century humanist scholarship –they seem less cognizant of a related phenomenon: the archive does not obey strict professional divisions, either. In Kaplan’s library-as-detective’s-office metaphor, the scholar is the detective, but does the “Eureka” moment belong only to the scholar who pieces together a narrative? What about the people who prepared those pieces? The archivist is still missing in action. Likewise, these essays do not dwell on missing boxes, illegible papers, neglected citations. There are no descriptions of archival slogging, no admissions that some materials failed to be relevant. And of course, there are no prescriptions for a different order. It is not the main aim of Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman to effect an evolution of practice; archival turnistas are not interested in disorder in order to re-order. But it is worth remembering that it is not in their professional interest as scholars to make their practices more transparent.\r\n\r\nSecondly, along the same lines, these texts inform us of the duplicity of speculative practices that reveal but cannot live out the instability of their archival mandates. Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman are put into the position of saying, “Yes, the archive is biased, idiosyncratic and treacherous—but the observations I draw from it are flawless.” ((Derrida, unlike Kaplan and Steedman, makes no claims to work inside an actual archive, unless we consider Yerushalmi’s book as a kind of archive. But the fact that the essay was written self-consciously for presentation at the Freud Museum suggests that it was made out of an archive indirectly—in its construction, if not in its contents.))\r\n\r\nFinally, these texts suggest why archival studies that attempt to be explicit about the messy nature of the archive have become instead “archive studies.” In more recent works like Refiguring the Archive (2002), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (2005) and Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009), the archive appears as a subject in its own right. Although the archival scenarios that are put into play in each of these books incorporate different disciplines—art, history, anthropology, literature, post-colonial studies—they have essentially created a new discipline. “Archive studies” is something we might, in the taxonomy of disciplines, see as the love-child of cultural studies, history and archival methodology. Moreover, this new discipline has in common with other humanities disciplines a complete blindness about its professional investments; it does not register much awareness of the professional investments of librarians, archivists, curators and “non-specialists,” or invite insights from those perspectives. Perhaps this is inevitably what happens when academics must give legitimacy to something new, which in turn reflects the pressures of scholarly communication: a topic must be delineated in conventional terms in order to merit publication. ((Perhaps this is also the moment to ask why we—I—have been using the term “archive” all along, with its statist resonances, rather than the term “collection,” which has institutional but also personal resonances. Does “archive” bring us closer to recognizably “serious scholarship”?)) But it is also true that in these more recent books, which openly investigate the archive’s power-politics, the disorderly drift of the archive and its hybrid corporeality have mostly been bent towards a particular narrative about the archive as an agent of history rather than as a set of ongoing practices. It is as if the historical archive has been assembled in ways that reflect and reiterate power relations, but the contemporary archive has not; it is as if the researcher’s own research travails remain a transparent layer over the body of work that it constructs. ((Of course, this is precisely what Derrida meant about the “death drive” of the archival impulse. Archive Stories is something of an exception; researchers speak openly here about themselves as researchers. It is interesting, however, that this book—like Steedman’s—doesn’t cite Kaplan’s essay as a precursor text despite the clear titular link.))\r\n\r\nPerhaps it would also be fair to note that, if archival studies are now being formulated as an interdisciplinary discipline called “archive studies,” this might be just another stage in the turn. It might be that what comes next reconfigures the premise of disciplinarity and the promise of disorder, with a different approach to the human/non-human interactions that the archive documents and realizes: a more diffuse and multi-vocal set of practices in place of a new field. One way to imagine this approach would be to fully embrace Kaplan’s idea of the archive story as an account of what one hoped for, looked for and found, what one did and did not do, in the archive—an account loosed from the quarantine she advocates. Some very basic genre precedents for the archive story do exist; the bibliographic essay and the methodology statement, for example, have played an important role in many disciplines in the past and still do in some. Instead of a para-textual nod towards that archive story (in Kaplan’s sense), why not create a parallel text written collaboratively by the researcher(s) and the librarian(s), or by one person acting in both professional capacities, that runs alongside the official “results”? Or in a set of expanded notes that address not just the “what” and “where” but the “how” and “why” of sources, which are lifted from their small-type, bottom-of-page basement up into the light? Or—to add yet another layer—parallel texts that also offer room for exchange with other researchers, archivists and even interested “non specialists,” like collectors, bibliophiles and fans?\r\n\r\nIf it is hasn’t been clear already that I have scrupulously avoided so far the other kind of archive, the digital archive, it will be now. What I am imagining would be far too complicated to produce or consult in print, but would not be at all difficult to organize as a digital object—as an archive in its own right. By avoiding the digital archive up to this point, I have also finessed the fact that our current archival research methods are completely reliant on the digital archive, along with the development of online research tools and electronic instruments of data discovery and organization. Those conditions probably bear the most responsibility for making the archive visible as something that warranted a “turn” in the first place. Even Derrida refers in each version of Archive Fever to the computer on which he is currently composing, predicting that email will not only totally transform the archive as he knows it, but will make his own essay obsolete.\r\n\r\nIn short, we already have in place both the theory and the media that will make it possible to enact a radical new archival practice. We have in place what we need to integrate the archive story into the archive itself, while making it visible as a new form of “results.”\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>II. The library doubles as a librarian’s office.</strong>\r\n\r\nI could end here, with a triumphant firing of the starter pistol and a rousing cheer. But that would be a bit disingenuous, given that the starter pistol for both the archival turn and the academic use of the internet actually went off decades ago. So the question remains, what stands in the way of the practical enactment of the archival turn’s speculative insights? I’d like to engage this question by following Kaplan’s example (but not her main claim): through some archive story-telling about the George Peabody Library. These three vignettes, identified as “typical” through conversations with my colleague Paul Espinosa, illustrate the intractable formations that present-day archival encounters come up against.\r\n\r\n<strong>1. The Perils of Description.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>A group of Russian speakers visits the Peabody Library. The dozen men and women sit down around the screen that Paul has set up. He narrates a brief slide-show about the Peabody’s history, then leads them to a table where a dozen books from the collection have been laid out in cradles. He tells them about each book: what it is, why it is interesting. Each phrase of his presentation is painstakingly translated by the group’s leader into Russian.</blockquote>\r\nWhen academic and community groups visit the Peabody, my colleagues and I draw upon a standard tour-guide’s repertoire to describe it. We explain that George Peabody was a tradesman cum financier cum philanthropist who decided in 1857 that Baltimore needed a cultural institution to support the arts and learning. We talk about the evolution of the Peabody Institute, the four-part athenaeum that resulted, with its art gallery, lecture series, conservatory and free, public, non-circulating library. We discuss the model of philanthropy that George Peabody initiated and its wide-ranging influence. We point out the signal features of the awe-inspiring architecture of the current library, built to accommodate a rapidly growing collection in 1878. But when it comes to the library itself, as a collection, it is hard to know what to say. How to accurately translate the library’s holdings into a succinct and memorable statement that conveys an appropriate level of detail to different audiences? While it poses specific challenges, the Peabody also exemplifies more general problems of collection description.\r\n\r\nWe do not lack evidence for the evolving contents of the Peabody. We have the two-volume printed list of “desiderata” drawn up by the Peabody’s first librarian, John G. Morris. ((Alphabetical Catalogue of Books to be Purchased for the Library of the Peabody Institute, Baltimore, Vols. 1 and 2 (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1861, 1863).)) \r\n[caption]<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-6-alpha-index-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-395\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-395\" title=\"fig 6 alpha index\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1-336x484.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"484\" /></a>Alphabetical index from Alphabetical Catalouge (“desiderata”).[/caption] We have the collections register for several decades’-worth of acquisitions, recording bibliographic information and accession numbers that can still be found on the inside front end papers of many of the books in the collection. We have the librarians’ annual reports to the library trustees. ((The Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore: The Founder’s Letters and the Papers Relating to its Dedication and History, Up to the 1st January, 1868 (Baltimore: William K. Boyle, 1868); and subsequent Annual Reports, 1869, etc.)) We have the library’s first printed catalogue, an unsurpassed achievement when first published in 1883, which listed 100,000 volumes by author and title. ((Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Vols. 1-5 (Baltimore: Isaac Friedenwald, 1883; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, [1961?]; also on googlebooks), and Second Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Including the Additions Made Since 1882, Vols. 1-8 (Baltimore: Deutsch Lithographic and Printing, 1896; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, 1961).)) [caption]<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-7-print-cat/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-396\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-396\" title=\"fig 7 print cat\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).[/caption] We have the cards from the Dewey decimal system card catalogue, which replaced the printed catalogue in the 1910s. [caption]<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-8-card-cat/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-397\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-397\" title=\"fig 8 card cat\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"448\" /></a>One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.[/caption] Now, of course, the library’s collections are represented in an online catalogue that integrates them with other collections in the Hopkins library system.\r\n\r\nThese markers of the collection, however, fail to satisfy some contemporary research queries for reasons that are both practical and philosophical. The transfer of the printed index, organized by author, to the Dewey decimal system, organized by topic, represented a major epistemological shift that facilitated browsing by subject category. But of course, those categories are embedded in historically-bound notions about the subjects and structures of knowledge: Dewey was invented in the 1870s, and the 22 revisions it has undergone since then cannot overcome its essential organizational distortions. For example, the literature range—the 800s—offers only 10% of its categorical space to literatures in languages other than English, Germanic and Romance languages, Greek and Latin.\r\n\r\nIn the case of the Peabody, the Dewey arrangements overlay even older systems of knowledge hierarchy. Should we continue to offer, for example, a description of the Peabody’s “voyages and travels” books? This category represents a Renaissance schematic that was still in service in the mid-nineteenth century; while actual “voyages and travels” were extended by colonial ventures, the category was eventually disbanded. Dewey combined it with geography to make a sub-category of “history.” In keeping active the old-fashioned phrase “voyages and travels,” we are participating in a centuries-long project of euphemism about the material aims and actual activities of colonialism; we are privileging an early phase of the Peabody’s evolution over later phases; we may even be confusing modern researchers. And yet, as one of the topics in Morris’s “desiderata,” a considerable portion of the Peabody’s collection was acquired with the aim of fleshing out that descriptor. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'9\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-9-index-detail/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-398\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-398\" title=\"fig 9 index detail\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail-336x274.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"274\" /></a>Detail of subject index from Alphabetical Catalouge No. 2 (“desiderata”).[/note]\r\n\r\nYet another classificatory dilemma is expressed by George Peabody’s original statement of the library’s purpose: that it “be furnished in every department of knowledge, with the most approved literature… It should consist on the best works on every subject… to satisfy the researches of students who may be engaged in the pursuit of knowledge not ordinarily attainable in the private libraries of the country.” [note number=\'34\']“Letters from George Peabody, Esq.: Baltimore, February 12th, 1857,” in Founder’s Letters, 7.[/note] The Peabody was founded as a cultural institution for the people of Baltimore, but from the first, this democratic ambition was in conflict with the intellectual aspirations of the first librarians and their desire to facilitate civic “self-improvement.” Morris (a doctor of divinity), his successor Nathaniel Holmes Morison (a schoolmaster and poet), and Morison’s assistant and successor Philip Uhler (who had trained as an entomologist) were all devoted to the nineteenth-century idea of the scholar-librarian. Morison wrote in one annual report that “Education always proceeds from the above downward, from the best to the common minds, from the leaders of the people to the people themselves. Furnish... the foundations of intelligence and thought, and they will... stimulate and improve the whole community.\" [note number=\'35\']Qtd. in Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, “PIB Ref. Library. 8-Morison\'s Philosophy of Excellence,” in George Peabody (1795-1869): A-Z Handbook of the Massachusetts-Born Merchant in the South, London-Based Banker, and Philanthropist\'s Life, Influence, and Related People, Places, Events, and Institutions. . 11 Mar. 2011.[/note] When the Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876 in close proximity to the Peabody—in large part to take advantage of the library—the tendency of the librarians to address scholarly needs and “approved literature” over popular desires was given additional momentum. In keeping with these ideas, the Peabody’s librarians kept careful track of their readers’ choices, noting with special caution the numbers of novels that were requested. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'10\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-10-annual-report-detail/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-399\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-399\" title=\"fig 10 annual report detail\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail-336x452.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"452\" /></a>Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.[/note] This schism at the heart of the library’s collecting paradigm was not unique to the Peabody; the question of reading matter—should it offer leisure for the masses or the means of social uplift?—was central to the public library movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. [note number=\'36\']See, for example, Alexis McCrossen, “’One Cathedral More’ or ‘Mere Lounging Places for Bummers’? The Cultural Politics of Leisure and the Public Library in Gilded Age America,” Libraries &amp; Culture 41.2 (2006): 169-188; Paul Sturges, “The Public Library and Reading by the Masses: Historical Perspectives on the USA and Britain 1850-1900,” ; Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, Upon the Objects to be Attained by the Establishment of a Public Library, 12 Dec. 2010.[/note]\r\n\r\nFinally, the Peabody’s “desiderata” acquisitions and librarians’ selections were supplemented by book donations from local elites—bibliophiles with extensive private collections that included incunabula, classical authors in Renaissance editions, expensive illustrated atlases. At the same time, book donations came in from more plebian sources. The Peabody’s growth overlapped with the decline of the local social libraries, and it eventually absorbed some of the books from the Library Company of Baltimore, Robinson’s Circulating Library and several small professional and mechanics’ libraries. And I haven’t even touched on the Peabody’s twentieth-century fate.\r\n\r\nThe variety of philanthropic impulses, resource streams and classification philosophies that have fed the Peabody over the 150 years of its existence has led to a collection that does not so much map the nineteenth-century mind as signal its odd amalgam of popular and scholarly investments. The Peabody’s collection effectively evades succinct description—at least, any kind of description that pretends to be coherent, that is not perforated by its stakes in local history, library history, book history. But more importantly, it suggests the degree to which accident and opportunity and prejudice and wealth and the changing winds of cataloguing rules shape any archive. Description, which should be the most fundamental tool of communication between librarians and researchers, turns out to be utterly elusive. Yet we do not know what to replace them with, these inadequate descriptions, these exercises in stilted and partial translation.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>2. The Researcher’s Progress.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>I am preparing for my class about women and nineteenth-century print culture, which meets in the Peabody; we have reached the part of the syllabus where we look at gift books and annuals. I want students to examine several examples of these literary miscellanies, offering some illustration of their variety, and I have a list of such items that I have used in the past. But since I also want to show the students new acquisitions, I need to refresh my list. I will start with “gift book” as a keyword in the online catalogue.</blockquote>\r\nIn place of perfect and commensurate description—not possible—what we have are cataloguing systems that indexically represent collections through data and metadata that are, as I have already suggested, historically marked and inevitably inconsistent. In the case of the Peabody, these records are further compromised: Dewey cards developed from a nineteenth-century print index do not offer Library of Congress subject terms or detailed tables of contents; they also frequently lack other kinds of information. [note number=\'37\']Many of the electronic records for Peabody books have been copy-cataloged, that is, developed from records for identical books in other libraries. But these records might also be incomplete or inconsistent, given that many are quite old. The expense of original cataloging prevents our staff from creating full, new records for every item in the Peabody’s collection of over 300,000 titles.[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'11\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-11-ddc-cards/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-400\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-400\" title=\"fig 11 ddc cards\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Dewey cards for “gift books.”[/note] My search for “gift book” will turn up bequests—the term “gift book” is often attached to these donations—and it will miss many of the nineteenth-century gift books and annuals in our collection whose records lack subject classifications, or whose subject classifications reference the book’s contents, not its format. For example, the 1848 Rough and Ready Annual: or, Military Souvenir published by Appleton’s has been assigned the subject “Mexican War, 1846-1848—Anecdotes.” [note number=\'38\']Rough and Ready Annual (New York: D. Appleton; Philadelphia: G.S. Appleton, 1848).[/note]\r\n\r\nThe problem of finding is perhaps only a sub-set of the problem of description, but I want to give it special attention because it introduces another variable: the physical space of the object. My search for gift books in the Peabody also entails the privilege of retrieving the books from the stacks. There are two search processes, the intellectual and the physical, that I must navigate. The intellectual search in this case requires a variety of keyword/date range combinations, and ultimately, recourse to my prepared bibliography—a holdover from pre-catalogue research methods. Now the second search begins.\r\n\r\nThe Rough and Ready Annual is at 973.62 A5121, in the “general history of North America; United States” category. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'12\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-12-rr/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-401\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-401\" title=\"fig 12 r&amp;r\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.[/note] This call number range is on the second floor, west side. Other items on my list are in very different parts of the library. Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them, edited by the temperance writer T. S. Arthur and published in London, has been given the call number 813 A7910 duodecimo—fourth floor east, in the “American literature in English, fiction” section. [note number=\'39\']Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them (London: Knight &amp; Co., [1857]). This title does not appear in at least one Arthur bibliography; see Donald A Koch, \"Timothy Shay Arthur,\" Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, ed. Joel Myerson (Detroit: Gale Research, 1979), from Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Feb. 2011. To check on this, I need Mitchell Sharpe Jr.’s A Bibliography of the Published Books of Timothy Shay Arthur (Atlanta: Emory University, 1954), a typewritten quarto at 012 A791S, but it seems to be missing.[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'13\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-13-orange/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-402\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-402\" title=\"fig 13 orange\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Orange Blossoms in the stacks.[/note] Arthur shows up again as co-editor of The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present, which has received more extensive description as it contains the first printing of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Siope.” [note number=\'40\']The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present (Baltimore: Bayly and Burns, [1838]).[/note] We have two copies of this very genteel little gift book, one at 808.83 B2175 (rhetoric &amp; collections of literature), and one at 810.8 C297 (American literature in English). The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons is in the rare book room at the south end of the third floor. [note number=\'41\']The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons (London: The Religious Tract Society, ca. 1850).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'14\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-14-rbr/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-403\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-403\" title=\"fig 14 rbr\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The rare book room.[/note] In this case, the book’s rarity has to do with a lovely fore-edge painting. It has been assigned to 820.8 N42017 (general books about literature). On the other end of the “rare” continuum is The Family Circle and Parlor Annual, volume 5 in a series, which is shelved up on the sixth floor with the periodicals at 051 F198 (serials in American English). [note number=\'42\']The Family Circle and Parlor Annual (New York: Comstock, 1847).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'15\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-15-parlor/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-404\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-404\" title=\"fig 15 parlor\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Parlor Annual in the stacks.[/note]\r\n\r\nI’ll fill out call slips for each book, stick the slips into red flags, and put the flags in an order that will help me chart a logical course through the stacks. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'16\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-16-slips/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-405\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-405\" title=\"fig 16 slips\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Call slips and flags.[/note] It’s easiest to start on the sixth floor and work one’s way down, picking up books along the way. Usually I find other interesting items as I go, so I carry a batch of blank call slips and extra flags. (On this occasion, for example, I find The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse; published in 1813 and inscribed by its owner in 1817, it pre-dates by several years the official beginning of the gift book phenomenon. It might be more of a “literary almanac.” [note number=\'43\']The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse (Philadelphia: David Hogan, 1813).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'17\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-17-new-reader/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-406\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-406\" title=\"fig 17 new reader\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Inscription in The New American Reader.[/note]) Usually I am also unable to locate at least one of the books I have set out to find. Most likely the book has been misshelved, so I’ll check the quartos and folios, which are shelved separately; then I’ll check the rare book room’s octavo, duodecimo and quarto shelving areas. It used to astonish me that books were still shelved by format in the Peabody, but it does save space. At the same time, this shelving system—along with the multiple distinct areas within the library where books may reside, eg the rare book room, the reference section, the genealogy books, the Limited Editions Club, and several discrete named collections—means that retrieving a few books can take quite a long time, as I traipse up and down the six floors of the library, thread through stacks, open secured doors with multiple keys, turn lights on and off, and maneuver a book truck in and out of a tiny service elevator built in the 1920s. By the end of the journey, the library and I will have exchanged dust; I’ll take on a few streaks of red rot, and the library will have taken in particles from my body as well.\r\n\r\nWhile the Peabody is unique, these conditions are not in the end very unusual. In terms of the intellectual search, the absence of “gift book” from many of the catalogue records is no less egregious than the absence of other information—the names of all the contributors; the subjects of the illustrations. The metadata is potentially infinite. The “gift book” only exists as a category because of scholars who teased out this cultural phenomenon; it would be very difficult to define its absolute borders. In terms of the physical search, the Peabody might be messier than, say, a rare book library that has assigned current LC call numbers to all its contents and houses them in compact shelving, but it exemplifies the general on-the-ground situation. As I wind my way through the Peabody stacks, I remember how much more difficult it is to gather research materials from several different institutions.\r\n\r\nThe fact is, for scholars who rely on archives, research is something you do only after you have already undertaken a rigorous search. It is the search that provides you with the foundational sense of your subject. But the search is rarely acknowledged or accredited; even the foot-soldier craft of bibliography, the link between “librarianship” and “scholarship,” has largely lost its scholarly status.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>3. An Architecture of Disctinction.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>A non-affiliate researcher contacts the Peabody about our H. L. Mencken collections. Since she will bring a couple of graduate students with her, I set up a group work space in one of the library alcoves where the three of them can share materials and talk without disturbing other readers. I pull the requested volumes with the help of some students and set the cart up within easy reach of the alcove. When the researchers arrive, I show them the Mencken collections on the ground floor. Then I lead them to their group work space and leave them, returning to the glassed-in office behind the reading room, the vantage point that allows me to monitor the otherwise empty reading room.</blockquote>\r\nIn “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” a team of Dutch sociologists investigates the library as a space that is strongly marked by situational norms—“knowledge-based beliefs about how to behave in particular situations that are shaped by social influence.” [note number=\'44\']Henk Aarts and Ap Dijksterhuis, “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84.1 (2003), 19.[/note] Their research leads them to argue, however, that such norms do not require direct social influences to be triggered; in fact, “the situation can activate mental representations of normative behaviors automatically. And once activated, these representations provide the knowledge necessary for guiding one’s own situationally appropriate behavior.” [note number=\'45\']Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 19.[/note] Physical environments do not necessarily prompt these behaviors; rather, the behavior “depend[s] on whether the environment is of immediate behavioral relevance.” [note number=\'46\']Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 20.[/note] Talking in a quiet voice in the library, a normative behavior, is only activated for those who plan to visit the library.\r\n\r\nTen years ago, when the research for this article was conducted, the “silence of the library” was still a widespread norm. While the situation is now often reversed—in our main campus library, we must designate specific quiet areas because otherwise a sociable undergraduate din would take over—the norm of silence does continue to preside at the Peabody. Because it is off campus, the Peabody is often attractively under-populated compared to the crowded main library; it is mostly used by advanced researchers and those who seek a quiet place to study. The large central open area catches and amplifies even the smallest noises. The shelf-lined alcoves on either side of this central area offer the appearance of privacy, but in fact are little echo chambers. Visitors immediately detect these acoustics, and—except for the periodic tour groups—most spend their time in the Peabody in silence. But it is not just the physics of sound that shape behaviors here, as the Dutch researchers show; the social expectations of the space prefigure those behaviors.\r\n\r\nIn setting up a group work space for the Mencken researchers, I have quite deliberately contravened the usual norm of silence. Clearly, I am not inviting them to shout, and by putting them in an alcove in back, I have taken measures to protect any quiet-seeking visitors who might arrive. But in accordance with new ideas about the use of library space, my colleagues and I have decided that we must accommodate group study even if it might occasionally disrupt the silence desired by others. As it happens, the Mencken researchers’ conversation is eventually interrupted by a tour group, and the two activities play out side by side.\r\n\r\nI must admit that at moments I have mixed feelings about the tour groups and even the study cohorts. While my pedagogical instincts tend towards cheerful hub-bub, there is a part of me that is still in awe of the sanctuary-like atmosphere of the Peabody. John Morris called the library a “cathedral of books,” and clearly that’s what architect Edmund G. Lind had in mind. The central area with its grand skylight and the alcoves on its sides is like a nave bordered with chapels. Lind didn’t need a psychological study of environment-based situational norms to tell him that he might activate different behaviors within his building. The great central space inspires reverence—your eye is drawn to the skylight the way it would be drawn to the rose windows of Chartres, and on its way up catches row upon solemn row of books stowed behind gilded railings, a testament to the accumulated wisdom of the ages. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'18\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-18-skylight/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-407\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-407\" title=\"fig 18 skylight\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"448\" /></a>The skylight in the George Peabody Library.[/note] But step into an alcove, especially on the ground floor where each is filled with an immense wooden table, and you instantly feel something else, something no less grand but more human. The alcoves are study-sized, and once you sit down at one of those dark, gleaming, broad tables, it is like you are the master of your own private library. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'19\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-19-alcove/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-408\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-408\" title=\"fig 19 alcove\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Alcove in the George Peabody Library.[/note]\r\n\r\nIronically, the Peabody’s architecture was out-dated by the time it was completed. With the professionalization of librarianship and the evolution of library science in the late nineteenth century, librarians like William Frederick Poole advocated for a functional rather than decorative design of interior library space. [note number=\'47\']See William Frederick Poole, Remarks on Library Construction (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1884).[/note] Moreover, the actual use of space in the Peabody in the late nineteenth century was at odds with its symbolic appeal. The main library was known as the “stack room”; readers were seated in a comparatively plain reading room on the other side of the main doors. In this arrangement, the librarians reigned inside the gorgeous “cathedral of books,” but the building’s potential to civilize the masses was lost.\r\n\r\nNow, of course, we do not send readers outside. Inside the “stack room,” we explicitly call visitors’ attention to its beauty to explain the connections between the library’s architecture and its collections—how both speak eloquently of Victorian values. At the same time, we who staff the library have relegated ourselves to its periphery. We work in the glassed-in room at one end that serves as a monitoring point and occasional classroom; the official “librarian’s office” in one corner—its luxurious proportions suggesting something like a sacristy and something like a robber baron’s lair—is now shared work-space stuffed with several desks and laden book trucks. There is another monitoring station near the main doors. I often do my work at the photography station, in the back of one of the alcoves [note type=\'figure\' number=\'20\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-20-station/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-409\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-409\" title=\"fig 20 station\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station-336x252.jpg\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Photography station in the George Peabody Library.[/note]. It offers some privacy but is close enough to the central reading tables to be accessible to readers.\r\n\r\nThe space of the Peabody initiates other situational behaviors besides the norm of silence, and our work-station arrangements testify to this. The spatial re-centralizing of readers and marginalization of staff is not merely practical; it is a reflection of the modern office of librarianship. We are there to be of service, in a para-textual position. Consequently, our work should be out of sight; it should be separate from and secondary to the work that readers do. Our locations call upon us, in other words, to support the scholar’s effort to hide the “seams of [her] findings” by hiding the ways we contribute to that work—by the ways we sometimes do that work.\r\n\r\nI think about these complications as I escort the Mencken researchers to their table and walk back to the glassed-in office, where there is nothing pressing for me to do. I’d rather spend more time talking with them. I’d like to learn about their research and introduce them to some underappreciated parts of the collection. I’d like to share with them what I learned curating an exhibition of Mencken-related magazines and writing about one of those magazines. But I don’t want to get in their way; it’s likely that they are ready to get on with work that they don’t see as connected to mine. The professional norms of the archive are strong, and although I know how to talk about my research in many contexts—in presentations, interviews, hotel elevators—I haven’t figured out how to mix my scholarly role with the curatorial role I am supposed to play here, in the Peabody. In the end, I say nothing. Professional segregation is another kind of silence in the library.\r\n\r\nWe cannot change the archaeological record beneath our feet, but we can rearrange the fossils we dig up to create new narratives. We can tell different kinds of archive stories, including the story of what research in the archive was and is. Is it too idealistic to expect that dissolving the entrenched fantasies about archival research will make room for new methods? Is it naïve to imagine a space that, in putting into practice the archival turn’s preliminary insights about disciplinary and disorder, can support experimentation, facilitate connection across professions and disciplines, and enable new discoveries?','Disciplinarity and Disorder','','inherit','open','open','','2199-revision-36','','','2013-07-10 06:50:19','2013-07-10 06:50:19','',2199,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/2199-revision-36/',0,'revision','',0),