A R C H I VASM
Personal Papers & Private Archives
PUT YOUR
STUFF IN ORDER — IT IS THE STUFF OF HISTORY
Madison,
WI.— There’s a big and growing trend of interest in personal papers and private
histories. To help anyone protect their place in history and do it with
professional style, here is a concise, friendly and practically
free guide: Personal Papers and Private Archives: Sixteen almost
free & easy Steps to Putting Small Collections in Pretty Good Order
by Helen Ashmore. The author is a certified archivist trained at Simmons
College and in the Harvard University library. She is executive officer of
Archiva Personal Papers & Private Archives, whose clients include important
private archives in New York and Denver.
THE
BOOK
--The Key of Kappa Kappa Gamma, Oct 1999
______________________________________________________________________________
Excerpts from
the book & from interviews:
"Our histories are in our hands in our
personal papers or private archives— letters, diaries, notes and sketches,
photos and such. Many people understand the value of their papers as
their own history in perpetuity. They want to take care of what only
they can leave behind. But they‘re not sure how to go about it."
Robin Guin founded Archiva with Ashmore in 1996.
Guin relocated from Paris drawn by the chance to provide a service with such
far reaching implications. "Our goal is to give some control of history to
a wider base of people. It sounds a bit grand, but what is saved as evidence
determines what is written as history. It‘s that simple."
Archiva’s founders campaign energetically on
behalf of personal papers and private archives. Their work with private clients
and organizations in New York and Denver led to the writing of the book. “Many
people can’t afford a private archivist, and many people can do a lot of
what we do. The book was written to help those who want to take a run at
getting their papers in order, whether its for storage or for writing personal
or family history.
Archiving has a kind of Zen logic, but it comes down to
many straightforward things anyone can understand how to do. These ‘what
to do’ steps come straight out of our notes — nitty gritty details ground out
among our own teams of experienced, professional archivists during many
Archiva projects .”
From time immemorial people have accumulated
personal papers that eventually were put to use. Every biography that has ever
been written, every documentary like the Civil War series, Ken Burns' stirring
PBS special, relies on the personal voice in someone‘s papers. "Regardless
of fame or fortune people have papers important to their families or to
community history. It is rewarding to help protect these gems of
individual character, life and experience because they will be valuable some
place whether it is the National Archives or the family closet, " says
Guin. “People may have items of more cultural or monetary value than they
know. What looks like trash to most people is the archivist's or historian’s
gold, things like scribbled drafts of manuscripts or a series of sketches for a
painting."
Knowing what you have is often the hard
part. "Probably the most important thing Archiva does for private
clients in 90% of cases, " says Guin, "is help them understand what
they have and therefore what to do with it. Obviously you are not going to save
every scrap of paper you ever touched; but people often throw away the best
things. If they don’t, someone else does.
In one case, a woman died leaving a huge bequest
to care for the papers of her husband, a writer who had died years before. She
had kept a virtual shrine to him, touching nothing in his work space.
"We were brought in to organize his papers, assuming that they would
go to a major archive, " Guin said. But there were only remnants of the
papers - not the evidence of his life and creativity in process. Archiva
discovered that after the woman had died, someone had discarded the best of
what she had saved, thrown away her husband’s scratchy drafts and
correspondence but kept magazines in which his work was published. It was a
disaster.
Especially when people have lived alone,
their papers are vulnerable to such destruction. Archiva eventually tracked
down and retrieved some originals that had been “lost” some worth many
thousands of dollars. “Our goal is to prevent such catastrophes,
not scramble to salvage things in their wake. It's better to bring an
archivist in before the works by individual hands are thrown away and the mass
magazines are saved, "
Archiva's mission is to promote awareness of the
value of personal papers among those who ordinarily wouldn't think of
themselves as being "collected” — especially artists and writers. Another
goal is to help save the papers of this last "paper generation" —
people who write letters by hand or typewriter — before they are gone.
Why save your private papers in the first place?
“All biography and all history — including local and family
history — rely largely on records of individual lives. Why should you not be counted in that
long memory too?”
Archiva
services include consultation, inventory, and processing — the
archivist’s word for the archival methods of putting papers in order and
creating documents to make them easily accessible..