720.220.3201
FAQs: How we can help you face
those piles of boxes and papers
with some confidence
that you have some idea what you are doing.
Personal papers are letters, diaries, journals, and
original compositions such as drawings and sketches, poems, scores and
manuscripts in every stage and draft. They are research notes, scrapbooks,
photos, memorabilia, legal, financial and civil documents. They are what is
generated by the ordinary conduct of a life. Private archives refer to
the papers and documents generated by a family or by a private institution,
club or association.
Papers are one generation's legacy to the next. They represent
the work and the experience of an individual lifetime. They document the
history and bear witness to the character of a group. However much or little is
saved --a few letters, a journal, some photographs, or masses of manuscripts
and letters and documents -- papers are a unique gift to history and to
progeny. They live after us as part of the record of the human
experience; in a sense, they keep us alive.
What looks like trash to many people is often the
archivist’s or historian’s gold. An archivist can help you explore the proper
disposition of papers within a family or community. An archival survey will
sometimes discover papers that were created by other people, such as earlier
generations of family or friends. Their nature and value is not always
understood by those who have inherited custody of them.
The archivist's code of ethics, to which Archiva
adheres, is comparable to that of the priest or lawyer. Strict confidentiality
assures that the privacy of the client is honored and protected.
All
Archiva team members are bonded and insured.
1-Artists, writers and composers including those who are
not celebrities.
2-Collectors & patrons who make significant contributions to the cultural life of a community.
3-Others whose work embodies significant or unique contributions to a profession, a body of knowledge, or a community.
4-People with no other claim to be remembered than that their personal papers are redolent of life in our time, unique, and therefore of enduring value. The present senior generation will be the last to have written by hand or typewriter as a general practice. With the electronic age has come instant mutability -- invisible and impossible to trace -- and mass reproducibility of every written thing. To preserve the personal papers of this generation is to guard the privilege of working with unique, one of a kind products of the human hand.
5-Institutions and groups of any size or purpose.
Personal papers are collected by institutions and
individuals -- by government archives and historical societies, university
archives, special collections and manuscripts departments; by foundations and
museums, associations, businesses, unions and religious institutions. Each has
a collecting policy or mission focusing on specific subject areas and persons.
Private collectors purchase papers of the rich and famous; family members may
inherit papers of their forbears.
Collecting of personal papers is, after a certain
Olympian level, characterized by some degree of chance. People may not know
where their papers could go. Archivists may not know where they would put
papers they want if they got them. Repositories that have collected over a long
period are overwhelmed by the enormous holdings and unprocessed backlogs they
have. Daunted by space limitations and funding cuts -- archives rely heavily on
public funds -- fewer and fewer seek papers so actively as once they did. What
is collected is determined by what has already been collected; donors may have
advocated certain agenda.
The family haven for papers is threatened as well. Families have become dispersed, reducing the chance of family papers being preserved undisturbed where a family has lived “in one spacious house for generations.” The most vulnerable papers are those of a person who lives alone. This is a time of rich opportunity for members of the private sector to help restore balance to what is collected by taking a hand in the fate of their generation’s legacy of personal papers.
If the papers are significant in themselves or in their
provenance as the papers of a prominent person -- or if they are accompanied by
a large donation, they may be processed. To process papers is, in plain
English, to put them in order in a protective environment and write a
descriptive guide to help researchers understand what is in them. Restrictions
may be imposed on the use of papers at a donor=s request. But most papers are
processed to be used. When papers are stored unprocessed, in the order or
disorder in which they arrived and with little or no written description, their
accessibility is restricted by default. Their use is, if not forbidden by policy,
so forbidding in practice that they may not be used at all.
Most searchers use library and archive catalogs -- print
and electronic resources. Huge databases such as NUCMC, the National Union
Catalogue of Manuscript Collections, and NIDS, the National Inventory of
Documentary Sources, list collections by personal names. Dozens of other print
and online sources will guide researchers to papers. The cost and complexity of
finding and using these sources to productive end, however, can be
overwhelming. One certainty about personal papers is the unpredictability of
where they will be found. They can and do show up anywhere, often having got
there via extraordinary routes and circumstances. Researchers in personal papers
often rely on telephone calls and letters to families and friends of their
subjects to discover where they might begin their search.
Personal papers are preserved for the reason that other
archival materials are: because, in themselves or the information they contain,
they are of enduring value. The first step in preserving them is to determine
what is in them. Often good papers go to no repository and are cherished by no
heir. They are thrown away because no one understands what they are.
An accumulation of papers that evolved consistently over
time a bound journal with daily entries over a twenty-year span or a packet of
weekly letters written home by a soldier in World War II, for example has an
archival credibility that distinguishes it from a "collection." A
collection is by definition, something consciously orchestrated. Such a
gathering of individual items or groups is often of great interest and value,
and collected items can often be authenticated. But the context identifiable
provenance and original order of an archival group gives it special
trustworthiness.
Merely having kept a journal for twenty years does not
guarantee exceptional value. If there is no consistent concrete information --
first hand reports on parties or plays, on the extent of storm damage every
spring, even the prices of butter or shoes -- and if there is no evaluation, no
hint of understanding of ones condition, then the content value of the journal
may be low. Still a consistently kept journal may hold interest for a local
historical society. As the heart has reasons that reason does not know,
archivists and historians see diamonds where others see only dross.
“Personal papers" to the
consumer culture means records of financial and property transactions. Many
books and workshops cover them. The records of the rest of life, however, have
been left to fate.
Write 1505 Wood
Lane, Madison WI 53705; call 720.220.3201
email Archiva@highstream.net