(5052,10,'2013-07-10 06:46:30','2013-07-10 06:46:30','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).[/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).)) 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-35','','','2013-07-10 06:46:30','2013-07-10 06:46:30','',2199,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/2199-revision-35/',0,'revision','',0),(5051,10,'2013-07-10 06:33:55','2013-07-10 06:33:55','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). (See Figure 2.)\r\n\r\nFigure 2.\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). (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. [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-34','','','2013-07-10 06:33:55','2013-07-10 06:33:55','',2199,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/2199-revision-34/',0,'revision','',0),(4501,1,'2013-05-03 02:39:25','2013-05-03 02:39:25','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.\r\n\r\n<iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ykY6moIaDE?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\"></iframe> A 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, eg, 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<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-369\" title=\"fig 2 kaplan\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Photocopy of Alice Yaeger Kaplan’s “Working in the Archives.”; Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1994/95) \r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-372\" title=\"fig 3 Derrida\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Print out of Jacque Derrida’s “Archive Fever” from Diacritics.; and Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001).\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-373\" title=\"fig 4 steedman\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></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).)) A 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.” [note number=\'7\']Kaplan, 114.[/note]</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. [note number=\'8\']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).[/note] 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. [note number=\'9\']Kaplan, 106, 107.[/note]\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.” [note number=\'10\']Steedman, 3.[/note]\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.” [note number=\'11\']Kaplan, 107-108.[/note] 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. [note number=\'12\']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.[/note] 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. [note number=\'13\']Steedman, 2.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'14\']Derrida, 14. [/note] If the archival impulse is driven to destroy its own work, then the question of origins ultimately point to the larger question of disorder. [note number=\'15\']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).[/note]\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.” [note number=\'16\']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.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'17\']Kaplan, 116.[/note] Kaplan, however, is never mentioned. [note number=\'18\']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?[/note]\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.” [note number=\'19\']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.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'20\']Kaplan, 103.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'21\']Kaplan, 104.[/note] 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). [note type=\'figure\' number=\'5\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-5-cdjc-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-423\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-423\" title=\"fig 5 cdjc\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1-333x250.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.[/note] It is this library, where Kaplan solves the mystery of Céline’s sources, that “doubles as a detective’s office.”\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. [note number=\'22\']Kaplan, 115.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'23\']Kaplan, 115.[/note] “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. [note number=\'24\']Derrida, 19.[/note] 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. [note number=\'25\']Kaplan, 113.[/note] 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1-336x484.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail-336x274.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail-336x452.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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-16','','','2013-05-03 02:39:25','2013-05-03 02:39:25','',2199,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/2199-revision-16/',0,'revision','',0),(4285,1,'2013-04-30 23:52:31','2013-04-30 23:52:31','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. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'1\'] <iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ykY6moIaDE?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\"></iframe> A staged archival encounter.[/note] The 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. [note number=\'1\']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, eg, printers, publishers, editors and readers (81).[/note]\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.” [note number=\'2\']Alice Yaeger Kaplan, “Working in the Archives,” Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 103-116; 103, 107.[/note] 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. [note number=\'3\']See, for example, James M. O’Toole and Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006).[/note] 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. [note number=\'4\']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.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'5\']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.[/note] 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) [note type=\'figure\' number=\'2\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-369\" title=\"fig 2 kaplan\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Photocopy of Alice Yaeger Kaplan’s “Working in the Archives.”[/note]; Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1994/95) [note type=\'figure\' number=\'3\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-372\" title=\"fig 3 Derrida\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Print out of Jacque Derrida’s “Archive Fever” from Diacritics.[/note]; and Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001). [note type=\'figure\' number=\'4\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-373\" title=\"fig 4 steedman\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Library copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust.[/note] [note number=\'6\']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).[/note] A 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.” [note number=\'7\']Kaplan, 114.[/note]</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. [note number=\'8\']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).[/note] 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. [note number=\'9\']Kaplan, 106, 107.[/note]\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.” [note number=\'10\']Steedman, 3.[/note]\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.” [note number=\'11\']Kaplan, 107-108.[/note] 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. [note number=\'12\']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.[/note] 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. [note number=\'13\']Steedman, 2.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'14\']Derrida, 14. [/note] If the archival impulse is driven to destroy its own work, then the question of origins ultimately point to the larger question of disorder. [note number=\'15\']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).[/note]\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.” [note number=\'16\']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.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'17\']Kaplan, 116.[/note] Kaplan, however, is never mentioned. [note number=\'18\']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?[/note]\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.” [note number=\'19\']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.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'20\']Kaplan, 103.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'21\']Kaplan, 104.[/note] 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). [note type=\'figure\' number=\'5\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-5-cdjc-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-423\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-423\" title=\"fig 5 cdjc\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1-333x250.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.[/note] It is this library, where Kaplan solves the mystery of Céline’s sources, that “doubles as a detective’s office.”\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. [note number=\'22\']Kaplan, 115.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'23\']Kaplan, 115.[/note] “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. [note number=\'24\']Derrida, 19.[/note] 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. [note number=\'25\']Kaplan, 113.[/note] 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1-336x484.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail-336x274.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail-336x452.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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-15','','','2013-04-30 23:52:31','2013-04-30 23:52:31','',2199,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/2199-revision-15/',0,'revision','',0),(3991,1,'2013-04-18 21:08:57','2013-04-18 21:08:57','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. (Can we get a close-up of a box, please, to show the label with the long call number? [note type=\'figure\' number=\'1\'] <iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ykY6moIaDE?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\"></iframe> A staged archival encounter.[/note]) The 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.\n\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.\n\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. [note number=\'1\']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, eg, printers, publishers, editors and readers (81).[/note]\n\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.\n\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.” [note number=\'2\']Alice Yaeger Kaplan, “Working in the Archives,” Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 103-116; 103, 107.[/note] 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. [note number=\'3\']See, for example, James M. O’Toole and Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006).[/note] 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. [note number=\'4\']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.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'5\']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.[/note] 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.\n\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) [note type=\'figure\' number=\'2\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-369\" title=\"fig 2 kaplan\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Photocopy of Alice Yaeger Kaplan’s “Working in the Archives.”[/note]; Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1994/95) [note type=\'figure\' number=\'3\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-372\" title=\"fig 3 Derrida\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Print out of Jacque Derrida’s “Archive Fever” from Diacritics.[/note]; and Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001). [note type=\'figure\' number=\'4\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-373\" title=\"fig 4 steedman\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Library copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust.[/note] [note number=\'6\']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).[/note] A 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.\n\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.\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n\n<strong>I. “The library doubles as a detective’s office.” [note number=\'7\']Kaplan, 114.[/note]</strong>\n\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. [note number=\'8\']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).[/note] 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.\n\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. [note number=\'9\']Kaplan, 106, 107.[/note]\n\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.” [note number=\'10\']Steedman, 3.[/note]\n\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.\n\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.” [note number=\'11\']Kaplan, 107-108.[/note] 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. [note number=\'12\']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.[/note] 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.\n\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. [note number=\'13\']Steedman, 2.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'14\']Derrida, 14. [/note] If the archival impulse is driven to destroy its own work, then the question of origins ultimately point to the larger question of disorder. [note number=\'15\']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).[/note]\n\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.” [note number=\'16\']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.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'17\']Kaplan, 116.[/note] Kaplan, however, is never mentioned. [note number=\'18\']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?[/note]\n\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.” [note number=\'19\']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.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'20\']Kaplan, 103.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'21\']Kaplan, 104.[/note] 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). [note type=\'figure\' number=\'5\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-5-cdjc-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-423\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-423\" title=\"fig 5 cdjc\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1-333x250.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.[/note] It is this library, where Kaplan solves the mystery of Céline’s sources, that “doubles as a detective’s office.”\n\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. [note number=\'22\']Kaplan, 115.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'23\']Kaplan, 115.[/note] “A story of some kind”? So much for “results.”\n\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.\n\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. [note number=\'24\']Derrida, 19.[/note] 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. [note number=\'25\']Kaplan, 113.[/note] 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.\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n\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?\n\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.\n\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]\n\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]\n\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?\n\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.\n\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.”\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n\n<strong>II. The library doubles as a librarian’s office.</strong>\n\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.\n\n<strong>1. The Perils of Description.</strong>\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>\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.\n\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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1-336x484.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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.\n\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.\n\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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail-336x274.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"274\" /></a>Detail of subject index from Alphabetical Catalouge No. 2 (“desiderata”).[/note]\n\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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail-336x452.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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]\n\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.\n\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.\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n\n<strong>2. The Researcher’s Progress.</strong>\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>\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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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]\n\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.\n\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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Parlor Annual in the stacks.[/note]\n\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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\n<!--nextpage-->\n\n<strong>3. An Architecture of Disctinction.</strong>\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>\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Alcove in the George Peabody Library.[/note]\n\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.\n\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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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-10','','','2013-04-18 21:08:57','2013-04-18 21:08:57','',2199,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue-1/uncategorized/2199-revision-10/',0,'revision','',0),(4286,1,'2013-05-04 19:35:16','2013-05-04 19:35:16','','360° - Questions','','publish','closed','closed','','acf_360-questions','','','2013-05-04 19:35:16','2013-05-04 19:35:16','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?post_type=acf&#038;p=4286',0,'acf','',0),(3996,1,'2013-04-15 01:08:52','2013-04-15 01:08:52','<h3><a href=\"#welcome\">Welcome</a> | <a href=\"#mission\">Mission</a> | <a href=\"#content\">Journal Content</a> | <a href=\"#editors\">Editorial Team &amp; Editorial Board</a> | <a href=\"#submissions\">Submissions</a>\n<a href=\"#review\">Peer Review</a> | <a href=\"#copyright\">Copyright &amp; Licenses</a> | <a href=\"#publication\">Publication</a> | <a href=\"#design\">Web Design</a> | <a href=\"#support\"> Support</a></h3>\n&nbsp;\n<h3><a name=\"welcome\"></a>Welcome</h3>\n<p class=\"textblock\">What you see on this site is Issue 2 (Fall 2012).  Work is underway on Issue 3,  a special issue focused on data curation.</p>\n\n<h3><a name=\"mission\"></a>Mission</h3>\n<em>Archive</em> focuses on the use and theory of archives and special collections in higher education.\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>\n\n<h3><a name=\"content\"></a>Journal Content</h3>\n<p class=\"textblock\">The journal consists of three content areas:</p>\n\n<ul>\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>\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>\n	<li>Notes + Queriesserves as a community space for people to share best practices, archival finds, reports from the field, and thoughts on current work in the field.</li>\n</ul>\n&nbsp;\n<h3><a name=\"editors\"></a>Editorial Team</h3>\n<table>\n<thead>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"160px\"></td>\n<td></td>\n<td></td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td colspan=\"3\">\n<h2>Editor</h2>\n</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">Lauren Coats</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>Assistant Professor of English (LSU)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td colspan=\"3\">\n<h2>Managing Editor</h2>\n</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">Gabrielle Dean</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>Curator of Modern Literary Rare Books and Manuscripts, Librarian for English and the Writing Seminars (Johns Hopkins University)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td colspan=\"3\">\n<h2>Technical Editor</h2>\n</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">Daniel Chamberlain</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>Director, Center for Digital Learning and Research (Occidental College)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td colspan=\"3\">\n<h2>Contributing Editors</h2>\n</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">Cecily Marcus</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>Curator in Archives and Special Collections (University of Minnesota)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">Laurie N. Taylor</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>Digital Humanities Librarian, Digital Library Center (University of Florida)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td colspan=\"3\">\n<h2>Editorial Board</h2>\n</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">Wendy Hui Kyong Chun</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>Professor of Modern Culture and Media (Brown University)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">Dan Cohen</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>Associate Professor, Department of History and Art History; Director, Center for History and New Media (George Mason University)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">Sharon Farb</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>Associate University Librarian (UCLA)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">Kathleen Fitzpatrick</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>Director of Scholarly Communications (MLA) and Professor of Media Studies (Pomona College)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">Julia Flanders</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>Director, Women Writers Project; Associate Director for Textbase Development, Center for Digital Scholarship (Brown University)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">Amanda French</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>THATCamp Coordinator, Center for History and New Media (George Mason University)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">Chuck Henry</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>President, Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">Patricia Hswe</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>Digital Collections Curator (Penn State University)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">Tara McPherson</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>Associate Professor of Critical Studies, School of Cinematic Arts (University of Southern California)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">Kenneth M. Price</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>University Professor and Hillegass Chair of American Literature; Co-Director, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">Elliott Shore</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>CIO, Director of Libraries, and Professor of History (Bryn Mawr College)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">Richard Szary</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>Director, Louis Round Wilson Library; Associate University Librarian for Special Collections (UNC-Chapel Hill)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">Ed Whitley</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>Associate Professor of English (Lehigh University)</td>\n</tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"name\">John Willinsky</td>\n<td>.......</td>\n<td>Khosla Family Professor of Education (Stanford University)</td>\n</tr>\n</thead>\n</table>\n&nbsp;\n<h3><a name=\"submissions\"></a>Submissions</h3>\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, or have any suggestions for or comments about the journal.\n\n&nbsp;\n<h3><a name=\"review\"></a>Peer Review</h3>\nAll materials in <em>Archive Journal</em> are peer-reviewed.\n\nPeer 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.\n\nOur review process consists of editorial and open review in the following stages:\n<ul>\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>\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>\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>\n	<li>Following peer review and before publication, all accepted materials are copyedited for style and consistency.</li>\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>\n</ul>\n&nbsp;\n<h3><a name=\"copyright\"></a>Copyright &amp; Licenses</h3>\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.\n\nThe <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>.\n<a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/\" rel=\"license\"><img style=\"border-width: 0;\" src=\"http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/88x31.png\" alt=\"Creative Commons License\" /></a>\n<em>Archive</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.\n\n&nbsp;\n<h3><a name=\"publication\"></a>Publication</h3>\nPermanent 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.\n\nISSN 2166-1189\n\n&nbsp;\n<h3><a name=\"design\"></a>Web Design</h3>\n<a href=\"http://lamppostcreative.com/\">Lamppost Creative</a> serves as the current developer and designer.\n<a href=\"http://infernalcontraption.com/\">Infernal Contraption</a> provided the original design and layout.\n\n&nbsp;\n<h3><a name=\"support\"></a>Support</h3>\nThe project has been generously supported with grant funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.','About','','inherit','open','open','','3549-revision-4','','','2013-04-15 01:08:52','2013-04-15 01:08:52','',3549,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue-1/uncategorized/3549-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(3998,1,'2013-04-19 02:30:27','2013-04-19 02:30:27','<h3><a name=\"welcome\"></a>Welcome</h3>\r\n<p class=\"textblock\">What you see on this site is Issue 2 (Fall 2012).  Work is underway on Issue 3,  a special issue focused on data curation.</p>\r\n\r\n<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>Notes + Queriesserves as a community space for people to 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 Team</h3>\r\n<table>\r\n<thead>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td width=\"160px\"></td>\r\n<td></td>\r\n<td></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td colspan=\"3\">\r\n<h2>Editor</h2>\r\n</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">Lauren Coats</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>Assistant Professor of English (LSU)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td colspan=\"3\">\r\n<h2>Managing Editor</h2>\r\n</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">Gabrielle Dean</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>Curator of Modern Literary Rare Books and Manuscripts, Librarian for English and the Writing Seminars (Johns Hopkins University)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td colspan=\"3\">\r\n<h2>Technical Editor</h2>\r\n</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">Daniel Chamberlain</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>Director, Center for Digital Learning and Research (Occidental College)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td colspan=\"3\">\r\n<h2>Contributing Editors</h2>\r\n</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">Cecily Marcus</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>Curator in Archives and Special Collections (University of Minnesota)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">Laurie N. Taylor</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>Digital Humanities Librarian, Digital Library Center (University of Florida)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td colspan=\"3\">\r\n<h2>Editorial Board</h2>\r\n</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">Wendy Hui Kyong Chun</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>Professor of Modern Culture and Media (Brown University)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">Dan Cohen</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>Associate Professor, Department of History and Art History; Director, Center for History and New Media (George Mason University)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">Sharon Farb</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>Associate University Librarian (UCLA)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">Kathleen Fitzpatrick</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>Director of Scholarly Communications (MLA) and Professor of Media Studies (Pomona College)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">Julia Flanders</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>Director, Women Writers Project; Associate Director for Textbase Development, Center for Digital Scholarship (Brown University)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">Amanda French</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>THATCamp Coordinator, Center for History and New Media (George Mason University)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">Chuck Henry</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>President, Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">Patricia Hswe</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>Digital Collections Curator (Penn State University)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">Tara McPherson</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>Associate Professor of Critical Studies, School of Cinematic Arts (University of Southern California)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">Kenneth M. Price</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>University Professor and Hillegass Chair of American Literature; Co-Director, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">Elliott Shore</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>CIO, Director of Libraries, and Professor of History (Bryn Mawr College)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">Richard Szary</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>Director, Louis Round Wilson Library; Associate University Librarian for Special Collections (UNC-Chapel Hill)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">Ed Whitley</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>Associate Professor of English (Lehigh University)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td class=\"name\">John Willinsky</td>\r\n<td>.......</td>\r\n<td>Khosla Family Professor of Education (Stanford University)</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</thead>\r\n</table>\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, or have any suggestions for or comments about the journal.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h3><a name=\"review\"></a>Peer Review</h3>\r\nAll materials in <em>Archive Journal</em> are peer-reviewed.\r\n\r\nPeer 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.\r\n\r\nOur 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&nbsp;\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.\r\n\r\nThe <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>.\r\n<a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/\" rel=\"license\"><img style=\"border-width: 0;\" src=\"http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/88x31.png\" alt=\"Creative Commons License\" /></a>\r\n<em>Archive</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.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h3><a name=\"publication\"></a>Publication</h3>\r\nPermanent 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.\r\n\r\nISSN 2166-1189\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h3><a name=\"design\"></a>Web Design</h3>\r\n<a href=\"http://lamppostcreative.com/\">Lamppost Creative</a> serves as the current developer and designer.\r\n<a href=\"http://infernalcontraption.com/\">Infernal Contraption</a> provided the original design and layout.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h3><a name=\"support\"></a>Support</h3>\r\nThe project has been generously supported with grant funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.','About','','inherit','open','open','','3549-revision-6','','','2013-04-19 02:30:27','2013-04-19 02:30:27','',3549,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue-1/uncategorized/3549-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(3999,1,'2013-04-19 03:11:43','2013-04-19 03:11:43','test','Notes + Queries','','publish','open','closed','','notes-and-queries','','','2013-06-27 20:00:11','2013-06-27 20:00:11','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?page_id=3999',0,'page','',0),(4000,1,'2013-04-19 03:11:40','2013-04-19 03:11:40','','Test','','inherit','open','open','','3999-revision','','','2013-04-19 03:11:40','2013-04-19 03:11:40','',3999,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue-1/uncategorized/3999-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(4445,1,'2013-04-21 18:10:12','2013-04-21 18:10:12','<a href=\"http://thewalters.org/earth/casket/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1970\"><img src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/casket1.png\" alt=\"Romances Casket\" title=\"casket\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-1970\" /></a>','Walters - Romances Casket Tkacs','','inherit','open','open','','1967-revision-6','','','2013-04-21 18:10:12','2013-04-21 18:10:12','',1967,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/1967-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(4006,1,'2013-04-19 01:47:42','2013-04-19 01:47:42','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. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'1\'] <iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ykY6moIaDE?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\"></iframe> A staged archival encounter.[/note] The 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. [note number=\'1\']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, eg, printers, publishers, editors and readers (81).[/note]\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.” [note number=\'2\']Alice Yaeger Kaplan, “Working in the Archives,” Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 103-116; 103, 107.[/note] 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. [note number=\'3\']See, for example, James M. O’Toole and Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006).[/note] 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. [note number=\'4\']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.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'5\']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.[/note] 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) [note type=\'figure\' number=\'2\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-369\" title=\"fig 2 kaplan\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Photocopy of Alice Yaeger Kaplan’s “Working in the Archives.”[/note]; Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1994/95) [note type=\'figure\' number=\'3\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-372\" title=\"fig 3 Derrida\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Print out of Jacque Derrida’s “Archive Fever” from Diacritics.[/note]; and Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001). [note type=\'figure\' number=\'4\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-373\" title=\"fig 4 steedman\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Library copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust.[/note] [note number=\'6\']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).[/note] A 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.” [note number=\'7\']Kaplan, 114.[/note]</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. [note number=\'8\']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).[/note] 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. [note number=\'9\']Kaplan, 106, 107.[/note]\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.” [note number=\'10\']Steedman, 3.[/note]\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.” [note number=\'11\']Kaplan, 107-108.[/note] 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. [note number=\'12\']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.[/note] 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. [note number=\'13\']Steedman, 2.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'14\']Derrida, 14. [/note] If the archival impulse is driven to destroy its own work, then the question of origins ultimately point to the larger question of disorder. [note number=\'15\']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).[/note]\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.” [note number=\'16\']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.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'17\']Kaplan, 116.[/note] Kaplan, however, is never mentioned. [note number=\'18\']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?[/note]\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.” [note number=\'19\']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.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'20\']Kaplan, 103.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'21\']Kaplan, 104.[/note] 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). [note type=\'figure\' number=\'5\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-5-cdjc-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-423\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-423\" title=\"fig 5 cdjc\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1-333x250.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.[/note] It is this library, where Kaplan solves the mystery of Céline’s sources, that “doubles as a detective’s office.”\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. [note number=\'22\']Kaplan, 115.[/note] 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.” [note number=\'23\']Kaplan, 115.[/note] “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. [note number=\'24\']Derrida, 19.[/note] 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. [note number=\'25\']Kaplan, 113.[/note] 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1-336x484.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail-336x274.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail-336x452.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" 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-11','','','2013-04-19 01:47:42','2013-04-19 01:47:42','',2199,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/%section%/2199-revision-11/',0,'revision','',0),(4007,1,'2013-04-18 20:41:27','2013-04-18 20:41:27','<h3>Students as Archivists</h3>\nBehind the scenes in special collections libraries and archives across the country, undergraduate students are being hired as part-time, temporary employees to assist with processing cultural-heritage materials. A recent survey of recipients of Cataloging Hidden Collections Special Collections and Archives grant projects<sup><a title=\"footnote\" href=\"#_ftn1\">[1]</a></sup> found that 97% of respondents employ student workers, and 73% reported that their student workers included undergraduate students. Students are assisting with civil rights collections at Emory University, modernist architectural drawings and plans at North Carolina State University, Jewish cultural-heritage materials at the College of Charleston, and Moravian historical documents at Lehigh University, to name just a few examples. Employing students in special collections libraries and archives is not a new practice; indeed, many of today\'s career librarians and archivists were once student workers themselves. Generally this is a budget-driven practice: students are in need of work and their labor is relatively inexpensive. The educational impact on students, however, is not widely understood or even acknowledged. How does working in archives impact students themselves? What skills do they acquire? Is their library employment connected to their studies? Does this work experience influence their career path? How does engagement with cultural-heritage materials affect their learning in the digital age?\n<h3>Archivists as Educators</h3>\nStudent workers require management: recruitment, training, oversight, and mentorship. In fact, when viewed strictly as employees, student workers—a transitory population with jam-packed, fluctuating schedules—do not represent the ideal work force. At the same time, we know that employment in the archives gives students an exceptional opportunity for applied learning under the guidance of professional archivists who can provide for the growth of intellectual and practical skills. These skills include exposure to primary sources combined with hands-on training in cataloging, processing, preserving, and digitizing such materials. Working with primary sources involves precisely the kind of active, integrative, experiential learning that is vital to inspiring undergraduate research.<sup><a title=\"footnote\" href=\"#_ftn2\">[2]</a></sup> So, how can we better reconcile the challenges of employing student workers with the potential educational benefits of such labor? We believe that by recognizing and empowering archivists in their roles as teachers, the informal or “hidden” learning that student workers gain can become more visible.\n<h3>Linking Archival Work to the Educational Missions of Universities and Colleges</h3>\nBased on anecdotal evidence, we know that student workers\' exposure to primary sources and the skills and technologies necessary to preserve, manage, and study them is resulting in student learning, informing choices of major, and altering career paths. Yet, the informal or \"hidden learning” that is occurring behind the scenes in libraries and archives is treated largely as a side effect, a fortunate but contingent byproduct of labor, rather than as an integral part of the educational mission. We hope this situation changes with closer attention to the educational experiences of students working in the archives. To that end, we are currently engaged in a study that investigates the impact of working in libraries and archives on students involved in civil rights-related hidden collections projects. These civil rights collections—records of organizations such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Alianza Hispano-Americana, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Voter Education Project—are often directly connected to local communities and relevant to contemporary issues and curricula. Most importantly, students are often able to recognize themselves and their communities in the collections, thus increasing the potential for transformative educational experiences. We believe that such work should be acknowledged as precisely the kind of applied learning that most higher education institutions are now actively pursuing in the form of internships, field work, and community service. Our study raises the following questions:\n<ul>\n	<li>What if “student workers” were perceived as “student archivists,” “young researchers,” or “apprentice scholars”?</li>\n	<li>What if student participation in the work of libraries and archives was foregrounded and celebrated, instead of remaining largely anonymous?</li>\n	<li>What if training students was seen as central to the business of library and archival practice in educational institutions?</li>\n	<li>What if the work students were being hired to do was considered essential to their educational experience and the mission of their universities?</li>\n	<li>What if professional archivists emphasized their role as teachers within institutions of higher education?</li>\n</ul>\n<br></br>\n<h3>Archival Work, the Digital Humanities, and the Library Commons</h3>\nConnecting informal learning to university education requires that librarians, archivists, and technologists view themselves as educators working alongside faculty to<em> </em>help students become researchers in a hybrid analog-digital world. Twenty-first-century models for collaborative learning and teaching are emerging, especially in the digital humanities, where students study primary sources in digital formats and apply new technologies to pose and answer research questions. In the digital humanities, students are being guided by faculty to identify and study research questions using new technologies in partnership with their peers. At many institutions, such classes and activities are being supported in Library Commons\' spaces—multi-service research and learning hubs that are technology-enabled and staffed by professional librarians and technologists. How might the hidden learning that students are experiencing behind the scenes in special collections libraries and archives be connected to the digital humanities and the Library Commons?\n<h3>Teaching the Whole Student: Faculty, Librarian, Archivist, and Technologist as a Team</h3>\nCreating an integrated learning experience demands a symbiotic mindset—a team approach—with archivists, librarians, technologists, and faculty working together to support student learning through engagement with primary sources and new technologies. At the very least, expanding access to primary sources, both physical and digital, in the undergraduate curriculum will require intensifying and scaling coordination and collaboration between the faculty member teaching disciplinary content, the librarian teaching research strategies, the technologist teaching digital tools, and the archivist teaching primary sources. The aim of such coordination would be to provide an environment in which students were more likely to develop skills necessary for success in the knowledge-driven economy of the twenty-first century. Today\'s students must learn not only to find and analyze reliable information, but also to communicate effectively, solve problems, work in teams, use advanced digital tools to create new knowledge, and engage in multicultural communities. The phenomenon of student employment on archival projects is happening largely undetected at the margins of higher education, but it could inspire a new approach to undergraduate learning that foregrounds the role of cultural heritage in the digital age.\n<div class=\"footnote\"><sup title=\"footnote\">[1]</sup> The <a href=\"http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/index.html\">Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives</a> grant program, funded by The Mellon Foundation and administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources, addresses the problem of “hidden collections”: millions of cultural heritage materials held by libraries and archives that have not been adequately described and remain unavailable to researchers.\n<sup title=\"footnote\">[2]</sup> See, the definition of “high-impact educational practices” articulated by the Association of American Colleges and Universities LEAP (Liberal Education and America’s Promise) Program: http://www.aacu.org/leap/.</div>','Hidden Learning: Undergraduates at Work in the Archives','Student workers require management:  recruitment, training, oversight, and mentorship. In fact, when viewed strictly as employees, student workers—a transitory population with jam-packed, fluctuating schedules—do not represent the ideal work force. At the same time, we know that employment in the archives gives students an exceptional opportunity for applied learning under the guidance of professional archivists who can provide for the growth of intellectual and practical skills. ','inherit','open','open','','1899-revision-4','','','2013-04-18 20:41:27','2013-04-18 20:41:27','',1899,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/%section%/1899-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(4008,1,'2013-04-18 20:41:25','2013-04-18 20:41:25','Archival research is an important source for coursework and teaching, as professors and instructors are increasingly incorporating work with primary documents into undergraduate courses. Because access to primary resources is often restricted by research room hours, and can be further limited because of preservation concerns if materials are extremely fragile or if collections are not fully inventoried, this kind of research takes time. Despite this, many student researchers leave archives with a great deal more information than they will be able to explore in their written scholarship. Students’ research goals also inform their actual practice, although, due to the many pleasures and challenges of working with primary documents, even the best intentions often change dramatically when working through a collection of materials. Whatever the situation, undergraduates working with primary documents need to be aware of a number of general recommendations, in addition to any particular archive’s specific rules.\n\nThough the individual archive or library is the best first source of information for working with specific collections, the following resources provide general information about working effectively with archival materials that may be of use to students and/or their teachers.\n<h1>Resources for Working with Primary Source Documents</h1>\n<h3></h3>\n<h3>Comprehensive</h3>\nSchmidt, Laura. “Using Archives: A Guide to Effective Research.” <em>Society of American Archivists</em>. 2011. <a href=\"http://www2.archivists.org/usingarchives\">http://www2.archivists.org/usingarchives</a>. An excellent primer for using archives, with considerations such as: “What Are Archives and How do They Differ from Libraries?”; “Requesting Materials Remotely”; “Planning to Visit an Archive”; and “Notes on Copyright, Restrictions, and Unprocessed Collections.”\n<h3>Handling Documents</h3>\nNational Archives (UK). “Handling Documents.” <em>The National Archives.</em> 2011. <a href=\"http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/visit/document-handling.htm\">http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/visit/document-handling.htm</a>. A basic overview for handling documents, including best practices and an explanation of common types of documents and handling needs.\n\nNational Park Service. “Handling Archival Documents and Manuscripts.” <em>Conserve O Gram </em>19, no. 17 (Sept. 1996). <a href=\"http://www.nps.gov/museum/publications/conserveogram/19-17.pdf\">http://www.nps.gov/museum/publications/conserveogram/19-17.pdf</a>. A brief guide focused on handling archival documents and manuscripts organized into a series of do’s and don’ts, including setting up the research area, moving materials, and dealing with problems (brittle, damaged, attached, and contaminated materials).\n<h3>Working in Archives</h3>\nArchives of American Art. “Frequently Asked Questions.” <em>Archives of American Art: Ask Us.</em> 2011. <a href=\"http://www.aaa.si.edu/askus/faq\">http://www.aaa.si.edu/askus/faq</a>: A general FAQ addressing basic questions and providing policy information, such as the need for researchers to schedule appointments, a useful reminder no matter which archive you plan to use.\n\nNew York University Libraries. “Using Archives and Manuscripts.” <em>New York</em><em> University</em><em> Libraries: Research Guides.</em> 2011. <a href=\"http://nyu.libguides.com/content.php?pid=38517\">http://nyu.libguides.com/content.php?pid=38517</a>. Intended for researchers using NYU collections, this guide also provides general relevant information, including definitions, recommendations on handling materials, and best practices for archival research.\n<h3>Teaching</h3>\nThe National Archives Experience (US). “Tool Box.”<em> The National Archives Experience: Educators and Students. </em>2011. <a href=\"http://www.archives.gov/nae/education/tool-box.html\">http://www.archives.gov/nae/education/tool-box.html</a>. The “Tool Box” includes many basic documents explaining the benefits of teaching with primary sources, basics for teaching with primary documents, and links to teaching workshops and collaborative opportunities (<a href=\"http://www.archives.gov/nae/education/collaboration.html\">http://www.archives.gov/nae/education/collaboration.html</a>)\n\nNational Archives of Australia. <em>Vrroom: Virtual Reading Room</em>. 2011. <a href=\"http://vrroom.naa.gov.au/\">http://vrroom.naa.gov.au/</a>. With a tagline of “easy access to archival records for teachers and students,” <em>Vrroom</em> is designed as a full virtual reading room, allowing users to search and browse archival collections, as well as providing support for teaching and research.\n<h3>Working with Technology in Archives</h3>\nBateman, Kirklin, Sheila Brennan, Douglas Mudd, and Paula Petrik. “Taking a Byte Out of the Archives: Making Technology Work for You.” <em>Perspectives Online </em>43, no. 1: (Jan. 2005)\n<a href=\"http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2005/0501/0501arc1.cfm\">http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2005/0501/0501arc1.cfm</a>. A useful overview of working with technology in archives, as well as maintaining electronic documents and notes from archival research. Published in 2005, the guide is somewhat dated (it does not include Zotero, for example, which rolled out in 2006).','How to Work with Primary Source Documents','','inherit','open','open','','2045-revision-4','','','2013-04-18 20:41:25','2013-04-18 20:41:25','',2045,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/%section%/2045-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(4009,1,'2013-04-18 21:05:47','2013-04-18 21:05:47','I have only recently begun experimenting with using archival materials in the classroom, so I am still learning how to achieve the best results. Initially, I began by limiting student involvement to two or three weeks of the semester. I found that, practically, the students did much better when they worked in groups, in part because of the potential for some students to be more engaged than others, and in part because the students enjoyed being part of a team. Penn, of course, is home to the Wharton School of Business, and I often have a few Wharton students in class. These students helpfully pointed out that many Wharton classes assign students to a team in order to better prepare them for the private sector. This also allows the students to divide up the work according to each individual’s skill set. I have found the team-oriented approach—with all of the teams working together as one larger group devoted to producing a quality product for Native American clients—to work very well in the highly professionalized culture of Penn. However, this culture is double edged, for it also makes it difficult to attract pre-professional students to courses on Native American studies, which is not a program or a department at Penn.\n\nAs I became more comfortable and was able to prepare more quickly for the semester, I found that I could make more materials available to the students. I try to balance the students’ exposure to the originals by providing them with digital surrogates and by visiting the Penn Museum and the APS. This can be challenging because the APS is not set up for student visits; it is only because of my position as Director of Native American projects that I am able to arrange for a classroom to view original documents. The Penn Museum, on the other hand, actively encourages professors to bring their classes and provides access to the storage facilities. This planning paid off when, to my surprise, the students asked to have more time to work on their projects. Last semester, one student suggested that the entire semester should be devoted to creating the exhibits for the class project. When we talked about this together, the students expressed that they felt their work with archival materials would be more meaningful if they learned more about their historical and cultural background. The best students had done this research on their own, but I realized that the early part of the course could be structured to teach the students a great deal more about the cultural context of the archival materials, which would result in them understanding the materials better and doing a better job designing the exhibits. So this spring I am devoting an entire semester of a graduate seminar to researching archival materials and creating a digital exhibit based on student research. The APS recently acquired more than 500 hours of audio recordings related to Ojibwe culture in northern Canada (the acquisition was an outcome of the Pimachiowin Aki collaboration). The first five weeks of the class will be devoted to teaching the students the religious background necessary to understand the Ojibwe ceremonies being discussed; the ethics of working with religious materials in terms of what can or cannot be placed on the web; and basic archival skills so that the students can create a database and tags to make this new material more accessible to scholars and the Ojibwe communities where the material originated. All of the students’ work will be donated to those communities and the database will be housed at the APS.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Powell 5','I have only recently begun experimenting with using archival materials in the classroom, so I am still learning how to achieve the best results. Initially, I began by limiting student involvement to two or three weeks of the semester. I found that, practically, the students did much better when they worked in groups, in part because of the potential for some students to be more engaged than others, and in part because the students enjoyed being part of a team.','inherit','open','open','','1589-revision-7','','','2013-04-18 21:05:47','2013-04-18 21:05:47','',1589,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/%section%/1589-revision-7/',0,'revision','',0),(4446,1,'2013-05-22 01:10:54','2013-05-22 01:10:54','<a href=\"http://thewalters.org/earth/casket/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1970\"><img src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/casket1.png\" alt=\"Romances Casket\" title=\"casket\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-1970\" /></a>','Walters - Romances Casket Tkacs','','inherit','open','open','','1967-revision-7','','','2013-05-22 01:10:54','2013-05-22 01:10:54','',1967,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/1967-revision-7/',0,'revision','',0),(4011,1,'2013-04-20 19:31:29','2013-04-20 19:31:29','test','Notes + Queries','','inherit','open','open','','3999-revision-3','','','2013-04-20 19:31:29','2013-04-20 19:31:29','',3999,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/3999-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(4012,1,'2013-04-21 16:49:00','2013-04-21 16:49:00','I have only recently begun experimenting with using archival materials in the classroom, so I am still learning how to achieve the best results. Initially, I began by limiting student involvement to two or three weeks of the semester. I found that, practically, the students did much better when they worked in groups, in part because of the potential for some students to be more engaged than others, and in part because the students enjoyed being part of a team. Penn, of course, is home to the Wharton School of Business, and I often have a few Wharton students in class. These students helpfully pointed out that many Wharton classes assign students to a team in order to better prepare them for the private sector. This also allows the students to divide up the work according to each individual’s skill set. I have found the team-oriented approach—with all of the teams working together as one larger group devoted to producing a quality product for Native American clients—to work very well in the highly professionalized culture of Penn. However, this culture is double edged, for it also makes it difficult to attract pre-professional students to courses on Native American studies, which is not a program or a department at Penn.\n\nAs I became more comfortable and was able to prepare more quickly for the semester, I found that I could make more materials available to the students. I try to balance the students’ exposure to the originals by providing them with digital surrogates and by visiting the Penn Museum and the APS. This can be challenging because the APS is not set up for student visits; it is only because of my position as Director of Native American projects that I am able to arrange for a classroom to view original documents. The Penn Museum, on the other hand, actively encourages professors to bring their classes and provides access to the storage facilities. This planning paid off when, to my surprise, the students asked to have more time to work on their projects. Last semester, one student suggested that the entire semester should be devoted to creating the exhibits for the class project. When we talked about this together, the students expressed that they felt their work with archival materials would be more meaningful if they learned more about their historical and cultural background. The best students had done this research on their own, but I realized that the early part of the course could be structured to teach the students a great deal more about the cultural context of the archival materials, which would result in them understanding the materials better and doing a better job designing the exhibits. So this spring I am devoting an entire semester of a graduate seminar to researching archival materials and creating a digital exhibit based on student research. The APS recently acquired more than 500 hours of audio recordings related to Ojibwe culture in northern Canada (the acquisition was an outcome of the Pimachiowin Aki collaboration). The first five weeks of the class will be devoted to teaching the students the religious background necessary to understand the Ojibwe ceremonies being discussed; the ethics of working with religious materials in terms of what can or cannot be placed on the web; and basic archival skills so that the students can create a database and tags to make this new material more accessible to scholars and the Ojibwe communities where the material originated. All of the students’ work will be donated to those communities and the database will be housed at the APS.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Powell 5','I have only recently begun experimenting with using archival materials in the classroom, so I am still learning how to achieve the best results. Initially, I began by limiting student involvement to two or three weeks of the semester. I found that, practically, the students did much better when they worked in groups, in part because of the potential for some students to be more engaged than others, and in part because the students enjoyed being part of a team.','inherit','open','open','','1589-revision-8','','','2013-04-21 16:49:00','2013-04-21 16:49:00','',1589,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/1589-revision-8/',0,'revision','',0),(4013,1,'2013-04-18 21:05:47','2013-04-18 21:05:47','The biggest challenge by far is the preliminary work, which must be completed before the semester begins. In order to work with either the APS or Penn Museum collections, a good deal of paperwork must be filled out to secure permission from the curatorial staff. Because this material is rarely used by students who are designing digital exhibits for the web, often we must create new forms and convince very cautious curators who want to be sure that the tribe’s involvement will be properly documented—itself a very time-consuming endeavor. I find that it is also essential to communicate openly and honestly with institutional administrators at every level to help them understand that such projects are mutually beneficial to the archive, the students, and the indigenous communities. The next challenge is to locate enough relevant material to keep the students occupied for a month, or even an entire semester. One must also be aware that a good deal of time and expertise are required after the semester is over to ensure that the resulting exhibit is of a high enough quality to be valuable to the Native American communities and the general public. The current Andrew W. Mellon grant that I direct for the APS includes a Native American Fellows program that brings distinguished members of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians and the Ojibwe Nation to Philadelphia. Ideally, this provides the students a unique opportunity to meet the indigenous wisdom keepers who are responsible for returning the digital surrogates to their community. This is a wonderful experience for the students, but requires great care to make sure that the Native people feel comfortable talking to students who have no real sense of the diplomacy and respect for indigenous protocols involved in this kind of work.\n\nPedagogically, it takes at least a month to provide the students with enough historical, anthropological, religious, and cultural background so that they can identify important primary materials. Because some of the material is considered sacred, students must learn protocols for dealing with culturally sensitive objects. This is made even more difficult because the Society of American Archivists has not yet issued protocols concerning Native American cultural sensitivities. The current APS Mellon grant will digitize 3000 hours of audio recordings related to Native American cultures. The grant has also allowed us to create a Native American advisory board to establish protocols for protecting culturally sensitive archival materials. Currently, I have two independent-study students working on documenting and implementing protocols for cultural sensitivity at the APS. This cutting-edge work is another important means of involving the most advanced students in ongoing research projects with archival materials.\n\nIt can be difficult, however, to teach the students to be respectful of how Native people see their own culture. The idea, for example, that museum artifacts are considered animate objects—or living beings—is sometimes beyond the intellectual reach of some students. The success of the projects, therefore, often depends on the students’ respect for and understanding of the culture. The students’ performance can be very uneven, with some going on to win grants to pursue further work in the area and others sitting quietly in the corner.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Powell 4','The biggest challenge by far is the preliminary work, which must be completed before the semester begins. In order to work with either the APS or Penn Museum collections, a good deal of paperwork must be filled out to secure permission from the curatorial staff. ','inherit','open','open','','1586-revision-7','','','2013-04-18 21:05:47','2013-04-18 21:05:47','',1586,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/1586-revision-7/',0,'revision','',0),(4014,1,'2013-04-18 21:05:47','2013-04-18 21:05:47','There have been many exciting outcomes from the students’ interactions with archival materials. In the spring of 2010, the class project was to design a digital exhibit that would bring together Penn anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell’s Ojibwe photographs from the American Philosophical Society and Ojibwe artifacts from the Penn Museum, all of which were collected in the 1930s. (See Figure 1.)<span id=\"attachment_2610\" class=\"alignright wp-caption\" style=\"width: 335px;\"><a title=\"Bandolier Bag\" href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/powell_1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2625\" title=\"Ojibwe Bandolier Bag\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/powell_1-333x147.jpg\" alt=\"\'Ojibwe Bandolier Bag,\' Penn Museum, photograph by David McDonald, DMcD Productions.\" width=\"333\" height=\"147\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 1</em>: \"Ojibwe Bandolier Bag,\" Penn Museum, photograph by David McDonald, DMcD Productions.</span></span> Not long before the semester started, I had been contacted by Gord Jones, the project manager of Pimachiowin Aki Corporation, who is working on submitting a UNESCO World Heritage Site grant application to preserve 40,000 square kilometers of boreal forest and the cultural landscape of five Ojibwe First Nations. One challenge of the grant is to define a “cultural landscape.” A number of scholars associated with the Pimachiowin Aki project had come to the APS and digitized material from the Hallowell collection. Hallowell had worked in Ojibwe First Nation communities in northern Manitoba and Ontario for ten years, so there was a large amount of material related to this very small, remote place. The students photographed and documented the objects from the Hallowell collection at the Penn Museum and presented them to Ojibwe representatives of the Pimachiowin Aki project at a conference held at the APS shortly after the semester ended. The students’ material is now part of a historic project, the first UNESCO World Heritage Site application ever submitted by the Canadian government on behalf of First Nations.\n\nLast semester my students worked in groups to curate an exhibit entitled <em>Cherokee Stickball</em>, based on the research of Frank Speck, a highly distinguished anthropologist. Speck taught at Penn for half a century, collecting more than forty stickball sticks for the Penn Museum and depositing photographs of Cherokee stickball games at the APS. (See Figure 2.) <span id=\"attachment_2609\" class=\"alignright wp-caption\" style=\"width: 300px;\"><a href=\"http://www.archivejournal.net/issue/2/three-sixty/undergraduates-in-the-archives-powell-3/attachment/powell_2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-2609\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-2609\" title=\"Powell 2, Cherokee Stickball\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/powell_2.jpg\" alt=\"Cherokee Stickball, American Philosophical Society, Frank Speck collection.\" width=\"300\" height=\"345\" /></a> <span class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Figure 2.</em> Cherokee Stickball, American Philosophical Society, Frank Speck collection.</span></span> In the 1930s, Speck worked with a Cherokee Medicine Man named Will West Long, who provided Speck with a rich ethnographic description of the spiritual dimensions of the game. Will West’s grand nephew, T.J. Holland, came to the APS conference in the spring of 2010, and I had the opportunity to interview him along with another very knowledgeable elder, Tom Belt. The students created Quick Time videos that combined Speck’s photographs taken in the 1930s with the contemporary oral histories. They also photographed all of the sticks in the Penn Museum’s collection and created a database of descriptive materials. One of the students won a Mellon grant through Penn to take the digital materials to the Eastern Band of the Cherokee in North Carolina. Today, Cherokee craftsman are recreating the older sticks based on the students’ photographs, and the videos will be used in a museum exhibit that will be displayed at the tribally owned Junaluska Museum, located in Robbinsville, North Carolina.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Powell 3','There have been many exciting outcomes from the students’ interactions with archival materials. In the spring of 2010, the class project was to design a digital exhibit that would bring together Penn anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell’s Ojibwe photographs from the American Philosophical Society and Ojibwe artifacts from the Penn Museum.','inherit','open','open','','1583-revision-7','','','2013-04-18 21:05:47','2013-04-18 21:05:47','',1583,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/1583-revision-7/',0,'revision','',0),(4015,1,'2013-04-18 21:05:47','2013-04-18 21:05:47','The most obvious benefit to Penn students is the opportunity to work on a project designed to be used by Native American community members and to hear the voices of elders. Penn, unfortunately, has no Native American faculty working in the field of American Indian studies, and the state of Pennsylvania has no Indian reservations. As a result, students generally have no contact with the people they are studying. Because many have never met a Native American, they are prone to thinking of Indians as extinct. By getting students to look at archival materials from an indigenous perspective, they learn to think about such basic terms as “American,” “history,” “literature,” “knowledge,” and “writing” in new ways. Even if the students do not major in American Indian studies, the intellectual experience of understanding a very different cultural epistemology and ontology is inherently valuable.\n\nFrom a pedagogical perspective, the students learn research skills in archives that will serve them well no matter what careers they chose. In my experience, most undergraduates do not have the opportunity to work with archival or museum collections. Many students seem to enjoy the courses more once they have been to the American Philosophical Society and have seen Thomas Jefferson’s hand-written draft of the Declaration of Independence, or have held a drum owned by Sitting Bull in their hands. It makes history and culture come alive in a way that textbooks rarely do. I find that it requires a lot of preliminary work—selecting and skimming documents, scanning photographs, etc.—to prepare a class for doing research in the archives. This semester my students will be going through hundreds of pages of oral history transcripts about an Ojibwe Medicine Man. The students will try to match the transcripts to historical documents and photographs in order to make them more useful to the community in northern Manitoba, where the recordings were originally made more than seventy-five years ago. I find that the students’ work is more thoughtful and more inspired when they realize that it may possibly benefit Native Americans, rather than just be read by one person: me.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Powell 2','The most obvious benefit to Penn students is the opportunity to work on a project designed to be used by Native American community members and to hear the voices of elders. Penn, unfortunately, has no Native American faculty working in the field of American Indian studies, and the state of Pennsylvania has no Indian reservations.','inherit','open','open','','1580-revision-7','','','2013-04-18 21:05:47','2013-04-18 21:05:47','',1580,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/1580-revision-7/',0,'revision','',0),(4016,1,'2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','I am fortunate to hold positions at three major cultural institutions in Philadelphia. I teach in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Pennsylvania, work as a Contributing Scholar at the Penn Museum, and, as Director of Native American Projects at the American Philosophical Society (APS), I oversee one of the finest collections of Native American archival materials in the country. I have directed three large grant projects at the APS to digitize images and audio recordings related to Native American culture. Once in digital form, the material becomes much more accessible to students. I am, therefore, in a unique position to provide my students with access to a wide variety of archival materials, many of which are linked in surprising ways.\n\nFor most of the twentieth century, Penn was home to some of the greatest anthropologists working on Native American cultures: Frank Speck, A. Irving Hallowell, Anthony F.C. Wallace, and Dell Hymes. All of these scholars gave their papers to the APS, while Speck and Hallowell also donated artifacts to the Penn Museum. The collections fit together very nicely, even though the institutions do not have a formal collaborative relationship. My Penn students thus have many opportunities to connect the two collections in a variety of interesting ways that are beneficial to the APS, the Penn Museum, and Native American communities.\n\nMuch of my own research involves how digital technology can strengthen outreach to Native American communities. I have overseen six grant projects that share the aim of returning digital surrogates of archival materials to their communities of origin. In 2005, I started a website entitled <em><a href=\"http://gibagadinamaagoom.info/\">Gibagadinamaagoom: An Ojibwe Digital Archive</a></em> that houses digital materials and is used by Ojibwe high school and tribal college students throughout the state of Minnesota. Several years later I started a sister site, <em><a href=\"http://www.sas.upenn.edu/dpic/\">Digital Partnerships with Indian Communities</a></em>, which allows the students to “publish” their work. When their work is polished enough, which usually entails some substantive editing, it is then made available to Native communities via the <em>Digital Partnerships</em> website. Both sites are designed with the Drupal content management system and are maintained by the School of Arts and Sciences Computing at Penn. This provides long-term sustainability. Because Drupal is so flexible, students can learn how to design digital exhibits that incorporate highlights of the archival materials and make them more accessible to Native communities. This requires training and outstanding students, many of whom receive grant support from Penn or other sources to work with me on these projects.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Powell 1','I am fortunate to hold positions at three major cultural institutions in Philadelphia. I teach in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Pennsylvania, work as a Contributing Scholar at the Penn Museum, and, as Director of Native American Projects at the American Philosophical Society (APS), I oversee one of the finest collections of Native American archival materials in the country.','inherit','open','open','','1577-revision-7','','','2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','',1577,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/1577-revision-7/',0,'revision','',0),(4017,1,'2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','Archival work <em>is</em> my curriculum. Integrating it into the broader university curriculum has been a long-term project. The year I started at Wesleyan, I began an intensive, perhaps even aggressive, approach to bringing classes into Special Collections &amp; Archives (SC&amp;A). The first step was to find a close connection between our holdings and Wesleyan’s curriculum. To do this, I studied the course catalog carefully and matched holdings to what was being taught. I wrote detailed letters to each faculty member whose course seemed to connect well to our holdings. Although I used the same basic form for each letter, I tailored each one with a specific list of items I would show to the class if they would come in for a visit. (At the time, a letter still had more impact than an email message.) In the first year alone, this effort resulted in twenty-four class sessions for nineteen different courses and a total of 276 students. As the program has grown, certain trends have emerged. Perhaps not surprisingly, the largest number of requests for class sessions comes from the American Studies, English, and History departments. Faculty in African American Studies; Astronomy; Classical Studies; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Music; Romance Languages and Literatures; Science in Society; and Studio Art are regular participants as well. We have also hosted classes in atomic theory, computer science, dance, German, government, and sociology. By now, I have worked with upwards of one hundred different faculty members (including visitors and non-tenure-track faculty) to bring classes to SC&amp;A. This often includes helping them to design assignments that reinforce or build on the visit to SC&amp;A, while enhancing the pedagogical goals of the course and promoting the use of our collections. At this point, the program needs very little advertising to sustain itself, although I do still send reminders to some faculty to schedule a class visit, and I encourage new faculty to consider the possibility when our holdings are a good match for their courses.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Taraba 5','','inherit','open','open','','1571-revision-6','','','2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','',1571,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/1571-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(4018,1,'2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','The single biggest challenge my program faces is one of supply and demand. Demand for class sessions in Special Collections &amp; Archives (SC&amp;A) is increasing—all to the good!—but the supply of time for teaching is not. In this sense, we are the victims of our own success. More staff to share the teaching load would help. Increased use of digitized sources and online tutorials can help as well, and many institutions, both large and small, are exploring these options, some with considerable success. Digitization can help make our holdings more readily accessible to larger numbers of students. Naturally, care and preservation of materials that are heavily used is always a concern. Digitization helps to protect the originals from being damaged in the service of learning and scholarship, but the experience of using digital surrogates is not really the same as using the “real thing.” Best, of course, is when the original and a digital surrogate can be used in tandem.\n\nOften faculty find it difficult to squeeze a visit to SC&amp;A into an already full syllabus, even when it is pedagogically desirable. Scheduling extra sessions outside of regular class meetings can be complex in the extreme, since students are extraordinarily busy with academic and extracurricular commitments.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Taraba 4','','inherit','open','open','','1568-revision-6','','','2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','',1568,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/1568-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(4019,1,'2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','From 50,000 feet up, my greatest success is developing our program of outreach and teaching, and sustaining it over nearly fifteen years. In 1997-98, seven classes visited Special Collections &amp; Archives. Last semester, I taught thirty-one class sessions. The numbers document the faculty’s growing interest in bringing their classes to SC&amp;A and the success of our outreach. The value and enrichment to the curriculum and the students are, of course, harder to quantify.\n\nThe best, most rewarding experiences for me personally are those in which I can see the collections really come alive for students, when they come back to use our materials even when they are not required to do so, and when their enthusiasm for archives and special collections is clearly evident. There are many examples. At the most basic level, I know that students are engaged when they show up with their parents during our open house at Homecoming/Family Weekend, and they tell their families enthusiastically about their visit with an introductory astronomy class in which they saw, among other items, some of Einstein’s manuscripts and artists’ books with astronomical themes. This is a perfect example of how even the “dog and pony show” can reach students and provide a memorable experience. At the other end of the spectrum, some students find materials first encountered in a class visit so intriguing that they spend a full year (or sometimes more) researching them as the focus of a senior thesis. In recent years we have had excellent theses centered on a sixteenth-century German prayer book, a Shakespeare folio with eighteenth-century annotations, Civil War letters written by a Wesleyan alumnus, and the papers of a faculty member from the 1930s-50s, to name a few. In all of these cases, students have done high-level, truly original research that was sparked during a visit to SC&amp;A.\n\nThere are non-curricular peak experiences as well. From time to time, students use the University Archives to research family members who attended Wesleyan in the past. These projects are often exciting in a deeply personal way for both the students and their families. Perhaps the most memorable search for a Wesleyan ancestor ended up with a student weeping in our reading room. She had found yearbook pictures and evidence of a vibrant social and intellectual life of a grandfather she had never known because he had committed suicide before she was born. It is hard for me to imagine an archival experience more moving than this. Still, there have been many times over the years when students’ connections—intellectual, emotional, or both—with our holdings have been deeply gratifying to me.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Taraba 3','','inherit','open','open','','1565-revision-6','','','2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','',1565,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/1565-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(4020,1,'2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','Engagement is a clear benefit. Many students are visibly excited, even awed, by their first visit to our Davison Rare Book Room, where the class sessions take place. The room is itself beautiful, echoing an eighteenth-century English gentleman’s library with glass-fronted bookcases and walnut paneling. The setting, combined with the intriguing materials presented, often inspires students to focus especially closely on the objects on display. The “wow” factor helps to make the experience memorable. While the visit to Special Collections &amp; Archives (SC&amp;A)and attendant procedures (such as signing in, only using pencils, stowing bags, etc.) could easily be intimidating for some students, we work hard to ensure that the department is welcoming and friendly so that students feel encouraged to return on their own.\n\nPedagogically and intellectually, first-hand encounters with special collections and archives facilitate students’ thinking outside the box as they identify and pursue research topics. Direct contact with primary sources can fuel students’ interests, and many students find captivating the detective work involved in teasing out meanings from unedited and unglossed documents. Learning about the history and technology of the book opens students’ eyes to aspects of texts that can be far less evident with the ubiquitous electronic sources and secondary readings that fuel so much of their research. Through studying rare books and other special collections, students begin to understand that marginalia, provenance, typography, design, binding, and illustrations—all the physical aspects of specific copies of a book—offer avenues for viewing the book in the context of its own time. They begin to appreciate the many people beside the author who helped create the physical book. Often the study of these aspects of books helps to frame the text in such a way that students can step outside of themselves to evaluate it and analyze it, not just from a twenty-first-century point of view, but within the intellectual and historical context of its own time.\n\nOf course the active use of SC&amp;A by undergraduates benefits the department and the library as well. The deep integration of SC&amp;A into Wesleyan’s curriculum helps to ensure that we are not marginalized, that we are truly part of the University’s academic community, and that the materials are well (albeit carefully) used. As circulating collections and electronic resources in academic libraries become more homogenous, the strengths of archives and special collections holdings are often what distinguish an academic library from its peers at other institutions.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Taraba 2','','inherit','open','open','','1562-revision-6','','','2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','',1562,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/1562-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(4021,1,'2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','Since I came to Wesleyan nearly fifteen years ago, a key focus of my job has been outreach to the faculty, and thus the undergraduates, through the curriculum. To this end, I teach thirty-five to fifty class sessions each academic year in Special Collections &amp; Archives (SC&amp;A). Disciplines range from astronomy to writing, and just about everything in between.\n\nThough all class sessions have the common goal of raising undergraduate awareness of and interest in the holdings of SC&amp;A, each class presentation is different, based on both the subject of the course and the pedagogical purpose for which the materials will be used. Some sessions take a classic “dog and pony show” approach in which I, or sometimes the professor and I, present a group of interesting materials from our collections and talk briefly about each item, how it connects to the course, and/or how it might be used in the students’ research. In other sessions, students take a more active role by doing an in-class assignment. One such assignment we often use is the “mystery book exercise” that a History of Science faculty member and I developed together. “Mystery book” is a fun, fast-paced exercise that trains students to evaluate an unfamiliar source quickly and teaches information-literacy skills using books or documents connected to the subject of the course. After spending a few minutes looking at a book they have not seen before, students answer ten questions, which range from the (usually) easy identification of the author to more complex considerations of how the mystery book might inform their research. Still other classes use the visit to SC&amp;A to prepare for an in-depth paper or project that requires, or at least strongly encourages, the use of materials in SC&amp;A. These longer assignments are as varied as the classes, and they include traditional term papers, documentary editing projects, artists’ books, and creative writing based on primary sources, among others. For the full list of mystery book questions, other assignments, and comments from Wesleyan professors who use SC&amp;A in teaching, see the online exhibition, <em><a href=\"http://oldbooks.site.wesleyan.edu/\">Old Books, New Pedagogy: Special Collections and Archives in the Curriculum</a></em>.\n\nOf course, not all the work I do with undergraduates is teaching them about archives and special collections in class settings. Often class visits spark students to use SC&amp;A for other courses, senior theses or essays, co-curricular activities, or just simple personal interest. In many of these cases, I work one-on-one with the students to help them identify relevant materials, focus topics, find related books or documents, and understand the context, all of which are typical functions of reference and instruction librarians.\n\nMuch of my recent professional activity has focused on teaching undergraduates to use archives and special collections. I have just co-edited a volume of case studies on this topic, entitled <em>Past or Portal? Enhancing Undergraduate Learning through Special Collections and Archives</em>. The book, which was<a href=\"http://www.alastore.ala.org/detail.aspx?ID=3828\"> recently published by the Association of College and Research Libraries</a>, contains nearly fifty real-life examples of undergraduate curricular uses of archives and special collections in a wide variety of institutions.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Taraba 1','','inherit','open','open','','1558-revision-8','','','2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','',1558,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/1558-revision-8/',0,'revision','',0),(4022,1,'2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','In addition to what I have already addressed, I will just add that if you want to include archival work in your courses, you need to work closely with your librarians. Before you assume that students can have access to any rare materials, or that they can take notes on a rare book, or compare multiple manuscripts, check your special collections’ policies. And before you assume that your library does or does not have material relevant to your course, talk with the librarians. You might be surprised to learn that some books are too fragile to be handled, for instance, or that there is a large number of books relevant to the history of science in the 1700s. No one knows a special collection better than its librarians, and they are your first resource and your first ally in making archival work relevant to your curriculum.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 5','','inherit','open','open','','1553-revision-6','','','2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','',1553,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/1553-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(4023,1,'2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','The first set of challenges is logistical. Bringing students into the Library changed some of the Library’s usual operating procedures and has made me adjust some of my own habits of teaching. The Undergraduate Program was the first time the Library allowed undergraduates into the Library to conduct research in any sort of ongoing basis. (There is an established fellowship for Amherst students that brings two or three students down to do research at the Library for a couple of weeks each year, but the intense use of rare materials and the duration of the fellowship are significantly different from the structure of the Undergraduate Seminars.) Even though the Library was supportive of my program and eager to help adjust policy, understandably there was some concern about how needy the students would be: Would they require a lot of supervision? Would they be asking for a lot of assistance? Would they be disruptive to the other readers? (The answer to all of these is no. In part because of the intensive training they receive in the classroom about how to handle books and how to find the resources they need, the students are in many ways better prepared to work in the Reading Rooms than many others!) There were also procedural questions that needed to be resolved. Before my program, rare materials were not routinely brought into the Library’s classrooms and were never handled by non-staff members in classrooms. Putting together a new policy on classroom use (how many items, how they could and could not be handled, the number of staff members necessary to supervise, etc.) was vital. And it was not difficult, thanks to the supportive curatorial staff. I did have to adjust my own teaching style. My preference is to decide what I am going to do in any given class as I go along. I might decide to try a particular approach the day before class, if my sense of how the class is proceeding suggests it. But I cannot decide at the last minute to bring a set of rare books into the seminar room because curators need to vet the rare materials in advance. That is not a big obstacle, but it has required me to adjust.\n\nA bigger challenge has been getting used to not having all the answers. My students come from a wide range of majors: English and history, to be sure, but I have also taught majors in French, theology, art history, music, drama, medieval studies, physics, and economics. And because I let them choose any work that was printed before 1700 for their research project, students often choose works that I have never heard of. What this means is that I need to learn along with them. A student working on <em>Utopia</em> is fairly easy; a student working on a Czech herbal (a book describing plants and their medicinal properties) is a lot harder to guide. But this is also a challenge that is fun and beneficial: if I knew everything, I’d be bored and my students wouldn’t have room for discovery.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 4','','inherit','open','open','','1550-revision-6','','','2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','',1550,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/1550-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(4024,1,'2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','Oh my, this is a hard one to answer. Without intending to sound unbearably sappy, there are nearly too many moments of success for me to count! My favorite moments are those that come outside the seminar: when a student makes a connection between what we have been discussing and what another class of hers is doing; when a professor tells me that a former student has been teaching them all to pay attention to the textual history of a poem they are reading; or when a former student sends me an e-mail to point out a newspaper article about books he found interesting. All those moments mean that the lessons they have learned in our seminar are living on for them in other contexts.\n\nOther favorite moments have been when students have found something out about a book that is news to the Library’s catalogers. Given how tremendous the Folger catalogers are, that is hard to do! But, for instance, one student was working on <em>The essayes of a prentise</em>, a book that had been written by King James in 1594, when he was James VI of Scotland and not yet James I of England. The student’s interpretation of the book was that it was deeply embedded in James’s perspective as a Scottish monarch and aspirant to the English throne, especially since the book was bound as a presentation copy for Lord Burghley. But the catalog record for the book, following standard name authority rules, listed the author as James I. Given the student’s research, however, the book’s record now includes a note clarifying the nature of James’s title when it was written. (You can see a blog post I wrote about the book and this issue <a href=\"http://sarahwerner.net/blog/index.php/2009/09/essayes-of-a-prentise/\">here</a>; you can find the catalog record for it <a href=\"http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=163210\">here</a>.)\n\nAnother student was working on James Smith’s <em>The generall historie of Virginia</em> (1624) and was struck by its odd binding, in which one armorial device was stamped on top of another. The Folger’s catalog identified one of them as James I’s, but it took some joint sleuthing for her and I to work out that the stamp on top of James’s was that of George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham. As far as I can work out, no one else had noticed that, not the previous owners, the booksellers, or the Library’s catalogers. (That record still does not include the additional information about the binding because I have not yet brought it to their attention. But you can read about the book and see some pictures of the binding <a href=\"http://sarahwerner.net/blog/index.php/2011/04/an-armorial-binding-mystery/\">here</a>; the catalog record is <a href=\"http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=164134\">here</a>.)','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 3','','inherit','open','open','','1547-revision-6','','','2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','',1547,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/1547-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(4025,1,'2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','I think the biggest benefit of bringing students into special collections through this course is that students own the process of discovery. In many undergraduate humanities courses, students learn about a subject through reading about it and, sometimes, conducting research on a topic of their choosing. But their research is rarely significant in terms of discovering new knowledge or generating a new perspective on something. Anyone who has taught a Shakespeare course can attest to the fact that even the best student papers do not often contribute something new to the field of Shakespeare studies; they might be interesting, and insightful, and they might be genuinely exciting to the student, but they are not new. But when students work with primary materials in special collections, they can be working with something that no one else has considered before. Sure, many people have written about More’s <em>Utopia</em>, but no one else may have produced a history of the particular copy of the third English edition of his book, which can now be found at the Folger with the call number STC 18096 Copy 1. More importantly, I have not done that either. In creating the biographies of their books, students are on their own, doing utterly original research. I can provide guidance, and so can generations of scholars before them, but students will not have that sinking feeling of realizing that somebody else has already written what they want to say, and has written it better.\n\nThat ownership of their research shifts how students see themselves as scholars. They are each experts on their own book, and everyone teaches everyone else when it comes to sharing insights into the nature of the book trade, the shape of authorship, or the variety of book use. Students produce long research papers on their final biographies, having revised earlier drafts, rethought their assumptions, and spent countless hours in the Library and at home working through their books’ stories. There is a consistent level of engagement with the material that I have not seen in other advanced-level seminars I have taught. Their papers routinely go above and beyond the expectations I have set for the projects; I have learned to suggest word limits as minimum expectations, not maximum cut-offs, since when I ask for a 3000-word paper, there are always students who have produced such rich research that they need 5000 words to do it justice.\n\nI suppose some might question the scholarly benefit of pouring all that energy into one copy of one edition of one book. But by limiting their attention to one copy, students have the room to fully explore the range of connections and complications for that book, and with that knowledge, students are able to extrapolate to the production of other books and to the ways in which knowledge passes from one generation to the next. The history of who read and collected the 1597 English <em>Utopia</em> over the centuries sheds light on our reading and use of the text today. More importantly, the skills students learn exploring one book can be used to explore any book, even a book made after the hand-press period. And because students are genuinely excited by the sense of discovery, they absorb and retain those ideas, bringing them to their other courses and to their lives following graduation. Being able to discover and to be real scholars as undergraduates opens up doors to them long after our class is done.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 2','','inherit','open','open','','1544-revision-6','','','2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','',1544,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/1544-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(4026,1,'2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','I am the director of the Undergraduate Program at the Folger Shakespeare Library, a program I created five years ago. It consists of two semester-long seminars in which students from universities in the D.C. area come to the Library to study book history and early modern culture. The goal of the seminars is for students to expand their knowledge of the period and their research skills by working directly with rare materials in the context of book history. The course is divided into three thematic concerns: books as physical objects (descriptive bibliography), the relationship between books and cultural forces (print culture), and books as vehicles for text (editorial theory and practice). By moving from how books are made to the economics of authorship and readers’ uses of books to how their manifestation in print affects books’ meanings, the course models different approaches to studying the histories of books and strives to explore how each approach is related to others. The class as a whole reads secondary sources (Darnton, McKenzie, McLeod, Sherman, Lesser), and class discussions make frequent use of rare materials brought into the classroom.  (The current syllabus for the course can be found <a title=\"Book and Early Modern Culture Syllabus\" href=\"http://sarahwerner.net/FolgerBooks\">here</a>.) When we discuss how books are printed, for instance, I will bring books into class that illustrate moments where the printing went askew—a misfoliated book, perhaps—in order to learn what the evidence of these mistakes can teach us about the process of making a book. Or we will devote a session to looking at bibles from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries in order to see how their physical appearance changes, to explore how physical characteristics suggest different ways to read and use the bibles, and to examine what they might reveal about cultural and religious battles.\n\nWhile the class works together on these discussions, each student is studying one book that they have chosen to focus on. With their own book, they research its makers (authors, translators, and compilers as well as printers, publishers, and booksellers), its intended audience, and its later users and collectors. At the end of the semester, each student produces a biography of their book using their primary research and the book’s physical characteristics to tell its life story, from its inception to its afterlife as both text and object.\n\nIn both of these ways, working with rare materials is integral to the course and to the students’ learning experiences. Students in the class are Readers at the Library on the same terms that any other scholar given a Reader’s Card is: they can use any of the modern and rare materials in our collections that are not normally restricted. They come to the Library weekly for the seminar and return to the Library regularly to conduct their research for the class. Their Reader’s Cards are good for twelve months, so students can return to the Library after the seminar is done to carry on their own research. In other words, through the Undergraduate Seminar, students learn not only to use rare materials in their studies, but to be citizens of rare materials libraries.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 1','','inherit','open','open','','1541-revision-6','','','2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','',1541,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/1541-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(4027,1,'2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','As an undergraduate I felt like the archive primed me to search for pristine differences between the past and present. It was as if the past was a foreign country I was visiting while in the archive and that I had to translate into a more modern language. Yet the evidence I worked with was rarely so easily explained on the page. Similarities across time were often differences in addition, illustrating the messiness of historiography. There was also the logistical challenge of gauging the depth of a semester-long archival project. I had the classic Goldilocks problem of finding a research question that was neither too big nor too small.\n\nThe added obstacle is that undergraduates rarely devote their time to academics as faithfully as graduate students and faculty do. As an undergraduate I was juggling internships, part-time jobs, and community service with my class work. Before I started my undergraduate archival work, I usually resolved the logistical tangles by relegating reading and writing to the wee morning hours. When I needed to start visiting collections around New York City, this was not so easy. I started setting aside time to commute uptown to the New York Public Library, for example, while giving myself enough time to grab lunch and get back downtown for class.\n\nThe challenge was manageable on a practical level, but also on a conceptual one. Undergraduates—and I include myself when I was one—tend to think that setting aside business hours for internships will help develop the practical skills necessary for landing the perfect job after graduation. And there is no denying that internships can be useful in teaching the rigors of the workplace. But when we design courses for undergraduates, requiring them to spend time actively engaged in searching and <em>re</em>-searching, the pace and tenor of undergraduate study changes. For me, substituting work done alone, late at night in my apartment, for the work of talking with librarians, archivists, and other experts was a far more meaningful undergraduate experience, and something that was actually easily marketable for a job interview.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Gotkin 5','As an undergraduate I felt like the archive primed me to search for pristine differences between the past and present. It was as if the past was a foreign country I was visiting while in the archive and that I had to translate into a more modern language. Yet the evidence I worked with was rarely so easily explained on the page.','inherit','open','open','','1536-revision-6','','','2013-04-18 21:05:48','2013-04-18 21:05:48','',1536,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/uncategorized/1536-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),