(5085,3,'2013-07-11 03:57:03','2013-07-11 03:57:03','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.) 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\n<iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ykY6moIaDE?rel=0\" height=\"250\" width=\"333\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe>\r\n<div class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 1. A staged archival encounter.</div>\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, <em>A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism</em> (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,” <em>Yale French Studies</em> 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, <em>Understanding Archives and Manuscripts</em> (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,” <em>Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History</em>, 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<div class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 2.</div>\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<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., <em>Refiguring the Archive</em> (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), Cheryl Simon, ed., Following the Archival Turn: Photography, the Museum, and the Archive, special issue of <em>Visual Resources: A Journal of Documentation</em> 18.2 (June 2002), and Ann Laura Stoler, <em>Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense</em> (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 <em>Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne</em> in French; the published English version echoed the French publication with its 1995 title <em>Archive Fever</em>. As Carolyn Steedman points out in <em>Dust: The Archive and Cultural History</em>, 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 <em>Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable</em> (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 <em>Dust</em> is from Virginia Woolf’s <em>To the Lighthouse</em>, one chapter treats George Eliot’s <em>Middlemarch</em> in depth… in fact, almost every chapter depends on a literary text. ((Another chapter invokes Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel <em>Mary Barton</em>, a third is anchored by W. H. Auden’s poem “Homage to Clio,” and a fourth finds its most eloquent examples in Charles Dickens’ <em>Our Mutual Friend</em>.)) 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; <em>Mal d’Archive</em> 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 <em>Archive Fever</em>—a “let’s begin at the beginning” homage to the seminal text—her book’s title, <em>Dust</em>, 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).\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_423\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"358\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-423  \" alt=\"Figure 3. Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1.jpg\" width=\"358\" height=\"269\" /></a> Figure 3. Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.[/caption]\r\n\r\nShe uses this account to exemplify her effort to “move through the archival process and recover some of the stories that get deleted in the final scholarly form.” ((Kaplan, 104. For this reason, perhaps, Kaplan never reveals what she ultimately discovers in her successful search for Celine’s sources. In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether her pre-emptive and truncated treatment of her archive story is deliberate or not. Is this treatment meant to indirectly support her official claim about “results”? Or does the presence of the archive story suggest that telling it is an impulse she can’t quite control? Thanks, Lauren Coats, for helping tease this problem out.)) These beginnings are preemptively struck out, however, by what seems to be her main claim: “the passion of the archives must finally be used to eradicate all personal stories in the interests of the dry archival report, fit for a public.” ((Kaplan, 103.)) Only in the “para-text”—a preface, for example—can the archive story appear without “interrupt[ing] or complicat[ing] the narrative so much that no results could ever be understood or perceived.” ((Kaplan, 104.)) Despite this unequivocal assertion, the personal “whodunit” prevails in her essay, especially in the final section set in the Centre du documentation juive contemporain (CDJC). It is this library, where Kaplan solves the mystery of Céline’s sources, that “doubles as a detective’s office.”\r\n\r\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 <em>Archive Fever</em> 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\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 <em>Refiguring the Archive</em> (2002), <em>Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History</em> (2005) and <em>Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense</em> (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. <em>Archive Stories</em> 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 <em>Archive Fever</em> 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<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. ((<em>Alphabetical Catalogue of Books to be Purchased for the Library of the Peabody Institute, Baltimore</em>, Vols. 1 and 2 (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1861, 1863).)) (See Figure 4.) 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. ((<em>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</em> (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. ((<em>Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore</em>, Vols. 1-5 (Baltimore: Isaac Friedenwald, 1883; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, [1961?]; also on googlebooks), and <em>Second Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Including the Additions Made Since 1882</em>, Vols. 1-8 (Baltimore: Deutsch Lithographic and Printing, 1896; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, 1961).)) (See Figure 5.)  We have the cards from the Dewey decimal system card catalogue, which replaced the printed catalogue in the 1910s. 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_395\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"191\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-395   \" alt=\"Figure 4. Alphabetical index from Alphabetical Catalouge (“desiderata”).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1.jpg\" width=\"191\" height=\"277\" /></a> Figure 4. Alphabetical index from <em>Alphabetical Catalogue </em>(“desiderata”).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_396\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-396 \" alt=\"Figure 5. Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 5. Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_397\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"202\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-397 \" alt=\"Figure 6. One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\" width=\"202\" height=\"269\" /></a> Figure 6. One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\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. (See Figure 7.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_398\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"203\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-398   \" alt=\"Figure 7. Detail of subject index from Alphabetical Catalouge No. 2 (“desiderata”).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail.jpg\" width=\"203\" height=\"165\" /></a> Figure 7. Detail of subject index from <em>Alphabetical Catalouge</em> No. 2 (“desiderata”).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_399\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"171\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-399 \" alt=\"Figure 8. Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail.jpg\" width=\"171\" height=\"230\" /></a> Figure 8. Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.[/caption]\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.”  ((“Letters from George Peabody, Esq.: Baltimore, February 12th, 1857,” in Founder’s Letters, 7.)) 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.\" ((Qtd. in Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, “PIB Ref. Library. 8-Morison\'s Philosophy of Excellence,” in<em> 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.</em> 11 Mar. 2011.)) 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.\r\n\r\nThis 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. ((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,” <em>Libraries &amp; Culture</em> 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.))\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<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\n[caption id=\"attachment_400\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"215\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-400  \" alt=\"Figure 9. Dewey cards for “gift books.”\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards.jpg\" width=\"215\" height=\"162\" /></a> Figure 9. Dewey cards for “gift books.”[/caption]\r\n\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. ((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.)) (See Figure 9.) 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 <em>Rough and Ready Annual: or, Military Souvenir</em> published by Appleton’s has been assigned the subject “Mexican War, 1846-1848—Anecdotes.” ((<em>Rough and Ready Annual</em> (New York: D. Appleton; Philadelphia: G.S. Appleton, 1848).))\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\n[caption id=\"attachment_401\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"164\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-401 \" alt=\"Figure 10. The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr.jpg\" width=\"164\" height=\"123\" /></a> Figure 10. The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.[/caption]\r\n\r\n<em>The Rough and Ready Annual</em> is at 973.62 A5121, in the “general history of North America; United States” category. (See Figure 10.) This call number range is on the second floor, west side. Other items on my list are in very different parts of the library. <em>Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them,</em> 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. ((<em>Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them</em> (London: Knight &amp; Co., [1857]). This title does not appear in at least one Arthur bibliography; see Donald A Koch, \"Timothy Shay Arthur,\" <em>Antebellum Writers in New York and the South</em>, 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 <em>A Bibliography of the Published Books of Timothy Shay Arthur (</em>Atlanta: Emory University, 1954), a typewritten quarto at 012 A791S, but it seems to be missing.)) (See Figure 11.) Arthur shows up again as co-editor of <em>The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present</em>, which has received more extensive description as it contains the first printing of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Siope.” ((<em>The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present</em> (Baltimore: Bayly and Burns, [1838]).)) 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). <em>The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons</em> is in the rare book room at the south end of the third floor. ((<em>The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons</em> (London: The Religious Tract Society, ca. 1850).)) (See Figure 12.) 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 <em>The Family Circle and Parlor Annual</em>, volume 5 in a series, which is shelved up on the sixth floor with the periodicals at 051 F198 (serials in American English). ((<em>The Family Circle and Parlor Annual (</em>New York: Comstock, 1847).)) (See Figure 13.)\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-402 \" alt=\"Figure 11. Orange Blossoms in the stacks.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a>\r\n\r\n<dl class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" id=\"attachment_402\" style=\"width: 279px;\"><dd class=\"wp-caption-dd\">Figure 11. Orange Blossoms in the stacks.</dd></dl>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_403\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-403 \" alt=\"Figure 12. The rare book room.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 12. The rare book room.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_404\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-404 \" alt=\"Figure 13. The Parlor Annual in the stacks.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 13. The Parlor Annual in the stacks.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_405\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"161\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-405  \" alt=\"Figure 14. Call slips and flags.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips.jpg\" width=\"161\" height=\"121\" /></a> Figure 14. Call slips and flags.[/caption]\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. (See Figure 14.) 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 <em>The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse</em>; 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.” ((<em>The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse </em>(Philadelphia: David Hogan, 1813).)) (See Figure 15.) 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_406\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-406 \" alt=\"Figure 15. Inscription in The New American Reader.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 15. Inscription in <em>The New American Reader</em>.[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\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<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.” ((Henk Aarts and Ap Dijksterhuis, “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” <em>Journal of Personality and Social Psychology</em> 84.1 (2003), 19.)) 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.” ((Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 19.)) Physical environments do not necessarily prompt these behaviors; rather, the behavior “depend[s] on whether the environment is of immediate behavioral relevance.” ((Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 20.)) 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. (See Figure 16.) 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. (See Figure 17.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_407\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"202\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-407 \" alt=\"Figure 16. The skylight in the George Peabody Library.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\" width=\"202\" height=\"269\" /></a> Figure 16. The skylight in the George Peabody Library.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_408\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-408 \" alt=\"Figure 17. Alcove in the George Peabody Library.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 17. Alcove in the George Peabody Library.[/caption]\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. ((See William Frederick Poole, <em>Remarks on Library Construction</em> (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1884).)) 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_409\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"151\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-409   \" alt=\"Figure 18. Photography station in the George Peabody Library.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station.jpg\" width=\"151\" height=\"113\" /></a> Figure 18. Photography station in the George Peabody Library.[/caption]\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. (See Figure 18.) 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-58','','','2013-07-11 03:57:03','2013-07-11 03:57:03','',2199,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/2199-revision-58/',0,'revision','',0),(5086,3,'2013-07-11 04:00:41','2013-07-11 04:00:41','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.) 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\n<iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ykY6moIaDE?rel=0\" height=\"250\" width=\"333\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe>\r\n<div class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 1. A staged archival encounter.</div>\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, <em>A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism</em> (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,” <em>Yale French Studies</em> 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, <em>Understanding Archives and Manuscripts</em> (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,” <em>Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History</em>, 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<div class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 2.</div>\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<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., <em>Refiguring the Archive</em> (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), Cheryl Simon, ed., Following the Archival Turn: Photography, the Museum, and the Archive, special issue of <em>Visual Resources: A Journal of Documentation</em> 18.2 (June 2002), and Ann Laura Stoler, <em>Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense</em> (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 <em>Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne</em> in French; the published English version echoed the French publication with its 1995 title <em>Archive Fever</em>. As Carolyn Steedman points out in <em>Dust: The Archive and Cultural History</em>, 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 <em>Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable</em> (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 <em>Dust</em> is from Virginia Woolf’s <em>To the Lighthouse</em>, one chapter treats George Eliot’s <em>Middlemarch</em> in depth… in fact, almost every chapter depends on a literary text. ((Another chapter invokes Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel <em>Mary Barton</em>, a third is anchored by W. H. Auden’s poem “Homage to Clio,” and a fourth finds its most eloquent examples in Charles Dickens’ <em>Our Mutual Friend</em>.)) 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; <em>Mal d’Archive</em> 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 <em>Archive Fever</em>—a “let’s begin at the beginning” homage to the seminal text—her book’s title, <em>Dust</em>, 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_423\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"172\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-423    \" alt=\"Figure 3. Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1.jpg\" width=\"172\" height=\"129\" /></a> Figure 3. Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.[/caption]\r\n\r\nKaplan, for her part, unravels her own archive story. She gives us a kind of “whodunit”—her search for the ephemeral sources of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s anti-semitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937). She uses this account to exemplify her effort to “move through the archival process and recover some of the stories that get deleted in the final scholarly form.” ((Kaplan, 104. For this reason, perhaps, Kaplan never reveals what she ultimately discovers in her successful search for Celine’s sources. In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether her pre-emptive and truncated treatment of her archive story is deliberate or not. Is this treatment meant to indirectly support her official claim about “results”? Or does the presence of the archive story suggest that telling it is an impulse she can’t quite control? Thanks, Lauren Coats, for helping tease this problem out.)) These beginnings are preemptively struck out, however, by what seems to be her main claim: “the passion of the archives must finally be used to eradicate all personal stories in the interests of the dry archival report, fit for a public.” ((Kaplan, 103.)) Only in the “para-text”—a preface, for example—can the archive story appear without “interrupt[ing] or complicat[ing] the narrative so much that no results could ever be understood or perceived.” ((Kaplan, 104.)) Despite this unequivocal assertion, the personal “whodunit” prevails in her essay, especially in the final section set in the Centre du documentation juive contemporain (CDJC). It is this library, where Kaplan solves the mystery of Céline’s sources, that “doubles as a detective’s office.”\r\n\r\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 <em>Archive Fever</em> 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\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 <em>Refiguring the Archive</em> (2002), <em>Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History</em> (2005) and <em>Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense</em> (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. <em>Archive Stories</em> 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 <em>Archive Fever</em> 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<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. ((<em>Alphabetical Catalogue of Books to be Purchased for the Library of the Peabody Institute, Baltimore</em>, Vols. 1 and 2 (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1861, 1863).)) (See Figure 4.) 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. ((<em>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</em> (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. ((<em>Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore</em>, Vols. 1-5 (Baltimore: Isaac Friedenwald, 1883; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, [1961?]; also on googlebooks), and <em>Second Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Including the Additions Made Since 1882</em>, Vols. 1-8 (Baltimore: Deutsch Lithographic and Printing, 1896; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, 1961).)) (See Figure 5.)  We have the cards from the Dewey decimal system card catalogue, which replaced the printed catalogue in the 1910s. 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_395\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"191\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-395   \" alt=\"Figure 4. Alphabetical index from Alphabetical Catalouge (“desiderata”).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1.jpg\" width=\"191\" height=\"277\" /></a> Figure 4. Alphabetical index from <em>Alphabetical Catalogue </em>(“desiderata”).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_396\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-396 \" alt=\"Figure 5. Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 5. Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_397\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"202\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-397 \" alt=\"Figure 6. One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\" width=\"202\" height=\"269\" /></a> Figure 6. One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\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. (See Figure 7.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_398\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"203\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-398   \" alt=\"Figure 7. Detail of subject index from Alphabetical Catalouge No. 2 (“desiderata”).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail.jpg\" width=\"203\" height=\"165\" /></a> Figure 7. Detail of subject index from <em>Alphabetical Catalouge</em> No. 2 (“desiderata”).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_399\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"171\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-399 \" alt=\"Figure 8. Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail.jpg\" width=\"171\" height=\"230\" /></a> Figure 8. Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.[/caption]\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.”  ((“Letters from George Peabody, Esq.: Baltimore, February 12th, 1857,” in Founder’s Letters, 7.)) 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.\" ((Qtd. in Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, “PIB Ref. Library. 8-Morison\'s Philosophy of Excellence,” in<em> 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.</em> 11 Mar. 2011.)) 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.\r\n\r\nThis 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. ((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,” <em>Libraries &amp; Culture</em> 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.))\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<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\n[caption id=\"attachment_400\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"215\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-400  \" alt=\"Figure 9. Dewey cards for “gift books.”\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards.jpg\" width=\"215\" height=\"162\" /></a> Figure 9. Dewey cards for “gift books.”[/caption]\r\n\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. ((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.)) (See Figure 9.) 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 <em>Rough and Ready Annual: or, Military Souvenir</em> published by Appleton’s has been assigned the subject “Mexican War, 1846-1848—Anecdotes.” ((<em>Rough and Ready Annual</em> (New York: D. Appleton; Philadelphia: G.S. Appleton, 1848).))\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\n[caption id=\"attachment_401\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"164\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-401 \" alt=\"Figure 10. The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr.jpg\" width=\"164\" height=\"123\" /></a> Figure 10. The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.[/caption]\r\n\r\n<em>The Rough and Ready Annual</em> is at 973.62 A5121, in the “general history of North America; United States” category. (See Figure 10.) This call number range is on the second floor, west side. Other items on my list are in very different parts of the library. <em>Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them,</em> 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. ((<em>Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them</em> (London: Knight &amp; Co., [1857]). This title does not appear in at least one Arthur bibliography; see Donald A Koch, \"Timothy Shay Arthur,\" <em>Antebellum Writers in New York and the South</em>, 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 <em>A Bibliography of the Published Books of Timothy Shay Arthur (</em>Atlanta: Emory University, 1954), a typewritten quarto at 012 A791S, but it seems to be missing.)) (See Figure 11.) Arthur shows up again as co-editor of <em>The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present</em>, which has received more extensive description as it contains the first printing of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Siope.” ((<em>The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present</em> (Baltimore: Bayly and Burns, [1838]).)) 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). <em>The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons</em> is in the rare book room at the south end of the third floor. ((<em>The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons</em> (London: The Religious Tract Society, ca. 1850).)) (See Figure 12.) 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 <em>The Family Circle and Parlor Annual</em>, volume 5 in a series, which is shelved up on the sixth floor with the periodicals at 051 F198 (serials in American English). ((<em>The Family Circle and Parlor Annual (</em>New York: Comstock, 1847).)) (See Figure 13.)\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-402 \" alt=\"Figure 11. Orange Blossoms in the stacks.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a>\r\n\r\n<dl class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" id=\"attachment_402\" style=\"width: 279px;\"><dd class=\"wp-caption-dd\">Figure 11. Orange Blossoms in the stacks.</dd></dl>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_403\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-403 \" alt=\"Figure 12. The rare book room.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 12. The rare book room.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_404\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-404 \" alt=\"Figure 13. The Parlor Annual in the stacks.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 13. The Parlor Annual in the stacks.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_405\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"161\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-405  \" alt=\"Figure 14. Call slips and flags.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips.jpg\" width=\"161\" height=\"121\" /></a> Figure 14. Call slips and flags.[/caption]\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. (See Figure 14.) 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 <em>The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse</em>; 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.” ((<em>The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse </em>(Philadelphia: David Hogan, 1813).)) (See Figure 15.) 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_406\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-406 \" alt=\"Figure 15. Inscription in The New American Reader.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 15. Inscription in <em>The New American Reader</em>.[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\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<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.” ((Henk Aarts and Ap Dijksterhuis, “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” <em>Journal of Personality and Social Psychology</em> 84.1 (2003), 19.)) 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.” ((Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 19.)) Physical environments do not necessarily prompt these behaviors; rather, the behavior “depend[s] on whether the environment is of immediate behavioral relevance.” ((Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 20.)) 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. (See Figure 16.) 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. (See Figure 17.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_407\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"202\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-407 \" alt=\"Figure 16. The skylight in the George Peabody Library.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\" width=\"202\" height=\"269\" /></a> Figure 16. The skylight in the George Peabody Library.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_408\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-408 \" alt=\"Figure 17. Alcove in the George Peabody Library.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 17. Alcove in the George Peabody Library.[/caption]\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. ((See William Frederick Poole, <em>Remarks on Library Construction</em> (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1884).)) 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_409\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"151\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-409   \" alt=\"Figure 18. Photography station in the George Peabody Library.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station.jpg\" width=\"151\" height=\"113\" /></a> Figure 18. Photography station in the George Peabody Library.[/caption]\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. (See Figure 18.) 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-59','','','2013-07-11 04:00:41','2013-07-11 04:00:41','',2199,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/2199-revision-59/',0,'revision','',0),(5087,3,'2013-07-06 23:23:35','2013-07-06 23:23:35','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nIn her article, “Disciplinarity and Disorder,” in Issue 1 of this journal, Gabrielle Dean opens her essay with a detailed and expressive “fantasy” describing the “primal scene of archival research [that] takes place in a dreary reading room,” featuring an archivist, a researcher, a cart, dusty gray boxes, and a “numbered file folder.” As her fantasy takes flight, with the researcher scribbling away and papers swirling and new collections sprouting up organically, she crafts an evocative metaphor for the life cycle of preservation and regeneration that archivists aim to enable through access to primary sources. Dean cogently deconstructs the origins and implications of this “primal scene” over the course of her essay. But what also merits highlighting in her opening metaphor are the accoutrements that populate it—the cart, the box, the file folder—familiar players on the stage of the archival encounter. These objects and symbols are evocative of that idealized moment of archaeological discovery that characterizes the use of the archive. They are objects and symbols of history, certainly, but relics, alas, of an analog age.\r\n\r\nA similar fantasy, one potentially more fraught with anxiety and dread, must darken the reveries of archivists as they attempt to provide access to more contemporary materials. A daydream involving the researcher of tomorrow may instead feature dreadful moments of “file cannot be opened” error messages, of FTP transfers gone awry, of decaying media orphaned from long-lost playback devices. Our imaginary researcher will not be awaiting archival discovery sitting in a dreary reading room, but instead exist in some networked who-knows-where, furiously emailing an endless stream of access and transfer requests and constantly griping about obsolete formats and buggy interfaces. At the same time, our imaginary archivist will not be pushing carts or shelving boxes, but creating user accounts for virtual reading rooms, running pattern-recognition text-mining queries, uploading disk images, or helping users with emulation software. Like the content of our archives themselves, the props and symbols of our archival fantasies increasingly will be associated with born-digital materials.\r\n\r\nHow will traditional principles of archival arrangement and description be challenged or modified to account for born-digital materials? Arrangement and description have long been the primary method of facilitating the use of archives, and their methodologies have been dependent upon the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i>. The articulation of this theory in 1841 has been held as the “starting point” or beginning of the modern era of archival theory, a “watershed” event establishing the “basic principle” and “very core” of the archival endeavor. Superlatives abound. <i>Respect des fonds</i>, “more than any other principle, has come to provide the archival profession with a unique identity.” ((Nancy Bartlett, “The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance,” in <i>Bibliographical Foundations of French Historical Studies</i> (New York: Haworth Press, 1992), 108.))\r\n\r\nBut <i>respect des fonds</i> was born of a particular historic moment, for a particular type of archival document, and was conceived to address the practical needs of specific social circumstances. Even as <i>respect des fonds</i> has mutated and evolved over the decades, subject to revisions, contestations, and reaffirmations, its methodologies have largely been a product of the nature of the archival record as a physical document to be sorted, grouped, and described after receipt from a single donating entity. In an era defined by digital materials and their affordances and limitations, one in which narrative linearity often seems replaced by data-driven relationalism, the meaning of <i>respect des fonds</i> is ever more slippery.\r\n\r\nBroadly stated, <i>respect des fonds</i> is the principle of grouping records by the administration, organization, individual, or creating body in which they originated. <i>Respect des fonds</i> mandates that the records of the creating entity not be mixed with those of a different entity. It prioritizes the “organic” nature of archival records, identifying the locus of their generation, and the evidence their consolidation provides about that originating body, as essential to preserving and maintaining context. Comprised of the related “principle of original order” and “the principle of provenance,” <i>respect des fonds</i> displaced prior methods of archival arrangement that were predicated upon classifications by subject, function, topic, legal utility, chronology, and other categories. Though often referenced as a core component of archival identity, as a theoretical concept, <i>respect des fonds</i> is, as one writer says, “elusive and oft-misunderstood.” ((Dan Zelenyj, “Linchpin Imperilled: The Functional Interpretation of Series and the Principle of Respect des Fonds,” <i>Archivaria</i> 42 (1996): 126.))\r\n\r\nThe introduction of born-digital records into the archives offers an opportunity to examine how the practical methodologies of arrangement and description are shifting and how those changing practices lead to a reconsideration of <i>respect des fonds</i>. Much as digital records’ technological dependencies, ease of duplication, and subordination to features of systems and storage have led to a reassessment of the existing precepts of archival appraisal and selection, they also prompt a similar analysis of arrangement and description. One of those axioms due reassessment is the theory of <i>respect des fonds</i>.\r\n\r\nThis essay details the social and material conditions of the emergence of <i>respect des fonds</i>, the theory’s complex practical implementations and contested assumption, the emergence of alternate models, and how born-digital materials illuminate the theory’s analog origins and limitations. I will also explain the specific qualities of digital objects, including the nature of inscription and its impact on notions of original order and authenticity, as well as how nonlinear retrieval supplants the narrative logic of <i>respect des fonds</i> with a broader notion of context and discoverability. I will then consider recent interpretive methods, such as data visualization and text mining, as potential harbingers of new modes of representing and creating interfaces to digital collections—representations that better capitalize on the possibilities of digital materials. Finally, I will argue that the affordances of born-digital archives—such as their potential for parallel representation, machine-enabled interpretation, and expansive contextual and intellectual availability—provoke a reconsideration of the place of privilege of <i>respect des fonds </i>in archival arrangement and description.\r\n\r\n<b>The Old Regime</b>\r\n\r\nBefore <i>respect des</i> <i>fonds</i> can be respected, disrespected, or neglected, a better understanding of its origins is warranted, along with an examination of how the principle has (or has not) been applied and its periodic contestation. The seductive purity of the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i> often overshadows the concept’s decidedly complex origins. <i>Respect des fonds</i> as a guiding method of archival control was never as ennobled an idea as its contemporary evocation often implies. Its original articulation was mired in professional infighting, reductive practicalities, and the tumult and disorganization of political change.\r\n\r\nWhile we can find records grouped according to creator in some earlier instances, ((Luciana Duranti, “Origin and Development of Archival Description,” <i>Archivaria</i> 35 (1993): 50.)) the formal articulation of the concept of <i>respect des fonds</i> was, like much of modernity, a by-product of the French Revolution. The Revolution featured a simultaneous destruction and reconstruction of the archive, an attempt to both erase and recast the historical record. Most famously, when revolutionaries stormed the Bastille they destroyed its documentary contents—records that instantiated the subjugation and exploitation of the despised monarchy. (See Figure 1.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4724\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4724\" alt=\"Figure 1. Storming of the Bastille and arrest of the Governor M. de Launay, July 14, 1789. Those are probably archival records burning in the background.  Public domain Image via Wikimedia Commons. Artist unknown.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image1-300x237.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"237\" /></a> Figure 1. Storming of the Bastille and arrest of the Governor M. de Launay, July 14, 1789. Those are probably archival records burning in the background. Public domain Image via Wikimedia Commons. Artist unknown.[/caption]\r\n\r\nYet the revolutionaries’ also scrupulously preserved the record of their own activities. The <i>Archives Nationales</i> was established in 1790, with a head archivist, hours designated for the general public, and a centralized administration tasked both with preserving the legacy of the new government and managing select records of the Old Regime. Those tasks, however, were segregated in ways that impacted how each class of documents was handled. Records of the National Assembly were to be scrupulously maintained, while feudal titles were widely destroyed. As one Minster put it, “all the old documents with gothic script are … only legal titles of feudalism, of the subjection of the feeble to the strong.” ((As cited in Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development since the French Revolution,” <i>The American Archivist</i> 3, no. 3 (1940): 162.))\r\n\r\nThe management of archives during this time was chaotic. Property records were sent to one administrative body within the <i>Archives Nationales</i>, legal records to another, and documents of historical interest went to the <i>Bibliotheque Nationales</i>. At the same time, archivists were tasked with maintaining a distinction between records documenting pre- and post-Revolutionary activities. In addition, the first two administrative heads of the <i>Archives Nationales</i>, Armand-Gaston Camus and Pierre Daunou, were both trained as librarians and had, by the early 1800s, established twenty-four “groupings” of records into which future accessions were to be integrated. Within these groups, additional classifications and intellectual methods of ordering existed. The archives, then, were “arranged in accordance with an arbitrarily devised ‘methodical’ scheme that was derived from library experience.” ((T. R Schellenberg, <i>Modern Archive : Principles and Techniques</i> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 169.)) As well, political tumult and instability of governance continued to have an impact on the arrangement of the archives, and “decisions about preservation, classification, inventory, and access were therefore the result not just of practical considerations or the opinions of individual archivists and librarians, but also of key shifts in national politics.” ((Lara Moore, <i>Restoring Order: The Ecole Des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870</i> (Duluth, Minnesota: Litwin Books, 2008), 17.))\r\n\r\n<b>The Origins of <i>Respect des Fonds</i></b>\r\n\r\nWhile the true extent of records destruction during the post-Revolutionary years is disputed, ((Carl Lokke, “Archives and the French Revolution,” <i>The American Archivist</i> 31, no. 1 (January 1968): 30-31.)) as Judith Panitch notes, “this chaotic episode of archival history reveals much about archives themselves, suggesting specifically their fundamental fragility and malleability.” ((Judith Panitch, “Liberty, equality, posterity? Some Archival Lessons from the Case of the French Revolution,” <i>The American Archivist</i> 59, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 33.)) That malleability is evident in the conflicting approaches to archival arrangement and description that characterized this era, practices that lead up to the declaration of the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i>. Records of the time were arranged primarily by sometimes-quixotic methods of classification, by schema idiosyncratic in origin and inconsistent in application. ((Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development,” 167.))\r\n\r\nA number of developments in the next few decades pushed this lack of uniformity to its breaking point and helped impel the conceptualization of <i>respect des fonds</i> as an archival principle, if, as I will show, less of an actual practice. The establishment of the <i>Ecole des Chartes</i> in 1821 created a formal institution to train archivists to staff both the <i>Archives Nationales</i> and the over 2500 provincial archives across France. Laws passed in the 1830s also drastically expanded the number of archivists mandated to work both in the <i>Archives Nationales</i> and in the provincial archives. Formal training and new positions, however, when combined with lax oversight and inconsistent guidance on practices, led, predictably, to a near-comic proliferation of methods of classification and arrangement. (See Figure 2.) Due to the proliferation of classification systems and schema, change was inevitable.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4725\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"480\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image2.jpg\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-4725\" alt=\"Figure 2. The many arrangement methods of some Ecole des Chartes graduates prior to the emergence of respect des fonds as a methodology. Image from Lara Moore\'s &quot;Restoring Order,&quot; 114.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image2.jpg\" width=\"480\" height=\"383\" /></a> Figure 2. The many arrangement methods of some Ecole des Chartes graduates prior to the emergence of respect des fonds as a methodology. Image from Lara Moore\'s \"Restoring Order,\" 114.[/caption]\r\n\r\nThat change came in the form of the infamous “Circular no. 14,” released in 1841 by Natalis de Wailly, Administrative Head of the <i>Archives Nationales</i>. This document is recognized as the first articulation of the fonds as the fundamental method of archival arrangement, the purpose of which was “to form a collection of all the documents which originate from a body, an organization, a family or an individual, and to arrange the different fonds according to a certain order.” ((As quoted in Nancy Bartlett, “The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance,” 107.)) <i>Respect des fonds</i> made creatorship the organizing principle of archival records and espoused the formation of collections according to the organization, entity, family, or individual responsible for their creation. Such an arrangement would ensure, as one writer later put it, the essential need “to know where it [the archival document] was created, in the framework of what process, to what end, for whom, when and how it was received by the addressee, and how it came into our hands.” ((Michael Duchein, “Theoretical Principles and Practical Problems of Respect des fonds in Archival Science,” <i>Archivaria</i> 16 (Summer 1983): 67.))\r\n\r\nHowever, as Nancy Bartlett has explicated, this “watershed” moment was less momentous than contemporary evocations suggest. For one, de Wailly’s circular dictated “that <i>respect des fonds</i> was prescribed only for archival records created prior to 1789.” More contemporary fonds were to continue to be arranged categorically. In addition, minutes from subsequent meetings of the commission overseeing the work of archivists—a commission on which de Wailly served—reveal that “<i>respect des fonds</i> was if nothing more a preliminary standard for archival arrangement and description in departmental archives, a means of insuring that beginning archivists without the benefit of direct supervision might not cause too much intellectual damage to vulnerable records in their care.” ((Bartlett, “The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance,” 111.))\r\n\r\nThe principle was, in fact, a practical exigency, a method to simplify archival arrangement seen as more easily implemented by novice archivists than the more rigorous arrangement by classification. Bartlett also notes that <i>respect des fonds</i> remained absent from both the curriculum of the <i>Ecole des Chartes</i> as well as the publications of the professional society of its graduates. Lastly, the principle was, at the time, not applied to accessions into the <i>Archive Nationales</i> itself, as it operated under a different administrative department than de Wailly’s Interior Ministry.\r\n\r\n<i>Respect des fonds</i>, then, was never a perfectly realized theory. Its formation was a contingency of a unique historical moment; its conception depended upon practical necessities and its implementation was inconsistent and disputed. What today seems near dogma—that archives be arranged by fonds—was at the time novel and simplistic, more the product of utility and political manipulation than a grand inspiration regarding the functional authenticity of fonds or evidential purity towards their arrangement.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4726\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"183\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image3.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4726 \" alt=\"Figure 3. Front page of the proceedings of the 1910 Congres de Bruxelles, the First International Congress of Archivists and Librarians. The full proceedings are available online at http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/menu.html. Google Translate does a passable job of translating.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image3-183x300.jpg\" width=\"183\" height=\"300\" /></a> Figure 3. Front page of the proceedings of the 1910 Congres de Bruxelles, the First International Congress of Archivists and Librarians. The full proceedings are available online at http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/menu.html. Google Translate does a passable job of translating.[/caption]\r\n\r\n<b>The Original Original Order</b>\r\n\r\nThough implemented inconsistently in its home country, the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i> gained a wide acceptance across Europe. In Prussia, the theory (known as <i>Provenienzprinzip,</i> the principle of provenance) mandated that “official papers are to be maintained in the order and with the designations which they received in the course of the official activity of the agency concerned.” ((Schellenberg, <i>Modern Archives</i>, 175.)) <i>Respect des fonds</i> received its most elaborate and sustained justification, and expansion, however, in the Netherlands, where the Dutch archivists Muller, Feith, and Fruin produced their famous <i>Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives</i> in 1898. Often referred to colloquially as the “Dutch Manual” and seen as the “starting point of archival theory and methodology,” ((Peter Horsman, Eric Ketelaar, and Theo Thomassen, “New Respect for the Old Order: The Context of the Dutch Manual,” <i>The American Archivist </i>66, no. 2 (2003): 249.)) the work provided a detailed set of guidelines for the arrangement of records. The principle of <i>respect des fonds</i> gained even wider acceptance and popularity after its ratification at the First International Congress of Archivists meeting in Brussels in 1910. ((Lawrence D. Geller, “Joseph Cuvelier, Belgian Archival Education, and the First International Congress of Archivists, Brussels, 1910,” <i>Archivaria</i> 16 (Summer 1983): 16. Proceedings from the 1910 meeting can be found online at <a href=\"http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/\">http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/</a>.)) (See Figure 3.)\r\n\r\nThe Dutch Manual, and the methodologies implemented in its wake, not only forbid the intermingling of the fonds of one agency with those of another—in keeping with the French conception of <i>respect des fonds</i>—but also expanded the theory to apply to the records within each fond—the internal arrangement of the archival collection. Or as the Dutch Manual put it, “the system of arrangement must be based on the original organization of the archival collection.” ((Samuel Muller, Johan Adriaan Feith, and Robert Fruin, <i>Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives</i> (H.W. Wilson Co., 1968), 52.)) This concept has come to be known as the “principle of original order,” an intra-fonds corollary to the external means of arrangement associated with the principle of provenance; <i>respect des fonds</i> encompasses both principles.\r\n\r\nA closer examination of the Dutch Manual, however, reveals certain methodological impracticalities that even its authors admit. First, they claim that the original order within a fonds may be modified or “restored” to account for multiple transfers from an agency, not all of which may truly represent the idealized “original order.” As well, records may be reorganized to account for “inconsequential irregularities attributable to record-keeping officials.” The authors also note that reconstituting the original order may be avoided when “the trouble which would have to be taken in order to reconstruct the old organization is out of proportion to the result to be obtained.” ((Muller et al., <i>Manual</i>, 83.)) Needless to say, the simple idea of “restoring original order” seems itself problematic, fraught with subjective decision-making likely far removed from whatever idealized “organic” origin archivists may discover within fonds. The complicated approach to “restoration” and “reconstruction” that the Dutch Manual advises often borders on, as one writer put it, “abandoning entirely their carefully developed ethic of conservation.” ((Frank Boles, “Disrespecting Original Order,” <i>The American Archivist </i>45, no. 1 (1982): 28.))\r\n\r\n<b>Critique des Fonds</b>\r\n\r\nThe widespread adoption <i>of respect des fonds</i> did not proceed unquestioned, however. As early as the 1930s, some archivists were taking issue with the methodology of arranging collections according to original order. In his survey of the development of archival theory, Ernst Posner points to the German Max Bar and two Swedish archivists who demonstrated “that slavish preservation of the original arrangement of a fonds is often insufficient,” the principle of provenance “is subject to certain restrictions” that make blanket adoption impractical, and adherence to <i>respect des fonds</i> often impedes use of archival materials. ((Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development,” 169.))\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4747\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image4.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4747 \" alt=\"Figure 4. Peter Scott\'s diagram depicting his system of archival arrangement based on grouping records at the series level. From Scott, &quot;The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment,&quot; 1966. \" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image4-300x177.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"177\" /></a> Figure 4. Peter Scott\'s diagram depicting his system of archival arrangement based on grouping records at the series level. From Scott, \"The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment,\" 1966.[/caption]\r\n\r\nSome Australian and American archivists in the 1960s, primarily Peter Scott and Mario Fenyo, challenged the definition of fonds even further. The problems with the traditional concept of the fonds were manifold. Defining fonds as the records of a “transferring or controlling agency” was problematic since the agent of transfer was not always the creating agency. Fonds could also be mixed or “broken” into multiple transfers to an archive, making reconstitution difficult. Fonds could also be the result of “a succession of agencies,” blurring true creatorship. Ordering series within fonds was difficult since future accessions may need to be inserted at different places in the existing organizational system, leading to physical disorder or the constant revision of finding aids or inventories. After reviewing minutes of early NARA meetings in an attempt to define what, exactly, constitutes a fonds, Fenyo succinctly pointed out, “no one knows what the word fonds means, not even the French who invented it.” ((Mario D. Fenyo, “The Record Group Concept: A Critique,” <i>The American Archivist </i>29, no. 2 (April 1966): 230.)) For Scott, his belief that “the very arbitrariness of the concept [of the fonds] is sufficient to make one question its usefulness,” ((Peter Scott, “The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment,” <i>The American Archivist </i>29, no. 4 (October 1966): 497.)) led him to develop the “series system” (See Figure 4) which sought to orient arrangement and description according to function and use instead of agent or material type—a theory that, Terry Cook noted, “shifted the entire archival description enterprise from a static cataloging mode to a dynamic system of multiple interrelationships.” ((Terry Cook, “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” <i>Archivaria</i> 43 (1999): 38.))\r\n\r\nThe principle of original order underwent a similar critique. A lack of clarity on the custodianship of records prior to their delivery to an archive, the problem of multiple and ongoing accessions, and the potential for incoherent or unknown methods of ordering or classification by creating bodies all led Fenyo to proclaim, “archivists generally believe that the arrangement of series within a record group reflects to some extent the organization and even history of the agency that created those records.… But the records in the National Archives reflect no such thing.” ((Fenyo, \"The Record Group Concept,\" 236.)) For archives consisting of personal papers, original order is seen as particularly problematic, since a chronological arrangement seemingly provides the greatest meaning and value to the records of an individual, but is unlikely to be the order of records upon accession. Restoration of original order also risks destroying the contextual information accrued by collections that have passed through multiple states of custodianship prior to their acceptance into the archive. ((Debra Barr, “Protecting Provenance: Response to the Report of the Working Group on Description at the Fonds Level,” <i>Archivaria</i> 28 (Summer 1989): 141-145. See also Robert Edwards, “‘With Respect to Original Order’: Changing Values in Archival Arrangement,” <i>Archives Association of British Columbia</i> 11, no. 1 (Winter 2001).)) Lastly, the principle of original order prioritizes filing systems of unknown or dubious legitimacy over the principle of use or accessibility. As Frank Boles states, “usability acknowledges the evidential superiority of documents over filing systems by placing primary emphasis on access to documents.” ((Boles, “Disrespecting Original Order,” 31.)) In this critique, usability and original order are often in conflict.\r\n\r\n<b>Of Bonds and Parallels</b>\r\n\r\nOther conceptual models besides the series system have attempted to address these critiques by forming new ideas about how order or grouping can evidence archival authenticity, identity, and meaning. One theory to articulate the interrelations of individual records can be found in Luciana Duranti’s notion of the archival bond, which she defines as the “network of relations that each record has with the records belonging in the same aggregation.” ((Luciana Duranti, “The Archival Bond,” <i>Archives and Museum Informatics</i> 11 (1997): 213-18.)) Not to be confused with context, which exists outside the record, the archival bond, for Duranti, is core to the identity of the record. As she states, “documents that are expressions of a transaction are not records until they are put into relation with other records.” ((Ibid., 216.)) Emerging from research into the authenticity of electronic records (including the InterPARES project), the archival bond identifies a web of documentary co-dependencies that presumes an inheritance and relationship between records based on functional proximity. ((“The InterPARES Project,” accessed October 2012, <a href=\"http://www.interpares.org\">www.interpares.org</a>.))\r\n\r\nPerhaps the most exhaustive attempt to deal with many difficulties that exist within the gulf between <i>respect des fonds</i> as principle and practice was undertaken by Michel Duchein in 1983. ((Duchein, \"Theoretical Principles and Practical Problems,\" 64–82.)) While Duchein proposes solutions to the many problems of the fonds concept, the reader cannot help but be overwhelmed by the fact that his cataloging of the “theoretical problems” and “practical difficulties” far outnumber, and begin to drown out, his proposed solutions. For Duchein, within fonds there can be all sorts of nebulous, arbitrary, and forgotten methods of classification “from which all imaginable disorders flow.” He calls these, in a poetic moment, “brutal manipulations.” ((Ibid., 77.)) But after this disquisition, on the last page of his article Duchein mentions one idea that seems if not prescient, then at least transitive in the way it conceives of context: the <i>parallelismus membrorum</i>, “the similarity of parallel files.” <i>Parallelismus membrorum</i> is a rhetorical term referring to the patterns within a text formed by the utilization of repeated grammatical structures. (“I came. I saw. I conquered,” is a brief example). Duchein here employs the motif to refer to the contextual relations that exist between records of different fonds, the network of meanings that stretch across the archive.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4927\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image5.gif\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4927  \" alt=\"Figure 5. Chris Hurly\'s diagram of parallel provenance, &quot;The Little Truck.&quot; The little truck is a metaphor for archival description. From Hurley, &quot;Parallel Provenance: (1) What if Anything is Archival Description?”\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image5-300x199.gif\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" /></a> Figure 5. Chris Hurly\'s diagram of parallel provenance, \"The Little Truck.\" The little truck is a metaphor for archival description. From Hurley, \"Parallel Provenance: (1) What if Anything is Archival Description?”[/caption]\r\n\r\nChris Hurley explored an idea similar to <i>parallelismus membrorum</i> in his delineation of “parallel provenance” a concept built around “composing different things from the same particles—combining things in different ways to produce a variety of views of what they look like in the aggregate … not so much about identifying a different creator as recognizing manifold context.” ((Chris Hurley, “Parallel Provenance: (1) What if Anything is Archival Description?,” <i>Archives and Manuscripts</i> 33, no. 1 (2005): 126.)) (See Figure 5.) Other contemporary writers, such as Laura Millar and Geoffrey Yeo, have sought to stretch the meaning of the fonds even further, arguing it exists purely at the conceptual level. ((Geoffrey Yeo, “The Conceptual Fonds and the Physical Collection,” <i>Archivaria</i> 73 (Spring 2012): 43-91; Laura Millar, “The Death of the Fonds and the Resurrection of Provenance: Archival Context in Space and Time,” <i>Archivaria</i> 53 (Spring 2002): 1-15.)) But as the definition of the fonds becomes more distant, more abstract, its privileging as a form of aggregation seems less certain, especially in a digital environment in which creatorship is but one of many means of grouping records.\r\n\r\nThe archival bond, the series system, <i>parallelismus membrorum, </i>and parallel provenance all mark attempts to theorize relationships between records and collections in ways that can elide the practical problems of <i>res</i><i>pect des fonds</i>. Equally, these ideas represent a continued expansion of context beyond the limitations of grouping by creatorship or creator-derived order. In each case, similarities and dependencies emerge out of cross-collection networks or semantically derived principles. As the models gain distance from the vagaries of the individual records, one starts to recognize a familiar pattern of removal—not a disjunction, exactly, but a subtle passage from the material trace to the abstract representation. The familiarity is borne of the similar movement from item to representation that characterizes electronic records and their attendant phenomenological tension between the physical inscription on a drive and the symbolic interface on a screen.\r\n\r\n<b>Bit Level Processing</b>\r\n\r\nBut enough of models. Consider instead the bit, the binary, the magnetic flux reversal of the spinning disk that is the origin of the digital object. Material inscription offers a good point to segue into an examination of digital records and how they both complicate or even circumvent historical notions of <i>respect des fonds </i> while at the same time enabling realization of a more expansive notion of context and interrelation.\r\n\r\nStarting at the bit level, the characteristics of inscription (how digital information is written onto storage media) call into question the idea of original order. When data is written to a storage device, it has a material, physical trace, but that trace is far from the legibility or interpretability we associate with analog documents. As Matt Kirschenbaum has noted in his study of new media and digital forensics, “we write <i>on</i> paper, but we write <i>to</i> a magnetic disk (or tape)”; the semantic difference signifies that the act of inscription is “logically distinct” from the act of creation and intellectual manipulation. ((Matt Kirschenbaum, <i>Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination</i> (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 87. Emphasis in original.)) (See Figure 6.) In addition, a key component of storage media is that it is random access; that means the bits composing a record are inscribed to available clusters across the platter of a drive depending on which tracks and sectors are available for inscription. That is, the component bits of a digital object are non-sequential in their material physical arrangement. Aggregated, they can create an interpretable object, but their component location is nonlinear. Here, even at the bit level of a single item, there is no original order. Furthermore, each time these bits are reconstructed, each time the file is accessed and translated into an interpretable, editable representation, the file will be altered in minute ways (for instance, a file’s “last opened” date) and thus be composed of a new order as new bits are assigned to other available areas of the disk. As Kirschenbaum notes, quoting a dictum of forensic science, “every contact leaves a trace.” The act of interpreting a digital object, thus, continually alters its material order.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4729\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image6.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4729 \" title=\"bailey_archivejournal_image6\" alt=\"Figure 6. Close-up of a disk drive at the Computer History Museum, showing arms and a read/write head. Processing Born-Digital Materials Using AccessData FTK at Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, 2011.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image6-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Figure 6. Close-up of a disk drive at the Computer History Museum, showing arms and a read/write head.<br />Processing Born-Digital Materials Using AccessData FTK at Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, 2011.[/caption]\r\n\r\nMoving beyond the non-sequential arrangement of bits of individual records, but remaining at the forensic level, other features of the digital environment challenge long-standing presumptions of authenticity and uniqueness that are dependent upon physical arrangement or description. Temporary files, such as those stored by auto-save or recovery programs, mean that a drive can contain multiple versions of identical files, many of them beyond the management (or even awareness) of their creator. This “ambient data” is matched by other features of data dispersal throughout a storage system, such as “swap space” (disk space sometimes allocated for use by RAM) and “disk slack” (which accounts for the difference between the actual file size and the disk space used for storage) that themselves complicate ideas of order and linearity. Storage becomes a hidden, dynamic world in which physical arrangement on a spinning drive consists of the equivalent of dispersed crevices, hidey-holes, and secret areas where data proliferates. Kirschenbaum asserts, “there is, in short, no simple way to know how many instances of a single file are residing in how many states, in how many different locations, at any given moment in the operating system.” ((Ibid., 52.)) As well, digital objects themselves have the potential to contain trace data that, while possibly not achieving the singular identity of a record, can have evidential value or help establish provenance.\r\n\r\nTake, for instance, Kirschenbaum’s exploration of a floppy disk image, in which he finds evidence of how the storage media was used over time and what its hidden and partially deleted data can manifest about its user: “[W]e discover on the original diskette the incompletely overwritten remains of previous software … a piece of 1980s software culture frozen in allographic amber.” ((Ibid., 140.)) Discovering this legacy information reveals multiple levels of creatorship and a trail of ownership and social and cultural meaning that extend beyond the object, the creator, or the fonds. In this case, the unintentionally preserved (by the user, at least) data provides a testament to its origins that is not visible in the individual files themselves. Here provenance is not a result of aggregation or description but a characteristic of how digital information is created and transmitted. Context is not just relational, implied, or conceptualized, but can be a part of the very media itself, like secret, half-formed barnacles clinging to the vessel of the digital record. Incomplete but decipherable. Fragmentary but meaningful. Allographic amber.\r\n\r\n<b>Fonds Essentialism</b>\r\n\r\nNeedless to say, most people do not interact with digital information at the forensic level. In Kenneth Thibodeau’s useful model, digital objects are compounds, composed of a physical, logical, and conceptual object. Respectively, those adjectives refer to the physical inscription on storage media; the logical suite of translational software and processes that access and “read” that inscription; and the conceptual object the user interacts with, such as the text, image, or interface on a screen. ((Kenneth Thibodeau, “Overview of Technological Approaches to Digital Preservation and Challenges in Coming Years,” in <i>The State of Digital Preservation: An International Perspective</i> (Washington D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2002).)) The conceptual object—the representational environment of the screen as experienced in the word processing program, the image editor, the social media app—inculcates its own affordances and logic on the creation or use of records. In fact, given the hidden, inscrutable nature of storage and inscription, the formal representation of digital objects on a screen can have an outsized influence on their creation, management, and perception—an interpretive tendency that Nick Montford calls “screen essentialism.” Considering the extensive influence that the theory of <i>respect des fonds</i> has had, historically, on how archival collections are arranged and described, a similar predilection may characterize the archival enterprise—call it <i>fonds essentialism</i>.\r\n\r\nThe conceptual object—the screen—presents its own challenges to the implied narrative of current modes of archival description. The way that a user interacts with an aggregation of digital materials is fundamentally different from how a user would interact with a set of document boxes or a finding aid. The screen imposes its own logic, its own “formal regimen,” in Kirschenbaum’s terms, on how digital objects are interpreted or accessed, but also how they are described. Traditional archival representation for analog materials emerges from a narrative: a story about what a collection is, what it holds, and the order and location of its contents. It moves through a descriptive summary of contextual detail and administrative information and on to a hierarchy of series and subseries often arranged by type, function, chronology, or other broad categories. Papers, folders, boxes, and series must be arranged in physical space, after all, and that comes to shape how they are arranged in the intellectual space of description. A finding aid is a narrative to be read and its intellectual availability is largely linear and structural. The conceptual object of the digital record and the interface to an aggregation of digital records offer quite a different type of interaction.\r\n\r\nText mining and hyperlinks are simple examples of ways to navigate large groups of materials absent a singular narrative sequence. Lev Manovich, in theorizing new media, has noted that the database (or, the database logic) has supplanted narrative as the method of interacting with digital information. In new media, “narrative becomes just one method of accessing data among others,” and digital information assumes “the projection of the ontology of a computer onto culture itself.” ((Lev Manovich, “Database as a Genre of New Media,” <i>Journal of A&amp;I Society</i> 14, no. 2 (May 2000): 176-77.)) In a database, objects are related but not ordered. The database logic is nonlinear and there is no original order because order is dependent upon query. Search and navigation become algorithm-dependent and not predetermined by a creator, an archivist, or a static finding aid—though all of those organizations are themselves available. Digital objects will have an identifier, yes, but where they “rest” in intellectual space is contingent, mutable. The key point is that, even at the level of representation, arrangement is dynamic: access and representation need not depend on the fonds. Description becomes relational as well and can extend beyond individual aggregations of records. The logic of physical space no longer drives retrieval or predominates in description. Original order and provenance are not lost or obviated in this model, but they are not the exclusive means of access, either.\r\n\r\n<b>Recent Practices</b>\r\n\r\nCase studies from projects handling significant amounts of born-digital records provide insight into the theoretical and practical problems of <i>respect des fonds</i>. As the Emory University project asked of the born-digital content in its Salmon Rushdie acquisition, “Would we treat the born-digital files the same as print material? Would we impose any sort of arrangement on the materials? How much added description could we provide? As the following discussion will reveal, the application of archival theory and principles may shift to accommodate the differences between paper and born-digital archives.” ((Laura Carroll et al., “A Comprehensive Approach to Born-Digital Archives,” <i>Archivaria</i> 72 (Fall 2011): 72.)) Or, as the large-scale, born-digital Vancouver Olympics project team put it, “core archival activities may diverge from long-established practices when moving into the digital environment.” ((Courtney C. Mumma, Glenn Dingwall, and Sue Bigelow, “A First Look at the Acquisition and Appraisal of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Fonds: Or, SELECT * FROM VANOC_Records AS Archives WHERE Value=‘true’;,” <i>Archivaria</i> 72 (Fall 2011): 93.)) Along with the multi-institutional AIMS project and the PARADIGM (Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media) project in the UK, these case studies detail the practical issues involved in rethinking arrangement and description in born-digital archives. ((AIMS Work Group, “AIMS Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship,” 2012, <a href=\"http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/\">http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/</a>; Paradigm project, “Workbook on Digital Private Papers,” The Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media (Paradigm) Project, accessed October 2012,  <a href=\"http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook/index.html\">http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook/index.html</a>.))\r\n\r\nTaken together, the projects provide an overview of how arrangement may look in entirely born-digital collections. All note the difficulty in parsing user-generated description and the often quixotic or meaningless nature of directory structures and naming. The projects largely employed filtering, text mining, and other cross-record queries to determine the content of most files. The sheer volume of files contained in accessions precluded any item-level content review or hierarchical rearrangement; yet, at the same time, “the creation of file and item descriptions and inventories is not only easier and faster, it yields much richer information.… What takes hours or days to perform in the paper environment takes mere seconds to accomplish in the digital environment, and is done to a greater level of detail.” ((Mumma et al., \"A First Look,\" 115-16.))\r\n\r\nThough the many technical processes necessary for format validation, emulation, automated metadata extraction, and other methods of processing born-digital archives are too complex to be fully recounted here, these case studies point to their key characteristics. (See Video 1.) Arrangement, as we think of it, is no longer a process of imposing intellectualized hierarchies or physical relocation; instead, it becomes largely automated, algorithmic, and batch processed. At the same time, archival representation will build upon the affordances of the digital objects themselves to extract and compile metadata that can then be repurposed to bridge and augment a wealth of contextual relations far beyond the order of their creation and their agency of origin.\r\n\r\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDAhbR8dyp8\r\n<div class=\"wp-caption-text\">Video 1. Processing Born-Digital Materials Using AccessData FTK at Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. 2011.</div>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Visual Descriptions</b>\r\n\r\nAs the “logical associations of records extend beyond the records themselves and embrace relations with other entities in the wider world,” as Geoffrey Yeo puts it, archivists will be tasked with building interfaces that draw upon these aforementioned possibilities and linking them to the online interfaces through which records will be made available. ((Yeo, “The Conceptual Fonds,” 71.)) The interface thus becomes the “critical element in the interaction between documentary evidence and its consumers.” ((Margaret Hedstrom, “Archives, Memory, and Interfaces with the Past,” <i>Archival Science</i> 2, no. 1-2 (2002): 24.))\r\n\r\nSince few archives are accessioning entirely born-digital collections, it is difficult to find archival examples of a description for such a collection. Born-digital content that is currently being processed is usually a small portion of a larger physical collection and, as such, is integrated in a hybrid fashion into traditional finding aids; see, for instance, \"<a href=\"http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt9p3038mq/\">Series 8: Born digital files</a>,\" \"<a href=\"http://findingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/rushdie1000/\">Series 11: Computers and related devices</a>,\" or \"<a href=\"http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/creeley.html\">Series 13: Computer files</a>.\"\r\n\r\nThere are, however, some archival projects, as well as work in the digital humanities, that offer a window into how researchers and scholars are making using of large sets of digital data. While the data sets and digital records being utilized are not necessarily archival collections, the tools, methods of inquiry, and cross-collection, multi-institutional repositories that emerge from these projects presage both how entirely born-digital archives may come to be used and what digital archival collection interfaces may look like in the future.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4928\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image7.gif\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4928  \" alt=\"Figure 7. Image from &quot;Data Mining with Criminal Intent&quot; presentation by Briquet et al. at Digging into Data Challenge, Washington D.C., 2009. Slides available at http://criminalintent.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/criminal_intent_digging_into_data_meeting_10jun2011.pdf.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image7-300x179.gif\" width=\"300\" height=\"179\" /></a> Figure 7. Image from \"Data Mining with Criminal Intent\" presentation by Briquet et al. at Digging into Data Challenge, Washington D.C., 2009. Slides available at http://criminalintent.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/criminal_intent_digging_into_data_meeting_10jun2011.pdf.[/caption]\r\n\r\nTwo projects taking an innovative, insightful approach to exploring archival collections through the mining of large archival corpora are The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online and Cameron Blevins’s work text mining and topic modeling Martha Ballard’s diary. ((The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online can be found at <a href=\"http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/\">http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/</a>, and the associated Criminal Intent project can be found at <a href=\"http://criminalintent.org/category/old-bailey-online/\">http://criminalintent.org/category/old-bailey-online/</a>. Cameron Blevin’s work with Martha Ballard’s diary can be found online at <a href=\"http://historying.org/martha-ballards-diary/\">http://historying.org/martha-ballards-diary/</a> and at <a href=\"http://dh2011abstracts.stanford.edu/xtf/view?docId=tei/ab-173.xml\">http://dh2011abstracts.stanford.edu/xtf/view?docId=tei/ab-173.xml</a>.)) The Old Bailey Proceedings provides access to nearly 200,000 digitized trial records from London’s criminal courts, spans almost 250 years, allows full text searching, and has an API through which users can query the archive. The With Criminal Intent project has built a suite of related tools that can help perform data-mining projects using this archive. (See Figure 7.) This project measures and visualizes trends over time as a means of revealing historical themes, building and revealing new narratives, and providing insights into the past through data-driven analysis.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4731\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image8.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4731 \" alt=\"Figure 8. Screenshot from &quot;Mining the Dispatch&quot; website, http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/Topics/view/27.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image8-300x210.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"210\" /></a> Figure 8. Screenshot from \"Mining the Dispatch\" website, http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/Topics/view/27.[/caption]\r\n\r\nBlevins’s work with Martha Ballard’s diary features a different collection, a single diary by an eighteenth-century housewife composed of almost 10,000 entries from 1785 to 1812. This project aspires to a similar goal of revealing novel insights into, and interpretations of, historical material through the ability of digital tools to mine vast sets of information. Blevins uses topic modeling—an algorithmic method that searches word patterns and groupings throughout large collections of texts (for Ballard’s diary, each entry was treated as a different “text”)—to chart and track thematic trends across the diary. A similar approach has been taken by the Mining the Dispatch project, which examines changing sentiments toward the Civil War over the course of six years (over 112,000 items) in the Richmond, Virginia <i>Daily Dispatch</i> newspaper. ((“Mining the Dispatch,” accessed October 2012, <a href=\"http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/\">http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/</a>.)) (See Figure 8.)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nThese projects may fall under the broader rubric of the digital humanities, and the collections they are working with may not be archival collections in the traditional sense, but they offer a glimpse of the discovery, navigation, exploration, and analytic tools that foreshadow uses of digital archival collections. Other initiatives have sought to build upon the network of social relations that influence records creation. The SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context) Project “provides access to the socio-historical contexts ([including] people, families, and corporate bodies) in which the records were created” through the use of the EAC-CPF standard that describes corporate bodies, persons, and families. ((“SNAC: The Social Networks and Archival Context Project,” accessed October 2012, <a href=\"http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/\">http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/</a>.)) Early results show a promising method for using social context for discovery and interpretation.  (See Figure 9.) The archivists at Stanford University who are managing the Robert Creeley collection, which contains a significant quantity of born-digital content, especially emails, have used the custom-built MUSE tool for exploring semantic patterns in email archives. ((The Robert Creeley collection can be found at <a href=\"http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/creeley.html\">http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/creeley.html</a>. For more information on the MUSE tool visit <a href=\"http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/muse/\">http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/muse/</a>.)) (See Figure 10.) Similarly, other projects have explored building unique visual interfaces to archival collections that extend contextual relations across collections, archives, and disciplines. (See Video 2.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4732\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image9.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4732 \" alt=\"Figure 9. Image from &quot;Historic Social Networks&quot; presentation by Brian Tingle at SAA 2012 Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA. Slides available at http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/images/NAAC-dc-2012_SAA2012_Tingle.pdf.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image9-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Figure 9. Image from \"Historic Social Networks\" presentation by Brian Tingle at SAA 2012 Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA. Slides available at http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/images/NAAC-dc-2012_SAA2012_Tingle.pdf.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4727\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image10.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4727 \" alt=\"Figure 10. Network analysis of Robert Creeley email archive. Image by Elijah Meeks, captured from https://dhs.stanford.edu/visualization/robert-creeley-e-mail-correspodence-network/.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image10-300x265.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"265\" /></a> Figure 10. Network analysis of Robert Creeley email archive. Image by Elijah Meeks, captured from https://dhs.stanford.edu/visualization/robert-creeley-e-mail-correspodence-network/.[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\nhttp://vimeo.com/6694353\r\n<div class=\"wp-caption-text\" style=\"text-align: left;\">Video 2. Visible Archive Series Browser, Mitchell Whitelaw. 2012.</div>\r\nWhat distinguishes these projects from archival representations of old is that context and meaning are not exclusively provided through descriptive, narrative details that precede an arrangement and location list, but instead through networks, inter-linkages, modeling, and content analysis. Users can move dynamically within a collection and laterally across collections. Search, query, and tools like topic modeling also allow the user to build their own patterns and hierarchies for discovery. In this view, archival description still plays a crucial role in providing information on what something is or how it came to be created, but no longer is the fonds or idea of original order the sole determinant of representation.\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusion</b>\r\n\r\nAs Luciana Duranti has noted, archival description “has been carried out or not carried out depending on specific needs and conditions, attitudes and requirements, and its products have consistently reflected the conceptions about archives held by the society of the time.” ((Duranti, “Origin and Development,” 53.)) In the physical world of items, folders, boxes, and shelves, the archive must be sorted, ordered, and stored sequentially in space. Those properties, along with social, cultural, and political attitudes have driven how archival arrangement and description are theorized and practiced. Indeed, description itself has always had to serve multiple purposes: to provide historical or biographical information, scope and content detail, physical location for retrieval, administrative information for ongoing management, and restrictions and material types governing use. In a sense, description itself is a compound object, tugged between the needs of physical arrangement, intellectual representation, and user expectation. The properties of digital records allow archivists to revisit that negotiation. At the same time, other qualities of digital information, like the forensic disk image, have the potential to preserve both a mechanical version of “order” as well as provenancial and contextual information that formerly were provided through description. File fixity, forensic imaging, directory manifests, and auto-generated metadata may all come to play a larger role in defining provenance.\r\n\r\nWe disrespect des fonds, then, not as an act of elimination or insubordination, but in order to bring other contextual relations to its same level of privilege. Consider it less a disrespect, perhaps, than a humbling; or, instead, consider it a reaffirmation that the multiplicity of meanings possible with digital records can be better realized through an ongoing interrogation of archival traditions of arrangement and description. In rethinking <i>respect des fonds</i>, we gain a better awareness of the extent to which the material affordances of paper records have had an undue influence on how we conceptualize and practice grouping and describing collections. Bits, however, are fundamentally different at the material and symbolic levels. The use of digital objects is different as well, influenced by computational processing, algorithmic query, automation, and dynamism, not to mention social conditions, user expectations, technology dependencies, storage requirements, and a host of other characteristics of how we create and use technology.\r\n\r\nParallels and bonds, series and topics, models and paradigms; at times these concepts have collided and resulted in a seeming antagonism between ideas like original order and random access, historical contingency and abstract principle, finding aid and dynamic query. But there have been similarities too: how the tension between record and representation mirrors that of inscription and screen; and how the component nature of digital objects resembles the component purpose of traditional archival description. To entrench methods of arrangement and description borne of the qualities of physical collections is to disregard the potential expansion of context that digital information can support. In recognizing how historically and socially contingent traditional practices (and the theories spawning those practices) were, we better recognize their potential dysfunction in a time of born-digital records. This is not to say that we should discard the idea of the fonds or the utility of original order, but perhaps it is time to revoke their privileged place in archival discourse and revisit the true goals of arrangement and description in light of the capabilities of digital records. Maybe then we can begin to understand what is possible when we think of collections as mutually contextual and interrelated instead of cloistered and static. And perhaps then other bonds, other parallels, other contexts, meanings, and interpretations can receive the same amount of respect that we have, for too long now, granted the fonds.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nWikipedia articles created as part of this work:\r\n\r\nRespect des fonds: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_des_fonds\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_des_fonds</a>\r\n\r\nOriginal Order: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_order\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_order</a>\r\n\r\nArchival Bond: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_bond\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_bond</a>','Disrespect des Fonds: Rethinking Arrangement and Description in Born-Digital Archives','','inherit','open','open','','4722-revision-42','','','2013-07-06 23:23:35','2013-07-06 23:23:35','',4722,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4722-revision-42/',0,'revision','',0),(5088,3,'2013-07-11 04:01:56','2013-07-11 04:01:56','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.) 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\n<iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ykY6moIaDE?rel=0\" height=\"250\" width=\"333\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe>\r\n<div class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 1. A staged archival encounter.</div>\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, <em>A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism</em> (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,” <em>Yale French Studies</em> 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, <em>Understanding Archives and Manuscripts</em> (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,” <em>Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History</em>, 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<div class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 2.</div>\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<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., <em>Refiguring the Archive</em> (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), Cheryl Simon, ed., Following the Archival Turn: Photography, the Museum, and the Archive, special issue of <em>Visual Resources: A Journal of Documentation</em> 18.2 (June 2002), and Ann Laura Stoler, <em>Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense</em> (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 <em>Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne</em> in French; the published English version echoed the French publication with its 1995 title <em>Archive Fever</em>. As Carolyn Steedman points out in <em>Dust: The Archive and Cultural History</em>, 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 <em>Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable</em> (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 <em>Dust</em> is from Virginia Woolf’s <em>To the Lighthouse</em>, one chapter treats George Eliot’s <em>Middlemarch</em> in depth… in fact, almost every chapter depends on a literary text. ((Another chapter invokes Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel <em>Mary Barton</em>, a third is anchored by W. H. Auden’s poem “Homage to Clio,” and a fourth finds its most eloquent examples in Charles Dickens’ <em>Our Mutual Friend</em>.)) 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; <em>Mal d’Archive</em> 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 <em>Archive Fever</em>—a “let’s begin at the beginning” homage to the seminal text—her book’s title, <em>Dust</em>, 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_423\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"172\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-423    \" alt=\"Figure 3. Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1.jpg\" width=\"172\" height=\"129\" /></a> Figure 3. Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.[/caption]\r\n\r\nKaplan, for her part, unravels her own archive story. She gives us a kind of “whodunit”—her search for the ephemeral sources of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s anti-semitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937). She uses this account to exemplify her effort to “move through the archival process and recover some of the stories that get deleted in the final scholarly form.” ((Kaplan, 104. For this reason, perhaps, Kaplan never reveals what she ultimately discovers in her successful search for Celine’s sources. In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether her pre-emptive and truncated treatment of her archive story is deliberate or not. Is this treatment meant to indirectly support her official claim about “results”? Or does the presence of the archive story suggest that telling it is an impulse she can’t quite control? Thanks, Lauren Coats, for helping tease this problem out.)) These beginnings are preemptively struck out, however, by what seems to be her main claim: “the passion of the archives must finally be used to eradicate all personal stories in the interests of the dry archival report, fit for a public.” ((Kaplan, 103.)) Only in the “para-text”—a preface, for example—can the archive story appear without “interrupt[ing] or complicat[ing] the narrative so much that no results could ever be understood or perceived.” ((Kaplan, 104.)) Despite this unequivocal assertion, the personal “whodunit” prevails in her essay, especially in the final section set in the Centre du documentation juive contemporain (CDJC). It is this library, where Kaplan solves the mystery of Céline’s sources, that “doubles as a detective’s office.”\r\n\r\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 <em>Archive Fever</em> 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\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 <em>Refiguring the Archive</em> (2002), <em>Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History</em> (2005) and <em>Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense</em> (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. <em>Archive Stories</em> 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 <em>Archive Fever</em> 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<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. ((<em>Alphabetical Catalogue of Books to be Purchased for the Library of the Peabody Institute, Baltimore</em>, Vols. 1 and 2 (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1861, 1863).)) (See Figure 4.) 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. ((<em>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</em> (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. ((<em>Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore</em>, Vols. 1-5 (Baltimore: Isaac Friedenwald, 1883; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, [1961?]; also on googlebooks), and <em>Second Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Including the Additions Made Since 1882</em>, Vols. 1-8 (Baltimore: Deutsch Lithographic and Printing, 1896; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, 1961).)) (See Figure 5.)  We have the cards from the Dewey decimal system card catalogue, which replaced the printed catalogue in the 1910s. 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_395\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"191\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-395   \" alt=\"Figure 4. Alphabetical index from Alphabetical Catalouge (“desiderata”).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1.jpg\" width=\"191\" height=\"277\" /></a> Figure 4. Alphabetical index from <em>Alphabetical Catalogue </em>(“desiderata”).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_396\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-396 \" alt=\"Figure 5. Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 5. Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_397\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"202\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-397 \" alt=\"Figure 6. One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\" width=\"202\" height=\"269\" /></a> Figure 6. One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\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. (See Figure 7.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_398\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"203\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-398   \" alt=\"Figure 7. Detail of subject index from Alphabetical Catalouge No. 2 (“desiderata”).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail.jpg\" width=\"203\" height=\"165\" /></a> Figure 7. Detail of subject index from <em>Alphabetical Catalouge</em> No. 2 (“desiderata”).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_399\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"171\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-399 \" alt=\"Figure 8. Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail.jpg\" width=\"171\" height=\"230\" /></a> Figure 8. Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.[/caption]\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.”  ((“Letters from George Peabody, Esq.: Baltimore, February 12th, 1857,” in Founder’s Letters, 7.)) 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.\" ((Qtd. in Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, “PIB Ref. Library. 8-Morison\'s Philosophy of Excellence,” in<em> 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.</em> 11 Mar. 2011.)) 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.\r\n\r\nThis 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. ((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,” <em>Libraries &amp; Culture</em> 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.))\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<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\n[caption id=\"attachment_400\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"215\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-400  \" alt=\"Figure 9. Dewey cards for “gift books.”\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards.jpg\" width=\"215\" height=\"162\" /></a> Figure 9. Dewey cards for “gift books.”[/caption]\r\n\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. ((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.)) (See Figure 9.) 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 <em>Rough and Ready Annual: or, Military Souvenir</em> published by Appleton’s has been assigned the subject “Mexican War, 1846-1848—Anecdotes.” ((<em>Rough and Ready Annual</em> (New York: D. Appleton; Philadelphia: G.S. Appleton, 1848).))\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\n[caption id=\"attachment_401\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"164\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-401 \" alt=\"Figure 10. The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr.jpg\" width=\"164\" height=\"123\" /></a> Figure 10. The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.[/caption]\r\n\r\n<em>The Rough and Ready Annual</em> is at 973.62 A5121, in the “general history of North America; United States” category. (See Figure 10.) This call number range is on the second floor, west side. Other items on my list are in very different parts of the library. <em>Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them,</em> 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. ((<em>Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them</em> (London: Knight &amp; Co., [1857]). This title does not appear in at least one Arthur bibliography; see Donald A Koch, \"Timothy Shay Arthur,\" <em>Antebellum Writers in New York and the South</em>, 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 <em>A Bibliography of the Published Books of Timothy Shay Arthur (</em>Atlanta: Emory University, 1954), a typewritten quarto at 012 A791S, but it seems to be missing.)) (See Figure 11.) Arthur shows up again as co-editor of <em>The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present</em>, which has received more extensive description as it contains the first printing of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Siope.” ((<em>The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present</em> (Baltimore: Bayly and Burns, [1838]).)) 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). <em>The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons</em> is in the rare book room at the south end of the third floor. ((<em>The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons</em> (London: The Religious Tract Society, ca. 1850).)) (See Figure 12.) 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 <em>The Family Circle and Parlor Annual</em>, volume 5 in a series, which is shelved up on the sixth floor with the periodicals at 051 F198 (serials in American English). ((<em>The Family Circle and Parlor Annual (</em>New York: Comstock, 1847).)) (See Figure 13.)\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-402 \" alt=\"Figure 11. Orange Blossoms in the stacks.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a>\r\n\r\n<dl class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" id=\"attachment_402\" style=\"width: 279px;\"><dd class=\"wp-caption-dd\">Figure 11. Orange Blossoms in the stacks.</dd></dl>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_403\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-403 \" alt=\"Figure 12. The rare book room.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 12. The rare book room.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_404\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-404 \" alt=\"Figure 13. The Parlor Annual in the stacks.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 13. The Parlor Annual in the stacks.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_405\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"161\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-405  \" alt=\"Figure 14. Call slips and flags.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips.jpg\" width=\"161\" height=\"121\" /></a> Figure 14. Call slips and flags.[/caption]\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. (See Figure 14.) 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 <em>The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse</em>; 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.” ((<em>The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse </em>(Philadelphia: David Hogan, 1813).)) (See Figure 15.) 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_406\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-406 \" alt=\"Figure 15. Inscription in The New American Reader.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 15. Inscription in <em>The New American Reader</em>.[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\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<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.” ((Henk Aarts and Ap Dijksterhuis, “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” <em>Journal of Personality and Social Psychology</em> 84.1 (2003), 19.)) 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.” ((Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 19.)) Physical environments do not necessarily prompt these behaviors; rather, the behavior “depend[s] on whether the environment is of immediate behavioral relevance.” ((Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 20.)) 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. (See Figure 16.) 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. (See Figure 17.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_407\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"202\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-407 \" alt=\"Figure 16. The skylight in the George Peabody Library.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\" width=\"202\" height=\"269\" /></a> Figure 16. The skylight in the George Peabody Library.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_408\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-408 \" alt=\"Figure 17. Alcove in the George Peabody Library.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 17. Alcove in the George Peabody Library.[/caption]\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. ((See William Frederick Poole, <em>Remarks on Library Construction</em> (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1884).)) 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_409\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"151\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-409   \" alt=\"Figure 18. Photography station in the George Peabody Library.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station.jpg\" width=\"151\" height=\"113\" /></a> Figure 18. Photography station in the George Peabody Library.[/caption]\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. (See Figure 18.) 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-60','','','2013-07-11 04:01:56','2013-07-11 04:01:56','',2199,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/2199-revision-60/',0,'revision','',0),(5090,3,'2013-07-11 04:07:38','2013-07-11 04:07:38','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nIn her article, “Disciplinarity and Disorder,” in Issue 1 of this journal, Gabrielle Dean opens her essay with a detailed and expressive “fantasy” describing the “primal scene of archival research [that] takes place in a dreary reading room,” featuring an archivist, a researcher, a cart, dusty gray boxes, and a “numbered file folder.” As her fantasy takes flight, with the researcher scribbling away and papers swirling and new collections sprouting up organically, she crafts an evocative metaphor for the life cycle of preservation and regeneration that archivists aim to enable through access to primary sources. Dean cogently deconstructs the origins and implications of this “primal scene” over the course of her essay. But what also merits highlighting in her opening metaphor are the accoutrements that populate it—the cart, the box, the file folder—familiar players on the stage of the archival encounter. These objects and symbols are evocative of that idealized moment of archaeological discovery that characterizes the use of the archive. They are objects and symbols of history, certainly, but relics, alas, of an analog age.\r\n\r\nA similar fantasy, one potentially more fraught with anxiety and dread, must darken the reveries of archivists as they attempt to provide access to more contemporary materials. A daydream involving the researcher of tomorrow may instead feature dreadful moments of “file cannot be opened” error messages, of FTP transfers gone awry, of decaying media orphaned from long-lost playback devices. Our imaginary researcher will not be awaiting archival discovery sitting in a dreary reading room, but instead exist in some networked who-knows-where, furiously emailing an endless stream of access and transfer requests and constantly griping about obsolete formats and buggy interfaces. At the same time, our imaginary archivist will not be pushing carts or shelving boxes, but creating user accounts for virtual reading rooms, running pattern-recognition text-mining queries, uploading disk images, or helping users with emulation software. Like the content of our archives themselves, the props and symbols of our archival fantasies increasingly will be associated with born-digital materials.\r\n\r\nHow will traditional principles of archival arrangement and description be challenged or modified to account for born-digital materials? Arrangement and description have long been the primary method of facilitating the use of archives, and their methodologies have been dependent upon the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i>. The articulation of this theory in 1841 has been held as the “starting point” or beginning of the modern era of archival theory, a “watershed” event establishing the “basic principle” and “very core” of the archival endeavor. Superlatives abound. <i>Respect des fonds</i>, “more than any other principle, has come to provide the archival profession with a unique identity.” ((Nancy Bartlett, “The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance,” in <i>Bibliographical Foundations of French Historical Studies</i> (New York: Haworth Press, 1992), 108.))\r\n\r\nBut <i>respect des fonds</i> was born of a particular historic moment, for a particular type of archival document, and was conceived to address the practical needs of specific social circumstances. Even as <i>respect des fonds</i> has mutated and evolved over the decades, subject to revisions, contestations, and reaffirmations, its methodologies have largely been a product of the nature of the archival record as a physical document to be sorted, grouped, and described after receipt from a single donating entity. In an era defined by digital materials and their affordances and limitations, one in which narrative linearity often seems replaced by data-driven relationalism, the meaning of <i>respect des fonds</i> is ever more slippery.\r\n\r\nBroadly stated, <i>respect des fonds</i> is the principle of grouping records by the administration, organization, individual, or creating body in which they originated. <i>Respect des fonds</i> mandates that the records of the creating entity not be mixed with those of a different entity. It prioritizes the “organic” nature of archival records, identifying the locus of their generation, and the evidence their consolidation provides about that originating body, as essential to preserving and maintaining context. Comprised of the related “principle of original order” and “the principle of provenance,” <i>respect des fonds</i> displaced prior methods of archival arrangement that were predicated upon classifications by subject, function, topic, legal utility, chronology, and other categories. Though often referenced as a core component of archival identity, as a theoretical concept, <i>respect des fonds</i> is, as one writer says, “elusive and oft-misunderstood.” ((Dan Zelenyj, “Linchpin Imperilled: The Functional Interpretation of Series and the Principle of Respect des Fonds,” <i>Archivaria</i> 42 (1996): 126.))\r\n\r\nThe introduction of born-digital records into the archives offers an opportunity to examine how the practical methodologies of arrangement and description are shifting and how those changing practices lead to a reconsideration of <i>respect des fonds</i>. Much as digital records’ technological dependencies, ease of duplication, and subordination to features of systems and storage have led to a reassessment of the existing precepts of archival appraisal and selection, they also prompt a similar analysis of arrangement and description. One of those axioms due reassessment is the theory of <i>respect des fonds</i>.\r\n\r\nThis essay details the social and material conditions of the emergence of <i>respect des fonds</i>, the theory’s complex practical implementations and contested assumption, the emergence of alternate models, and how born-digital materials illuminate the theory’s analog origins and limitations. I will also explain the specific qualities of digital objects, including the nature of inscription and its impact on notions of original order and authenticity, as well as how nonlinear retrieval supplants the narrative logic of <i>respect des fonds</i> with a broader notion of context and discoverability. I will then consider recent interpretive methods, such as data visualization and text mining, as potential harbingers of new modes of representing and creating interfaces to digital collections—representations that better capitalize on the possibilities of digital materials. Finally, I will argue that the affordances of born-digital archives—such as their potential for parallel representation, machine-enabled interpretation, and expansive contextual and intellectual availability—provoke a reconsideration of the place of privilege of <i>respect des fonds </i>in archival arrangement and description.\r\n\r\n<b>The Old Regime</b>\r\n\r\nBefore <i>respect des</i> <i>fonds</i> can be respected, disrespected, or neglected, a better understanding of its origins is warranted, along with an examination of how the principle has (or has not) been applied and its periodic contestation. The seductive purity of the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i> often overshadows the concept’s decidedly complex origins. <i>Respect des fonds</i> as a guiding method of archival control was never as ennobled an idea as its contemporary evocation often implies. Its original articulation was mired in professional infighting, reductive practicalities, and the tumult and disorganization of political change.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4724\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4724\" alt=\"Figure 1. Storming of the Bastille and arrest of the Governor M. de Launay, July 14, 1789. Those are probably archival records burning in the background.  Public domain Image via Wikimedia Commons. Artist unknown.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image1-300x237.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"237\" /></a> Figure 1. Storming of the Bastille and arrest of the Governor M. de Launay, July 14, 1789. Those are probably archival records burning in the background. Public domain Image via Wikimedia Commons. Artist unknown.[/caption]\r\n\r\nWhile we can find records grouped according to creator in some earlier instances, ((Luciana Duranti, “Origin and Development of Archival Description,” <i>Archivaria</i> 35 (1993): 50.)) the formal articulation of the concept of <i>respect des fonds</i> was, like much of modernity, a by-product of the French Revolution. The Revolution featured a simultaneous destruction and reconstruction of the archive, an attempt to both erase and recast the historical record. Most famously, when revolutionaries stormed the Bastille they destroyed its documentary contents—records that instantiated the subjugation and exploitation of the despised monarchy. (See Figure 1.)\r\n\r\nYet the revolutionaries’ also scrupulously preserved the record of their own activities. The <i>Archives Nationales</i> was established in 1790, with a head archivist, hours designated for the general public, and a centralized administration tasked both with preserving the legacy of the new government and managing select records of the Old Regime. Those tasks, however, were segregated in ways that impacted how each class of documents was handled. Records of the National Assembly were to be scrupulously maintained, while feudal titles were widely destroyed. As one Minster put it, “all the old documents with gothic script are … only legal titles of feudalism, of the subjection of the feeble to the strong.” ((As cited in Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development since the French Revolution,” <i>The American Archivist</i> 3, no. 3 (1940): 162.))\r\n\r\nThe management of archives during this time was chaotic. Property records were sent to one administrative body within the <i>Archives Nationales</i>, legal records to another, and documents of historical interest went to the <i>Bibliotheque Nationales</i>. At the same time, archivists were tasked with maintaining a distinction between records documenting pre- and post-Revolutionary activities. In addition, the first two administrative heads of the <i>Archives Nationales</i>, Armand-Gaston Camus and Pierre Daunou, were both trained as librarians and had, by the early 1800s, established twenty-four “groupings” of records into which future accessions were to be integrated. Within these groups, additional classifications and intellectual methods of ordering existed. The archives, then, were “arranged in accordance with an arbitrarily devised ‘methodical’ scheme that was derived from library experience.” ((T. R Schellenberg, <i>Modern Archive : Principles and Techniques</i> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 169.)) As well, political tumult and instability of governance continued to have an impact on the arrangement of the archives, and “decisions about preservation, classification, inventory, and access were therefore the result not just of practical considerations or the opinions of individual archivists and librarians, but also of key shifts in national politics.” ((Lara Moore, <i>Restoring Order: The Ecole Des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870</i> (Duluth, Minnesota: Litwin Books, 2008), 17.))\r\n\r\n<b>The Origins of <i>Respect des Fonds</i></b>\r\n\r\nWhile the true extent of records destruction during the post-Revolutionary years is disputed, ((Carl Lokke, “Archives and the French Revolution,” <i>The American Archivist</i> 31, no. 1 (January 1968): 30-31.)) as Judith Panitch notes, “this chaotic episode of archival history reveals much about archives themselves, suggesting specifically their fundamental fragility and malleability.” ((Judith Panitch, “Liberty, equality, posterity? Some Archival Lessons from the Case of the French Revolution,” <i>The American Archivist</i> 59, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 33.)) That malleability is evident in the conflicting approaches to archival arrangement and description that characterized this era, practices that lead up to the declaration of the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i>. Records of the time were arranged primarily by sometimes-quixotic methods of classification, by schema idiosyncratic in origin and inconsistent in application. ((Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development,” 167.))\r\n\r\nA number of developments in the next few decades pushed this lack of uniformity to its breaking point and helped impel the conceptualization of <i>respect des fonds</i> as an archival principle, if, as I will show, less of an actual practice. The establishment of the <i>Ecole des Chartes</i> in 1821 created a formal institution to train archivists to staff both the <i>Archives Nationales</i> and the over 2500 provincial archives across France. Laws passed in the 1830s also drastically expanded the number of archivists mandated to work both in the <i>Archives Nationales</i> and in the provincial archives. Formal training and new positions, however, when combined with lax oversight and inconsistent guidance on practices, led, predictably, to a near-comic proliferation of methods of classification and arrangement. (See Figure 2.) Due to the proliferation of classification systems and schema, change was inevitable.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4725\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image2.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4725\" alt=\"Figure 2. The many arrangement methods of some Ecole des Chartes graduates prior to the emergence of respect des fonds as a methodology. Image from Lara Moore\'s &quot;Restoring Order,&quot; 114.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image2-e1373515637216-300x226.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"226\" /></a> Figure 2. The many arrangement methods of some Ecole des Chartes graduates prior to the emergence of respect des fonds as a methodology. Image from Lara Moore\'s \"Restoring Order,\" 114.[/caption]\r\n\r\nThat change came in the form of the infamous “Circular no. 14,” released in 1841 by Natalis de Wailly, Administrative Head of the <i>Archives Nationales</i>. This document is recognized as the first articulation of the fonds as the fundamental method of archival arrangement, the purpose of which was “to form a collection of all the documents which originate from a body, an organization, a family or an individual, and to arrange the different fonds according to a certain order.” ((As quoted in Nancy Bartlett, “The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance,” 107.)) <i>Respect des fonds</i> made creatorship the organizing principle of archival records and espoused the formation of collections according to the organization, entity, family, or individual responsible for their creation. Such an arrangement would ensure, as one writer later put it, the essential need “to know where it [the archival document] was created, in the framework of what process, to what end, for whom, when and how it was received by the addressee, and how it came into our hands.” ((Michael Duchein, “Theoretical Principles and Practical Problems of Respect des fonds in Archival Science,” <i>Archivaria</i> 16 (Summer 1983): 67.))\r\n\r\nHowever, as Nancy Bartlett has explicated, this “watershed” moment was less momentous than contemporary evocations suggest. For one, de Wailly’s circular dictated “that <i>respect des fonds</i> was prescribed only for archival records created prior to 1789.” More contemporary fonds were to continue to be arranged categorically. In addition, minutes from subsequent meetings of the commission overseeing the work of archivists—a commission on which de Wailly served—reveal that “<i>respect des fonds</i> was if nothing more a preliminary standard for archival arrangement and description in departmental archives, a means of insuring that beginning archivists without the benefit of direct supervision might not cause too much intellectual damage to vulnerable records in their care.” ((Bartlett, “The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance,” 111.))\r\n\r\nThe principle was, in fact, a practical exigency, a method to simplify archival arrangement seen as more easily implemented by novice archivists than the more rigorous arrangement by classification. Bartlett also notes that <i>respect des fonds</i> remained absent from both the curriculum of the <i>Ecole des Chartes</i> as well as the publications of the professional society of its graduates. Lastly, the principle was, at the time, not applied to accessions into the <i>Archive Nationales</i> itself, as it operated under a different administrative department than de Wailly’s Interior Ministry.\r\n\r\n<i>Respect des fonds</i>, then, was never a perfectly realized theory. Its formation was a contingency of a unique historical moment; its conception depended upon practical necessities and its implementation was inconsistent and disputed. What today seems near dogma—that archives be arranged by fonds—was at the time novel and simplistic, more the product of utility and political manipulation than a grand inspiration regarding the functional authenticity of fonds or evidential purity towards their arrangement.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4726\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"183\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image3.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4726 \" alt=\"Figure 3. Front page of the proceedings of the 1910 Congres de Bruxelles, the First International Congress of Archivists and Librarians. The full proceedings are available online at http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/menu.html. Google Translate does a passable job of translating.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image3-183x300.jpg\" width=\"183\" height=\"300\" /></a> Figure 3. Front page of the proceedings of the 1910 Congres de Bruxelles, the First International Congress of Archivists and Librarians. The full proceedings are available online at http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/menu.html. Google Translate does a passable job of translating.[/caption]\r\n\r\n<b>The Original Original Order</b>\r\n\r\nThough implemented inconsistently in its home country, the principle of <i>respect des fonds</i> gained a wide acceptance across Europe. In Prussia, the theory (known as <i>Provenienzprinzip,</i> the principle of provenance) mandated that “official papers are to be maintained in the order and with the designations which they received in the course of the official activity of the agency concerned.” ((Schellenberg, <i>Modern Archives</i>, 175.)) <i>Respect des fonds</i> received its most elaborate and sustained justification, and expansion, however, in the Netherlands, where the Dutch archivists Muller, Feith, and Fruin produced their famous <i>Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives</i> in 1898. Often referred to colloquially as the “Dutch Manual” and seen as the “starting point of archival theory and methodology,” ((Peter Horsman, Eric Ketelaar, and Theo Thomassen, “New Respect for the Old Order: The Context of the Dutch Manual,” <i>The American Archivist </i>66, no. 2 (2003): 249.)) the work provided a detailed set of guidelines for the arrangement of records. The principle of <i>respect des fonds</i> gained even wider acceptance and popularity after its ratification at the First International Congress of Archivists meeting in Brussels in 1910. ((Lawrence D. Geller, “Joseph Cuvelier, Belgian Archival Education, and the First International Congress of Archivists, Brussels, 1910,” <i>Archivaria</i> 16 (Summer 1983): 16. Proceedings from the 1910 meeting can be found online at <a href=\"http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/\">http://extranet.arch.be/congres1910/</a>.)) (See Figure 3.)\r\n\r\nThe Dutch Manual, and the methodologies implemented in its wake, not only forbid the intermingling of the fonds of one agency with those of another—in keeping with the French conception of <i>respect des fonds</i>—but also expanded the theory to apply to the records within each fond—the internal arrangement of the archival collection. Or as the Dutch Manual put it, “the system of arrangement must be based on the original organization of the archival collection.” ((Samuel Muller, Johan Adriaan Feith, and Robert Fruin, <i>Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives</i> (H.W. Wilson Co., 1968), 52.)) This concept has come to be known as the “principle of original order,” an intra-fonds corollary to the external means of arrangement associated with the principle of provenance; <i>respect des fonds</i> encompasses both principles.\r\n\r\nA closer examination of the Dutch Manual, however, reveals certain methodological impracticalities that even its authors admit. First, they claim that the original order within a fonds may be modified or “restored” to account for multiple transfers from an agency, not all of which may truly represent the idealized “original order.” As well, records may be reorganized to account for “inconsequential irregularities attributable to record-keeping officials.” The authors also note that reconstituting the original order may be avoided when “the trouble which would have to be taken in order to reconstruct the old organization is out of proportion to the result to be obtained.” ((Muller et al., <i>Manual</i>, 83.)) Needless to say, the simple idea of “restoring original order” seems itself problematic, fraught with subjective decision-making likely far removed from whatever idealized “organic” origin archivists may discover within fonds. The complicated approach to “restoration” and “reconstruction” that the Dutch Manual advises often borders on, as one writer put it, “abandoning entirely their carefully developed ethic of conservation.” ((Frank Boles, “Disrespecting Original Order,” <i>The American Archivist </i>45, no. 1 (1982): 28.))\r\n\r\n<b>Critique des Fonds</b>\r\n\r\nThe widespread adoption <i>of respect des fonds</i> did not proceed unquestioned, however. As early as the 1930s, some archivists were taking issue with the methodology of arranging collections according to original order. In his survey of the development of archival theory, Ernst Posner points to the German Max Bar and two Swedish archivists who demonstrated “that slavish preservation of the original arrangement of a fonds is often insufficient,” the principle of provenance “is subject to certain restrictions” that make blanket adoption impractical, and adherence to <i>respect des fonds</i> often impedes use of archival materials. ((Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development,” 169.))\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4747\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image4.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4747 \" alt=\"Figure 4. Peter Scott\'s diagram depicting his system of archival arrangement based on grouping records at the series level. From Scott, &quot;The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment,&quot; 1966. \" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image4-300x177.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"177\" /></a> Figure 4. Peter Scott\'s diagram depicting his system of archival arrangement based on grouping records at the series level. From Scott, \"The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment,\" 1966.[/caption]\r\n\r\nSome Australian and American archivists in the 1960s, primarily Peter Scott and Mario Fenyo, challenged the definition of fonds even further. The problems with the traditional concept of the fonds were manifold. Defining fonds as the records of a “transferring or controlling agency” was problematic since the agent of transfer was not always the creating agency. Fonds could also be mixed or “broken” into multiple transfers to an archive, making reconstitution difficult. Fonds could also be the result of “a succession of agencies,” blurring true creatorship. Ordering series within fonds was difficult since future accessions may need to be inserted at different places in the existing organizational system, leading to physical disorder or the constant revision of finding aids or inventories. After reviewing minutes of early NARA meetings in an attempt to define what, exactly, constitutes a fonds, Fenyo succinctly pointed out, “no one knows what the word fonds means, not even the French who invented it.” ((Mario D. Fenyo, “The Record Group Concept: A Critique,” <i>The American Archivist </i>29, no. 2 (April 1966): 230.)) For Scott, his belief that “the very arbitrariness of the concept [of the fonds] is sufficient to make one question its usefulness,” ((Peter Scott, “The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment,” <i>The American Archivist </i>29, no. 4 (October 1966): 497.)) led him to develop the “series system” (See Figure 4) which sought to orient arrangement and description according to function and use instead of agent or material type—a theory that, Terry Cook noted, “shifted the entire archival description enterprise from a static cataloging mode to a dynamic system of multiple interrelationships.” ((Terry Cook, “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” <i>Archivaria</i> 43 (1999): 38.))\r\n\r\nThe principle of original order underwent a similar critique. A lack of clarity on the custodianship of records prior to their delivery to an archive, the problem of multiple and ongoing accessions, and the potential for incoherent or unknown methods of ordering or classification by creating bodies all led Fenyo to proclaim, “archivists generally believe that the arrangement of series within a record group reflects to some extent the organization and even history of the agency that created those records.… But the records in the National Archives reflect no such thing.” ((Fenyo, \"The Record Group Concept,\" 236.)) For archives consisting of personal papers, original order is seen as particularly problematic, since a chronological arrangement seemingly provides the greatest meaning and value to the records of an individual, but is unlikely to be the order of records upon accession. Restoration of original order also risks destroying the contextual information accrued by collections that have passed through multiple states of custodianship prior to their acceptance into the archive. ((Debra Barr, “Protecting Provenance: Response to the Report of the Working Group on Description at the Fonds Level,” <i>Archivaria</i> 28 (Summer 1989): 141-145. See also Robert Edwards, “‘With Respect to Original Order’: Changing Values in Archival Arrangement,” <i>Archives Association of British Columbia</i> 11, no. 1 (Winter 2001).)) Lastly, the principle of original order prioritizes filing systems of unknown or dubious legitimacy over the principle of use or accessibility. As Frank Boles states, “usability acknowledges the evidential superiority of documents over filing systems by placing primary emphasis on access to documents.” ((Boles, “Disrespecting Original Order,” 31.)) In this critique, usability and original order are often in conflict.\r\n\r\n<b>Of Bonds and Parallels</b>\r\n\r\nOther conceptual models besides the series system have attempted to address these critiques by forming new ideas about how order or grouping can evidence archival authenticity, identity, and meaning. One theory to articulate the interrelations of individual records can be found in Luciana Duranti’s notion of the archival bond, which she defines as the “network of relations that each record has with the records belonging in the same aggregation.” ((Luciana Duranti, “The Archival Bond,” <i>Archives and Museum Informatics</i> 11 (1997): 213-18.)) Not to be confused with context, which exists outside the record, the archival bond, for Duranti, is core to the identity of the record. As she states, “documents that are expressions of a transaction are not records until they are put into relation with other records.” ((Ibid., 216.)) Emerging from research into the authenticity of electronic records (including the InterPARES project), the archival bond identifies a web of documentary co-dependencies that presumes an inheritance and relationship between records based on functional proximity. ((“The InterPARES Project,” accessed October 2012, <a href=\"http://www.interpares.org\">www.interpares.org</a>.))\r\n\r\nPerhaps the most exhaustive attempt to deal with many difficulties that exist within the gulf between <i>respect des fonds</i> as principle and practice was undertaken by Michel Duchein in 1983. ((Duchein, \"Theoretical Principles and Practical Problems,\" 64–82.)) While Duchein proposes solutions to the many problems of the fonds concept, the reader cannot help but be overwhelmed by the fact that his cataloging of the “theoretical problems” and “practical difficulties” far outnumber, and begin to drown out, his proposed solutions. For Duchein, within fonds there can be all sorts of nebulous, arbitrary, and forgotten methods of classification “from which all imaginable disorders flow.” He calls these, in a poetic moment, “brutal manipulations.” ((Ibid., 77.)) But after this disquisition, on the last page of his article Duchein mentions one idea that seems if not prescient, then at least transitive in the way it conceives of context: the <i>parallelismus membrorum</i>, “the similarity of parallel files.” <i>Parallelismus membrorum</i> is a rhetorical term referring to the patterns within a text formed by the utilization of repeated grammatical structures. (“I came. I saw. I conquered,” is a brief example). Duchein here employs the motif to refer to the contextual relations that exist between records of different fonds, the network of meanings that stretch across the archive.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4927\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image5.gif\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4927  \" alt=\"Figure 5. Chris Hurly\'s diagram of parallel provenance, &quot;The Little Truck.&quot; The little truck is a metaphor for archival description. From Hurley, &quot;Parallel Provenance: (1) What if Anything is Archival Description?”\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image5-300x199.gif\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" /></a> Figure 5. Chris Hurly\'s diagram of parallel provenance, \"The Little Truck.\" The little truck is a metaphor for archival description. From Hurley, \"Parallel Provenance: (1) What if Anything is Archival Description?”[/caption]\r\n\r\nChris Hurley explored an idea similar to <i>parallelismus membrorum</i> in his delineation of “parallel provenance” a concept built around “composing different things from the same particles—combining things in different ways to produce a variety of views of what they look like in the aggregate … not so much about identifying a different creator as recognizing manifold context.” ((Chris Hurley, “Parallel Provenance: (1) What if Anything is Archival Description?,” <i>Archives and Manuscripts</i> 33, no. 1 (2005): 126.)) (See Figure 5.) Other contemporary writers, such as Laura Millar and Geoffrey Yeo, have sought to stretch the meaning of the fonds even further, arguing it exists purely at the conceptual level. ((Geoffrey Yeo, “The Conceptual Fonds and the Physical Collection,” <i>Archivaria</i> 73 (Spring 2012): 43-91; Laura Millar, “The Death of the Fonds and the Resurrection of Provenance: Archival Context in Space and Time,” <i>Archivaria</i> 53 (Spring 2002): 1-15.)) But as the definition of the fonds becomes more distant, more abstract, its privileging as a form of aggregation seems less certain, especially in a digital environment in which creatorship is but one of many means of grouping records.\r\n\r\nThe archival bond, the series system, <i>parallelismus membrorum, </i>and parallel provenance all mark attempts to theorize relationships between records and collections in ways that can elide the practical problems of <i>res</i><i>pect des fonds</i>. Equally, these ideas represent a continued expansion of context beyond the limitations of grouping by creatorship or creator-derived order. In each case, similarities and dependencies emerge out of cross-collection networks or semantically derived principles. As the models gain distance from the vagaries of the individual records, one starts to recognize a familiar pattern of removal—not a disjunction, exactly, but a subtle passage from the material trace to the abstract representation. The familiarity is borne of the similar movement from item to representation that characterizes electronic records and their attendant phenomenological tension between the physical inscription on a drive and the symbolic interface on a screen.\r\n\r\n<b>Bit Level Processing</b>\r\n\r\nBut enough of models. Consider instead the bit, the binary, the magnetic flux reversal of the spinning disk that is the origin of the digital object. Material inscription offers a good point to segue into an examination of digital records and how they both complicate or even circumvent historical notions of <i>respect des fonds </i> while at the same time enabling realization of a more expansive notion of context and interrelation.\r\n\r\nStarting at the bit level, the characteristics of inscription (how digital information is written onto storage media) call into question the idea of original order. When data is written to a storage device, it has a material, physical trace, but that trace is far from the legibility or interpretability we associate with analog documents. As Matt Kirschenbaum has noted in his study of new media and digital forensics, “we write <i>on</i> paper, but we write <i>to</i> a magnetic disk (or tape)”; the semantic difference signifies that the act of inscription is “logically distinct” from the act of creation and intellectual manipulation. ((Matt Kirschenbaum, <i>Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination</i> (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 87. Emphasis in original.)) (See Figure 6.) In addition, a key component of storage media is that it is random access; that means the bits composing a record are inscribed to available clusters across the platter of a drive depending on which tracks and sectors are available for inscription. That is, the component bits of a digital object are non-sequential in their material physical arrangement. Aggregated, they can create an interpretable object, but their component location is nonlinear. Here, even at the bit level of a single item, there is no original order. Furthermore, each time these bits are reconstructed, each time the file is accessed and translated into an interpretable, editable representation, the file will be altered in minute ways (for instance, a file’s “last opened” date) and thus be composed of a new order as new bits are assigned to other available areas of the disk. As Kirschenbaum notes, quoting a dictum of forensic science, “every contact leaves a trace.” The act of interpreting a digital object, thus, continually alters its material order.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4729\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image6.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4729 \" title=\"bailey_archivejournal_image6\" alt=\"Figure 6. Close-up of a disk drive at the Computer History Museum, showing arms and a read/write head. Processing Born-Digital Materials Using AccessData FTK at Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, 2011.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image6-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Figure 6. Close-up of a disk drive at the Computer History Museum, showing arms and a read/write head.<br />Processing Born-Digital Materials Using AccessData FTK at Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, 2011.[/caption]\r\n\r\nMoving beyond the non-sequential arrangement of bits of individual records, but remaining at the forensic level, other features of the digital environment challenge long-standing presumptions of authenticity and uniqueness that are dependent upon physical arrangement or description. Temporary files, such as those stored by auto-save or recovery programs, mean that a drive can contain multiple versions of identical files, many of them beyond the management (or even awareness) of their creator. This “ambient data” is matched by other features of data dispersal throughout a storage system, such as “swap space” (disk space sometimes allocated for use by RAM) and “disk slack” (which accounts for the difference between the actual file size and the disk space used for storage) that themselves complicate ideas of order and linearity. Storage becomes a hidden, dynamic world in which physical arrangement on a spinning drive consists of the equivalent of dispersed crevices, hidey-holes, and secret areas where data proliferates. Kirschenbaum asserts, “there is, in short, no simple way to know how many instances of a single file are residing in how many states, in how many different locations, at any given moment in the operating system.” ((Ibid., 52.)) As well, digital objects themselves have the potential to contain trace data that, while possibly not achieving the singular identity of a record, can have evidential value or help establish provenance.\r\n\r\nTake, for instance, Kirschenbaum’s exploration of a floppy disk image, in which he finds evidence of how the storage media was used over time and what its hidden and partially deleted data can manifest about its user: “[W]e discover on the original diskette the incompletely overwritten remains of previous software … a piece of 1980s software culture frozen in allographic amber.” ((Ibid., 140.)) Discovering this legacy information reveals multiple levels of creatorship and a trail of ownership and social and cultural meaning that extend beyond the object, the creator, or the fonds. In this case, the unintentionally preserved (by the user, at least) data provides a testament to its origins that is not visible in the individual files themselves. Here provenance is not a result of aggregation or description but a characteristic of how digital information is created and transmitted. Context is not just relational, implied, or conceptualized, but can be a part of the very media itself, like secret, half-formed barnacles clinging to the vessel of the digital record. Incomplete but decipherable. Fragmentary but meaningful. Allographic amber.\r\n\r\n<b>Fonds Essentialism</b>\r\n\r\nNeedless to say, most people do not interact with digital information at the forensic level. In Kenneth Thibodeau’s useful model, digital objects are compounds, composed of a physical, logical, and conceptual object. Respectively, those adjectives refer to the physical inscription on storage media; the logical suite of translational software and processes that access and “read” that inscription; and the conceptual object the user interacts with, such as the text, image, or interface on a screen. ((Kenneth Thibodeau, “Overview of Technological Approaches to Digital Preservation and Challenges in Coming Years,” in <i>The State of Digital Preservation: An International Perspective</i> (Washington D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2002).)) The conceptual object—the representational environment of the screen as experienced in the word processing program, the image editor, the social media app—inculcates its own affordances and logic on the creation or use of records. In fact, given the hidden, inscrutable nature of storage and inscription, the formal representation of digital objects on a screen can have an outsized influence on their creation, management, and perception—an interpretive tendency that Nick Montford calls “screen essentialism.” Considering the extensive influence that the theory of <i>respect des fonds</i> has had, historically, on how archival collections are arranged and described, a similar predilection may characterize the archival enterprise—call it <i>fonds essentialism</i>.\r\n\r\nThe conceptual object—the screen—presents its own challenges to the implied narrative of current modes of archival description. The way that a user interacts with an aggregation of digital materials is fundamentally different from how a user would interact with a set of document boxes or a finding aid. The screen imposes its own logic, its own “formal regimen,” in Kirschenbaum’s terms, on how digital objects are interpreted or accessed, but also how they are described. Traditional archival representation for analog materials emerges from a narrative: a story about what a collection is, what it holds, and the order and location of its contents. It moves through a descriptive summary of contextual detail and administrative information and on to a hierarchy of series and subseries often arranged by type, function, chronology, or other broad categories. Papers, folders, boxes, and series must be arranged in physical space, after all, and that comes to shape how they are arranged in the intellectual space of description. A finding aid is a narrative to be read and its intellectual availability is largely linear and structural. The conceptual object of the digital record and the interface to an aggregation of digital records offer quite a different type of interaction.\r\n\r\nText mining and hyperlinks are simple examples of ways to navigate large groups of materials absent a singular narrative sequence. Lev Manovich, in theorizing new media, has noted that the database (or, the database logic) has supplanted narrative as the method of interacting with digital information. In new media, “narrative becomes just one method of accessing data among others,” and digital information assumes “the projection of the ontology of a computer onto culture itself.” ((Lev Manovich, “Database as a Genre of New Media,” <i>Journal of A&amp;I Society</i> 14, no. 2 (May 2000): 176-77.)) In a database, objects are related but not ordered. The database logic is nonlinear and there is no original order because order is dependent upon query. Search and navigation become algorithm-dependent and not predetermined by a creator, an archivist, or a static finding aid—though all of those organizations are themselves available. Digital objects will have an identifier, yes, but where they “rest” in intellectual space is contingent, mutable. The key point is that, even at the level of representation, arrangement is dynamic: access and representation need not depend on the fonds. Description becomes relational as well and can extend beyond individual aggregations of records. The logic of physical space no longer drives retrieval or predominates in description. Original order and provenance are not lost or obviated in this model, but they are not the exclusive means of access, either.\r\n\r\n<b>Recent Practices</b>\r\n\r\nCase studies from projects handling significant amounts of born-digital records provide insight into the theoretical and practical problems of <i>respect des fonds</i>. As the Emory University project asked of the born-digital content in its Salmon Rushdie acquisition, “Would we treat the born-digital files the same as print material? Would we impose any sort of arrangement on the materials? How much added description could we provide? As the following discussion will reveal, the application of archival theory and principles may shift to accommodate the differences between paper and born-digital archives.” ((Laura Carroll et al., “A Comprehensive Approach to Born-Digital Archives,” <i>Archivaria</i> 72 (Fall 2011): 72.)) Or, as the large-scale, born-digital Vancouver Olympics project team put it, “core archival activities may diverge from long-established practices when moving into the digital environment.” ((Courtney C. Mumma, Glenn Dingwall, and Sue Bigelow, “A First Look at the Acquisition and Appraisal of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Fonds: Or, SELECT * FROM VANOC_Records AS Archives WHERE Value=‘true’;,” <i>Archivaria</i> 72 (Fall 2011): 93.)) Along with the multi-institutional AIMS project and the PARADIGM (Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media) project in the UK, these case studies detail the practical issues involved in rethinking arrangement and description in born-digital archives. ((AIMS Work Group, “AIMS Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship,” 2012, <a href=\"http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/\">http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/</a>; Paradigm project, “Workbook on Digital Private Papers,” The Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media (Paradigm) Project, accessed October 2012,  <a href=\"http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook/index.html\">http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook/index.html</a>.))\r\n\r\nTaken together, the projects provide an overview of how arrangement may look in entirely born-digital collections. All note the difficulty in parsing user-generated description and the often quixotic or meaningless nature of directory structures and naming. The projects largely employed filtering, text mining, and other cross-record queries to determine the content of most files. The sheer volume of files contained in accessions precluded any item-level content review or hierarchical rearrangement; yet, at the same time, “the creation of file and item descriptions and inventories is not only easier and faster, it yields much richer information.… What takes hours or days to perform in the paper environment takes mere seconds to accomplish in the digital environment, and is done to a greater level of detail.” ((Mumma et al., \"A First Look,\" 115-16.))\r\n\r\nThough the many technical processes necessary for format validation, emulation, automated metadata extraction, and other methods of processing born-digital archives are too complex to be fully recounted here, these case studies point to their key characteristics. (See Video 1.) Arrangement, as we think of it, is no longer a process of imposing intellectualized hierarchies or physical relocation; instead, it becomes largely automated, algorithmic, and batch processed. At the same time, archival representation will build upon the affordances of the digital objects themselves to extract and compile metadata that can then be repurposed to bridge and augment a wealth of contextual relations far beyond the order of their creation and their agency of origin.\r\n\r\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDAhbR8dyp8\r\n<div class=\"wp-caption-text\">Video 1. Processing Born-Digital Materials Using AccessData FTK at Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. 2011.</div>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<b>Visual Descriptions</b>\r\n\r\nAs the “logical associations of records extend beyond the records themselves and embrace relations with other entities in the wider world,” as Geoffrey Yeo puts it, archivists will be tasked with building interfaces that draw upon these aforementioned possibilities and linking them to the online interfaces through which records will be made available. ((Yeo, “The Conceptual Fonds,” 71.)) The interface thus becomes the “critical element in the interaction between documentary evidence and its consumers.” ((Margaret Hedstrom, “Archives, Memory, and Interfaces with the Past,” <i>Archival Science</i> 2, no. 1-2 (2002): 24.))\r\n\r\nSince few archives are accessioning entirely born-digital collections, it is difficult to find archival examples of a description for such a collection. Born-digital content that is currently being processed is usually a small portion of a larger physical collection and, as such, is integrated in a hybrid fashion into traditional finding aids; see, for instance, \"<a href=\"http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt9p3038mq/\">Series 8: Born digital files</a>,\" \"<a href=\"http://findingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/rushdie1000/\">Series 11: Computers and related devices</a>,\" or \"<a href=\"http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/creeley.html\">Series 13: Computer files</a>.\"\r\n\r\nThere are, however, some archival projects, as well as work in the digital humanities, that offer a window into how researchers and scholars are making using of large sets of digital data. While the data sets and digital records being utilized are not necessarily archival collections, the tools, methods of inquiry, and cross-collection, multi-institutional repositories that emerge from these projects presage both how entirely born-digital archives may come to be used and what digital archival collection interfaces may look like in the future.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4928\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image7.gif\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4928  \" alt=\"Figure 7. Image from &quot;Data Mining with Criminal Intent&quot; presentation by Briquet et al. at Digging into Data Challenge, Washington D.C., 2009. Slides available at http://criminalintent.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/criminal_intent_digging_into_data_meeting_10jun2011.pdf.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image7-300x179.gif\" width=\"300\" height=\"179\" /></a> Figure 7. Image from \"Data Mining with Criminal Intent\" presentation by Briquet et al. at Digging into Data Challenge, Washington D.C., 2009. Slides available at http://criminalintent.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/criminal_intent_digging_into_data_meeting_10jun2011.pdf.[/caption]\r\n\r\nTwo projects taking an innovative, insightful approach to exploring archival collections through the mining of large archival corpora are The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online and Cameron Blevins’s work text mining and topic modeling Martha Ballard’s diary. ((The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online can be found at <a href=\"http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/\">http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/</a>, and the associated Criminal Intent project can be found at <a href=\"http://criminalintent.org/category/old-bailey-online/\">http://criminalintent.org/category/old-bailey-online/</a>. Cameron Blevin’s work with Martha Ballard’s diary can be found online at <a href=\"http://historying.org/martha-ballards-diary/\">http://historying.org/martha-ballards-diary/</a> and at <a href=\"http://dh2011abstracts.stanford.edu/xtf/view?docId=tei/ab-173.xml\">http://dh2011abstracts.stanford.edu/xtf/view?docId=tei/ab-173.xml</a>.)) The Old Bailey Proceedings provides access to nearly 200,000 digitized trial records from London’s criminal courts, spans almost 250 years, allows full text searching, and has an API through which users can query the archive. The With Criminal Intent project has built a suite of related tools that can help perform data-mining projects using this archive. (See Figure 7.) This project measures and visualizes trends over time as a means of revealing historical themes, building and revealing new narratives, and providing insights into the past through data-driven analysis.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4731\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image8.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4731 \" alt=\"Figure 8. Screenshot from &quot;Mining the Dispatch&quot; website, http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/Topics/view/27.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image8-300x210.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"210\" /></a> Figure 8. Screenshot from \"Mining the Dispatch\" website, http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/Topics/view/27.[/caption]\r\n\r\nBlevins’s work with Martha Ballard’s diary features a different collection, a single diary by an eighteenth-century housewife composed of almost 10,000 entries from 1785 to 1812. This project aspires to a similar goal of revealing novel insights into, and interpretations of, historical material through the ability of digital tools to mine vast sets of information. Blevins uses topic modeling—an algorithmic method that searches word patterns and groupings throughout large collections of texts (for Ballard’s diary, each entry was treated as a different “text”)—to chart and track thematic trends across the diary. A similar approach has been taken by the Mining the Dispatch project, which examines changing sentiments toward the Civil War over the course of six years (over 112,000 items) in the Richmond, Virginia <i>Daily Dispatch</i> newspaper. ((“Mining the Dispatch,” accessed October 2012, <a href=\"http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/\">http://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/</a>.)) (See Figure 8.)\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nThese projects may fall under the broader rubric of the digital humanities, and the collections they are working with may not be archival collections in the traditional sense, but they offer a glimpse of the discovery, navigation, exploration, and analytic tools that foreshadow uses of digital archival collections. Other initiatives have sought to build upon the network of social relations that influence records creation. The SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context) Project “provides access to the socio-historical contexts ([including] people, families, and corporate bodies) in which the records were created” through the use of the EAC-CPF standard that describes corporate bodies, persons, and families. ((“SNAC: The Social Networks and Archival Context Project,” accessed October 2012, <a href=\"http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/\">http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/</a>.)) Early results show a promising method for using social context for discovery and interpretation.  (See Figure 9.) The archivists at Stanford University who are managing the Robert Creeley collection, which contains a significant quantity of born-digital content, especially emails, have used the custom-built MUSE tool for exploring semantic patterns in email archives. ((The Robert Creeley collection can be found at <a href=\"http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/creeley.html\">http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/creeley.html</a>. For more information on the MUSE tool visit <a href=\"http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/muse/\">http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/muse/</a>.)) (See Figure 10.) Similarly, other projects have explored building unique visual interfaces to archival collections that extend contextual relations across collections, archives, and disciplines. (See Video 2.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4732\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image9.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4732 \" alt=\"Figure 9. Image from &quot;Historic Social Networks&quot; presentation by Brian Tingle at SAA 2012 Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA. Slides available at http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/images/NAAC-dc-2012_SAA2012_Tingle.pdf.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image9-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" /></a> Figure 9. Image from \"Historic Social Networks\" presentation by Brian Tingle at SAA 2012 Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA. Slides available at http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/images/NAAC-dc-2012_SAA2012_Tingle.pdf.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4727\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image10.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4727 \" alt=\"Figure 10. Network analysis of Robert Creeley email archive. Image by Elijah Meeks, captured from https://dhs.stanford.edu/visualization/robert-creeley-e-mail-correspodence-network/.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bailey_archivejournal_image10-300x265.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"265\" /></a> Figure 10. Network analysis of Robert Creeley email archive. Image by Elijah Meeks, captured from https://dhs.stanford.edu/visualization/robert-creeley-e-mail-correspodence-network/.[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\nhttp://vimeo.com/6694353\r\n<div class=\"wp-caption-text\" style=\"text-align: left;\">Video 2. Visible Archive Series Browser, Mitchell Whitelaw. 2012.</div>\r\nWhat distinguishes these projects from archival representations of old is that context and meaning are not exclusively provided through descriptive, narrative details that precede an arrangement and location list, but instead through networks, inter-linkages, modeling, and content analysis. Users can move dynamically within a collection and laterally across collections. Search, query, and tools like topic modeling also allow the user to build their own patterns and hierarchies for discovery. In this view, archival description still plays a crucial role in providing information on what something is or how it came to be created, but no longer is the fonds or idea of original order the sole determinant of representation.\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusion</b>\r\n\r\nAs Luciana Duranti has noted, archival description “has been carried out or not carried out depending on specific needs and conditions, attitudes and requirements, and its products have consistently reflected the conceptions about archives held by the society of the time.” ((Duranti, “Origin and Development,” 53.)) In the physical world of items, folders, boxes, and shelves, the archive must be sorted, ordered, and stored sequentially in space. Those properties, along with social, cultural, and political attitudes have driven how archival arrangement and description are theorized and practiced. Indeed, description itself has always had to serve multiple purposes: to provide historical or biographical information, scope and content detail, physical location for retrieval, administrative information for ongoing management, and restrictions and material types governing use. In a sense, description itself is a compound object, tugged between the needs of physical arrangement, intellectual representation, and user expectation. The properties of digital records allow archivists to revisit that negotiation. At the same time, other qualities of digital information, like the forensic disk image, have the potential to preserve both a mechanical version of “order” as well as provenancial and contextual information that formerly were provided through description. File fixity, forensic imaging, directory manifests, and auto-generated metadata may all come to play a larger role in defining provenance.\r\n\r\nWe disrespect des fonds, then, not as an act of elimination or insubordination, but in order to bring other contextual relations to its same level of privilege. Consider it less a disrespect, perhaps, than a humbling; or, instead, consider it a reaffirmation that the multiplicity of meanings possible with digital records can be better realized through an ongoing interrogation of archival traditions of arrangement and description. In rethinking <i>respect des fonds</i>, we gain a better awareness of the extent to which the material affordances of paper records have had an undue influence on how we conceptualize and practice grouping and describing collections. Bits, however, are fundamentally different at the material and symbolic levels. The use of digital objects is different as well, influenced by computational processing, algorithmic query, automation, and dynamism, not to mention social conditions, user expectations, technology dependencies, storage requirements, and a host of other characteristics of how we create and use technology.\r\n\r\nParallels and bonds, series and topics, models and paradigms; at times these concepts have collided and resulted in a seeming antagonism between ideas like original order and random access, historical contingency and abstract principle, finding aid and dynamic query. But there have been similarities too: how the tension between record and representation mirrors that of inscription and screen; and how the component nature of digital objects resembles the component purpose of traditional archival description. To entrench methods of arrangement and description borne of the qualities of physical collections is to disregard the potential expansion of context that digital information can support. In recognizing how historically and socially contingent traditional practices (and the theories spawning those practices) were, we better recognize their potential dysfunction in a time of born-digital records. This is not to say that we should discard the idea of the fonds or the utility of original order, but perhaps it is time to revoke their privileged place in archival discourse and revisit the true goals of arrangement and description in light of the capabilities of digital records. Maybe then we can begin to understand what is possible when we think of collections as mutually contextual and interrelated instead of cloistered and static. And perhaps then other bonds, other parallels, other contexts, meanings, and interpretations can receive the same amount of respect that we have, for too long now, granted the fonds.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nWikipedia articles created as part of this work:\r\n\r\nRespect des fonds: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_des_fonds\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_des_fonds</a>\r\n\r\nOriginal Order: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_order\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_order</a>\r\n\r\nArchival Bond: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_bond\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_bond</a>','Disrespect des Fonds: Rethinking Arrangement and Description in Born-Digital Archives','','inherit','open','open','','4722-revision-44','','','2013-07-11 04:07:38','2013-07-11 04:07:38','',4722,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4722-revision-44/',0,'revision','',0),(5091,10,'2013-07-11 04:04:50','2013-07-11 04:04:50','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.) 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\n<iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ykY6moIaDE?rel=0\" height=\"250\" width=\"333\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe>\r\n<div class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 1. A staged archival encounter.</div>\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, <em>A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism</em> (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,” <em>Yale French Studies</em> 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, <em>Understanding Archives and Manuscripts</em> (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,” <em>Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History</em>, 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<div class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 2.</div>\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<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., <em>Refiguring the Archive</em> (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), Cheryl Simon, ed., Following the Archival Turn: Photography, the Museum, and the Archive, special issue of <em>Visual Resources: A Journal of Documentation</em> 18.2 (June 2002), and Ann Laura Stoler, <em>Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense</em> (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 <em>Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne</em> in French; the published English version echoed the French publication with its 1995 title <em>Archive Fever</em>. As Carolyn Steedman points out in <em>Dust: The Archive and Cultural History</em>, 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 <em>Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable</em> (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 <em>Dust</em> is from Virginia Woolf’s <em>To the Lighthouse</em>, one chapter treats George Eliot’s <em>Middlemarch</em> in depth… in fact, almost every chapter depends on a literary text. ((Another chapter invokes Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel <em>Mary Barton</em>, a third is anchored by W. H. Auden’s poem “Homage to Clio,” and a fourth finds its most eloquent examples in Charles Dickens’ <em>Our Mutual Friend</em>.)) 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; <em>Mal d’Archive</em> 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 <em>Archive Fever</em>—a “let’s begin at the beginning” homage to the seminal text—her book’s title, <em>Dust</em>, 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_423\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"172\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-423    \" alt=\"Figure 3. Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1.jpg\" width=\"172\" height=\"129\" /></a> Figure 3. Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.[/caption]\r\n\r\nKaplan, for her part, unravels her own archive story. She gives us a kind of “whodunit”—her search for the ephemeral sources of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s anti-semitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937). She uses this account to exemplify her effort to “move through the archival process and recover some of the stories that get deleted in the final scholarly form.” ((Kaplan, 104. For this reason, perhaps, Kaplan never reveals what she ultimately discovers in her successful search for Celine’s sources. In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether her pre-emptive and truncated treatment of her archive story is deliberate or not. Is this treatment meant to indirectly support her official claim about “results”? Or does the presence of the archive story suggest that telling it is an impulse she can’t quite control? Thanks, Lauren Coats, for helping tease this problem out.)) These beginnings are preemptively struck out, however, by what seems to be her main claim: “the passion of the archives must finally be used to eradicate all personal stories in the interests of the dry archival report, fit for a public.” ((Kaplan, 103.)) Only in the “para-text”—a preface, for example—can the archive story appear without “interrupt[ing] or complicat[ing] the narrative so much that no results could ever be understood or perceived.” ((Kaplan, 104.)) Despite this unequivocal assertion, the personal “whodunit” prevails in her essay, especially in the final section set in the Centre du documentation juive contemporain (CDJC). It is this library, where Kaplan solves the mystery of Céline’s sources, that “doubles as a detective’s office.”\r\n\r\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 <em>Archive Fever</em> 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\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 <em>Refiguring the Archive</em> (2002), <em>Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History</em> (2005) and <em>Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense</em> (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. <em>Archive Stories</em> 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 <em>Archive Fever</em> 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<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. ((<em>Alphabetical Catalogue of Books to be Purchased for the Library of the Peabody Institute, Baltimore</em>, Vols. 1 and 2 (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1861, 1863).)) (See Figure 4.) 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. ((<em>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</em> (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. ((<em>Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore</em>, Vols. 1-5 (Baltimore: Isaac Friedenwald, 1883; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, [1961?]; also on googlebooks), and <em>Second Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Including the Additions Made Since 1882</em>, Vols. 1-8 (Baltimore: Deutsch Lithographic and Printing, 1896; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, 1961).)) (See Figure 5.)  We have the cards from the Dewey decimal system card catalogue, which replaced the printed catalogue in the 1910s. 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_395\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"191\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-395   \" alt=\"Figure 4. Alphabetical index from Alphabetical Catalouge (“desiderata”).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1.jpg\" width=\"191\" height=\"277\" /></a> Figure 4. Alphabetical index from <em>Alphabetical Catalogue </em>(“desiderata”).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_396\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-396 \" alt=\"Figure 5. Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 5. Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_397\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"202\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-397 \" alt=\"Figure 6. One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\" width=\"202\" height=\"269\" /></a> Figure 6. One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\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. (See Figure 7.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_398\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"203\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-398   \" alt=\"Figure 7. Detail of subject index from Alphabetical Catalouge No. 2 (“desiderata”).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail.jpg\" width=\"203\" height=\"165\" /></a> Figure 7. Detail of subject index from <em>Alphabetical Catalouge</em> No. 2 (“desiderata”).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_399\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"171\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-399 \" alt=\"Figure 8. Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail.jpg\" width=\"171\" height=\"230\" /></a> Figure 8. Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.[/caption]\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.”  ((“Letters from George Peabody, Esq.: Baltimore, February 12th, 1857,” in Founder’s Letters, 7.)) 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.\" ((Qtd. in Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, “PIB Ref. Library. 8-Morison\'s Philosophy of Excellence,” in<em> 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.</em> 11 Mar. 2011.)) 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.\r\n\r\nThis 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. ((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,” <em>Libraries &amp; Culture</em> 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.))\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<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\n[caption id=\"attachment_400\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"215\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-400  \" alt=\"Figure 9. Dewey cards for “gift books.”\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards.jpg\" width=\"215\" height=\"162\" /></a> Figure 9. Dewey cards for “gift books.”[/caption]\r\n\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. ((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.)) (See Figure 9.) 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 <em>Rough and Ready Annual: or, Military Souvenir</em> published by Appleton’s has been assigned the subject “Mexican War, 1846-1848—Anecdotes.” ((<em>Rough and Ready Annual</em> (New York: D. Appleton; Philadelphia: G.S. Appleton, 1848).))\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\n[caption id=\"attachment_401\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"164\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-401 \" alt=\"Figure 10. The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr.jpg\" width=\"164\" height=\"123\" /></a> Figure 10. The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.[/caption]\r\n\r\n<em>The Rough and Ready Annual</em> is at 973.62 A5121, in the “general history of North America; United States” category. (See Figure 10.) This call number range is on the second floor, west side. Other items on my list are in very different parts of the library. <em>Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them,</em> 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. ((<em>Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them</em> (London: Knight &amp; Co., [1857]). This title does not appear in at least one Arthur bibliography; see Donald A Koch, \"Timothy Shay Arthur,\" <em>Antebellum Writers in New York and the South</em>, 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 <em>A Bibliography of the Published Books of Timothy Shay Arthur (</em>Atlanta: Emory University, 1954), a typewritten quarto at 012 A791S, but it seems to be missing.)) (See Figure 11.) Arthur shows up again as co-editor of <em>The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present</em>, which has received more extensive description as it contains the first printing of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Siope.” ((<em>The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present</em> (Baltimore: Bayly and Burns, [1838]).)) 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). <em>The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons</em> is in the rare book room at the south end of the third floor. ((<em>The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons</em> (London: The Religious Tract Society, ca. 1850).)) (See Figure 12.) 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 <em>The Family Circle and Parlor Annual</em>, volume 5 in a series, which is shelved up on the sixth floor with the periodicals at 051 F198 (serials in American English). ((<em>The Family Circle and Parlor Annual (</em>New York: Comstock, 1847).)) (See Figure 13.)\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-402 \" alt=\"Figure 11. Orange Blossoms in the stacks.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a>\r\n\r\n<dl class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" id=\"attachment_402\" style=\"width: 279px;\"><dd class=\"wp-caption-dd\">Figure 11. Orange Blossoms in the stacks.</dd></dl>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_403\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-403 \" alt=\"Figure 12. The rare book room.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 12. The rare book room.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_404\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-404 \" alt=\"Figure 13. The Parlor Annual in the stacks.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 13. The Parlor Annual in the stacks.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_405\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"161\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-405  \" alt=\"Figure 14. Call slips and flags.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips.jpg\" width=\"161\" height=\"121\" /></a> Figure 14. Call slips and flags.[/caption]\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. (See Figure 14.) 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 <em>The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse</em>; 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.” ((<em>The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse </em>(Philadelphia: David Hogan, 1813).)) (See Figure 15.) 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_406\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-406 \" alt=\"Figure 15. Inscription in The New American Reader.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 15. Inscription in <em>The New American Reader</em>.[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\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<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.” ((Henk Aarts and Ap Dijksterhuis, “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” <em>Journal of Personality and Social Psychology</em> 84.1 (2003), 19.)) 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.” ((Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 19.)) Physical environments do not necessarily prompt these behaviors; rather, the behavior “depend[s] on whether the environment is of immediate behavioral relevance.” ((Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 20.)) 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. (See Figure 16.) 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. (See Figure 17.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_407\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"202\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-407 \" alt=\"Figure 16. The skylight in the George Peabody Library.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\" width=\"202\" height=\"269\" /></a> Figure 16. The skylight in the George Peabody Library.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_408\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-408 \" alt=\"Figure 17. Alcove in the George Peabody Library.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 17. Alcove in the George Peabody Library.[/caption]\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. ((See William Frederick Poole, <em>Remarks on Library Construction</em> (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1884).)) 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_409\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"151\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-409   \" alt=\"Figure 18. Photography station in the George Peabody Library.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station.jpg\" width=\"151\" height=\"113\" /></a> Figure 18. Photography station in the George Peabody Library.[/caption]\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. (See Figure 18.) 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-61','','','2013-07-11 04:04:50','2013-07-11 04:04:50','',2199,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/2199-revision-61/',0,'revision','',0),(5092,10,'2013-07-11 04:23:35','2013-07-11 04:23:35','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.) 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\n<iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ykY6moIaDE?rel=0\" height=\"250\" width=\"333\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe>\r\n<div class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 1. A staged archival encounter.</div>\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, <em>A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism</em> (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,” <em>Yale French Studies</em> 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, <em>Understanding Archives and Manuscripts</em> (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,” <em>Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History</em>, 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<div class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 2.</div>\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<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., <em>Refiguring the Archive</em> (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), Cheryl Simon, ed., Following the Archival Turn: Photography, the Museum, and the Archive, special issue of <em>Visual Resources: A Journal of Documentation</em> 18.2 (June 2002), and Ann Laura Stoler, <em>Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense</em> (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 <em>Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne</em> in French; the published English version echoed the French publication with its 1995 title <em>Archive Fever</em>. As Carolyn Steedman points out in <em>Dust: The Archive and Cultural History</em>, 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 <em>Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable</em> (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 <em>Dust</em> is from Virginia Woolf’s <em>To the Lighthouse</em>, one chapter treats George Eliot’s <em>Middlemarch</em> in depth… in fact, almost every chapter depends on a literary text. ((Another chapter invokes Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel <em>Mary Barton</em>, a third is anchored by W. H. Auden’s poem “Homage to Clio,” and a fourth finds its most eloquent examples in Charles Dickens’ <em>Our Mutual Friend</em>.)) 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; <em>Mal d’Archive</em> 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 <em>Archive Fever</em>—a “let’s begin at the beginning” homage to the seminal text—her book’s title, <em>Dust</em>, 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_423\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"172\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-423    \" alt=\"Figure 3. Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1.jpg\" width=\"172\" height=\"129\" /></a> Figure 3. Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.[/caption]\r\n\r\nKaplan, for her part, unravels her own archive story. She gives us a kind of “whodunit”—her search for the ephemeral sources of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s anti-semitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937). She uses this account to exemplify her effort to “move through the archival process and recover some of the stories that get deleted in the final scholarly form.” ((Kaplan, 104. For this reason, perhaps, Kaplan never reveals what she ultimately discovers in her successful search for Celine’s sources. In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether her pre-emptive and truncated treatment of her archive story is deliberate or not. Is this treatment meant to indirectly support her official claim about “results”? Or does the presence of the archive story suggest that telling it is an impulse she can’t quite control? Thanks, Lauren Coats, for helping tease this problem out.)) These beginnings are preemptively struck out, however, by what seems to be her main claim: “the passion of the archives must finally be used to eradicate all personal stories in the interests of the dry archival report, fit for a public.” ((Kaplan, 103.)) Only in the “para-text”—a preface, for example—can the archive story appear without “interrupt[ing] or complicat[ing] the narrative so much that no results could ever be understood or perceived.” ((Kaplan, 104.)) Despite this unequivocal assertion, the personal “whodunit” prevails in her essay, especially in the final section set in the Centre du documentation juive contemporain (CDJC). It is this library, where Kaplan solves the mystery of Céline’s sources, that “doubles as a detective’s office.”\r\n\r\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 <em>Archive Fever</em> 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\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 <em>Refiguring the Archive</em> (2002), <em>Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History</em> (2005) and <em>Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense</em> (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. <em>Archive Stories</em> 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 <em>Archive Fever</em> 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<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. ((<em>Alphabetical Catalogue of Books to be Purchased for the Library of the Peabody Institute, Baltimore</em>, Vols. 1 and 2 (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1861, 1863).)) (See Figure 4.) 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. ((<em>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</em> (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. ((<em>Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore</em>, Vols. 1-5 (Baltimore: Isaac Friedenwald, 1883; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, [1961?]; also on googlebooks), and <em>Second Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Including the Additions Made Since 1882</em>, Vols. 1-8 (Baltimore: Deutsch Lithographic and Printing, 1896; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, 1961).)) (See Figure 5.)  We have the cards from the Dewey decimal system card catalogue, which replaced the printed catalogue in the 1910s. 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_395\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"191\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-395   \" alt=\"Figure 4. Alphabetical index from Alphabetical Catalouge (“desiderata”).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1.jpg\" width=\"191\" height=\"277\" /></a> Figure 4. Alphabetical index from <em>Alphabetical Catalogue </em>(“desiderata”).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_396\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-396 \" alt=\"Figure 5. Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 5. Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_397\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"202\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-397 \" alt=\"Figure 6. One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\" width=\"202\" height=\"269\" /></a> Figure 6. One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\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. (See Figure 7.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_398\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"203\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-398   \" alt=\"Figure 7. Detail of subject index from Alphabetical Catalouge No. 2 (“desiderata”).\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail.jpg\" width=\"203\" height=\"165\" /></a> Figure 7. Detail of subject index from <em>Alphabetical Catalouge</em> No. 2 (“desiderata”).[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_399\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"171\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-399 \" alt=\"Figure 8. Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail.jpg\" width=\"171\" height=\"230\" /></a> Figure 8. Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.[/caption]\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.” ((“Letters from George Peabody, Esq.: Baltimore, February 12th, 1857,” in Founder’s Letters, 7.)) 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.\" ((Qtd. in Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, “PIB Ref. Library. 8-Morison\'s Philosophy of Excellence,” in<em> 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.</em> 11 Mar. 2011.)) 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.\r\n\r\nThis 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. ((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,” <em>Libraries &amp; Culture</em> 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.))\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<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\n[caption id=\"attachment_400\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"215\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-400  \" alt=\"Figure 9. Dewey cards for “gift books.”\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards.jpg\" width=\"215\" height=\"162\" /></a> Figure 9. Dewey cards for “gift books.”[/caption]\r\n\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. ((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.)) (See Figure 9.) 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 <em>Rough and Ready Annual: or, Military Souvenir</em> published by Appleton’s has been assigned the subject “Mexican War, 1846-1848—Anecdotes.” ((<em>Rough and Ready Annual</em> (New York: D. Appleton; Philadelphia: G.S. Appleton, 1848).))\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\n[caption id=\"attachment_401\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"164\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-401 \" alt=\"Figure 10. The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr.jpg\" width=\"164\" height=\"123\" /></a> Figure 10. The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.[/caption]\r\n\r\n<em>The Rough and Ready Annual</em> is at 973.62 A5121, in the “general history of North America; United States” category. (See Figure 10.) This call number range is on the second floor, west side. Other items on my list are in very different parts of the library. <em>Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them,</em> 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. ((<em>Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them</em> (London: Knight &amp; Co., [1857]). This title does not appear in at least one Arthur bibliography; see Donald A Koch, \"Timothy Shay Arthur,\" <em>Antebellum Writers in New York and the South</em>, 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 <em>A Bibliography of the Published Books of Timothy Shay Arthur (</em>Atlanta: Emory University, 1954), a typewritten quarto at 012 A791S, but it seems to be missing.)) (See Figure 11.) Arthur shows up again as co-editor of <em>The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present</em>, which has received more extensive description as it contains the first printing of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Siope.” ((<em>The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present</em> (Baltimore: Bayly and Burns, [1838]).)) 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). <em>The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons</em> is in the rare book room at the south end of the third floor. ((<em>The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons</em> (London: The Religious Tract Society, ca. 1850).)) (See Figure 12.) 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 <em>The Family Circle and Parlor Annual</em>, volume 5 in a series, which is shelved up on the sixth floor with the periodicals at 051 F198 (serials in American English). ((<em>The Family Circle and Parlor Annual (</em>New York: Comstock, 1847).)) (See Figure 13.)\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-402 \" alt=\"Figure 11. Orange Blossoms in the stacks.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a>\r\n\r\n<dl class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" id=\"attachment_402\" style=\"width: 279px;\"><dd class=\"wp-caption-dd\">Figure 11. Orange Blossoms in the stacks.</dd></dl>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_403\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-403 \" alt=\"Figure 12. The rare book room.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 12. The rare book room.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_404\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-404 \" alt=\"Figure 13. The Parlor Annual in the stacks.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 13. The Parlor Annual in the stacks.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_405\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"161\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-405  \" alt=\"Figure 14. Call slips and flags.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips.jpg\" width=\"161\" height=\"121\" /></a> Figure 14. Call slips and flags.[/caption]\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. (See Figure 14.) 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 <em>The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse</em>; 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.” ((<em>The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse </em>(Philadelphia: David Hogan, 1813).)) (See Figure 15.) 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_406\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-406 \" alt=\"Figure 15. Inscription in The New American Reader.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 15. Inscription in <em>The New American Reader</em>.[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\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<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.” ((Henk Aarts and Ap Dijksterhuis, “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” <em>Journal of Personality and Social Psychology</em> 84.1 (2003), 19.)) 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.” ((Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 19.)) Physical environments do not necessarily prompt these behaviors; rather, the behavior “depend[s] on whether the environment is of immediate behavioral relevance.” ((Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 20.)) 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. (See Figure 16.) 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. (See Figure 17.)\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_407\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"202\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-407 \" alt=\"Figure 16. The skylight in the George Peabody Library.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\" width=\"202\" height=\"269\" /></a> Figure 16. The skylight in the George Peabody Library.[/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_408\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"269\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-408 \" alt=\"Figure 17. Alcove in the George Peabody Library.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove.jpg\" width=\"269\" height=\"202\" /></a> Figure 17. Alcove in the George Peabody Library.[/caption]\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. ((See William Frederick Poole, <em>Remarks on Library Construction</em> (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1884).)) 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\n[caption id=\"attachment_409\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"151\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-409   \" alt=\"Figure 18. Photography station in the George Peabody Library.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station.jpg\" width=\"151\" height=\"113\" /></a> Figure 18. Photography station in the George Peabody Library.[/caption]\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. (See Figure 18.) 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-62','','','2013-07-11 04:23:35','2013-07-11 04:23:35','',2199,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/2199-revision-62/',0,'revision','',0),