Week 12: Do you know where this goes?
where should we put things? also, when can we get our stuff back?
Yesterday hit 86 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s 30 degrees Celsius for the non-Americans), a sticky heat that heralded the beginning of summer on my last day of classes. Of course, the sweet relief of being relinquished from the unforgiving glare of Zoom is cut slightly short by the fact I begin a two-week summer intensive on rare book curatorship at the beginning of May (so a two-week summer intensive that’s actually in the spring). In the meantime, though, we can revel in the conclusion of what will hopefully be the only full-time pandemic-induced distance-learning graduate studies I will engage in.
Last week, my Wednesday was full of presentations, both for my management course and a guest lecture on my book history dissertation (wherein I talked for nearly 90 minutes about fanfiction production to a somewhat rapt class who truly had no idea what they were getting themselves into. If my sister is reading this, I think I’ve just articulated her worst nightmare). The management presentation was on my final paper on “a topic relating to management of information institutions.”
This delightful free reign led me to postcustodialism: a collection management theory that I was first introduced to as a mode of repatriation, or returning objects/materials to their rightful homes. Mohegan Tribe and Cornell University recently engaged in this process: Mohegan Tribe approached Cornell asking if they would return the papers of Fidelia Fielding, one of the last fluent Mohegan speakers in the 20th century, and Cornell readily agreed. Repatriation is increasingly appearing as a collection practice in white American and European heritage institutions after years of pressure and criticism by cultural advocates. Berlin recently made the news for announcing their return of Benin bronzes to Nigeria, signaling a shift that will make it very difficult for the British Museum and similar ilk to justify retaining stolen objects much longer. British TikToker @liamkalevit and British comedian James Acaster each have excellent bits about repatriation, specifically nudging the British Museum.
I first understood postcustodialism as institutions proactively identifying objects in their collections that should be held elsewhere and returning those objects, possibly directly to the original community that created them, or a cultural center, whatever may have you, which is…not how it works. Although I’ve seen some recent job postings articulate postcustodial priorities in the responsibility descriptions, most repatriation usually begins with external advocacy. And while postcustodial practices might end up playing a role in the outcome of what happens to objects, that was not the original purpose of the theory.
~some library history~
In 1981, a dude named F. Gerald Ham proposed postcustodialism as a digital collection management response to *drum roll* computers! He saw technological advances in personal computers as displacing the need or even likelihood of information professionals gathering and safekeeping documents, because more people than ever before had the increasing capacity to make and store and delete documents on their own. He also recognized that this increased output of materials meant that archives and libraries could not possibly keep up and store everything, so he proposed that archival institutions form “archival bonds” (no, I’m not joking) with records-making offices: when an office (meaning a church or a school or a business, etc.) makes documents, the archive would immediately receive a digital surrogate of that document. That way, the archive becomes a centralized location for all the digital copies of documents from, say, regional religious institutions, and those institutions can store the originals and do whatever they want with them. Decent idea, right?
Right! But how would anyone ever execute this on scale? It would take a massive amount of money and coordination, pre-planning and follow-up, digital and communications infrastructure…so as you might have guessed, a wide-scale digital postcustodial management practice never materialized. But the tenets of the theory were attractive: keep original documents under the purview of their creators and rely on archival institutions to support the preservation and care of those documents? Separating location and care of documents into two concepts was pretty revolutionary: under Ham’s theory, documents needn’t be shelved in an archive or library in order to be considered legitimate or authentic, a kind of safeguarding that often ends up gatekeeping what is worthy of protecting versus what is not. Instead, they could stay in their various homes, and institutions could provide support as needed from afar.
So postcustodialism increasingly developed into a collection management theory that puts community values first: preserving and organizing materials based on a community’s priorities versus standard archival standards, and making versions of those materials available, often online. This practice results in a lot of very cool projects that might use crowd-sourced documents and metadata to construct archives; develop perpetual digital exhibitions of documents for distance researchers; or involve archival training days to teach laypeople how to preserve their own family documents, decentralizing skills as well as holdings. Ultimately, the digital roots of postcustodialism make repatriation projects, an organic outcrop of this theory, that much more attainable: wealthy institutions like Cornell return documents to their rightful owners and continue to provide preservation support, possibly through equipment or conservation, and they retain digital surrogates that remain available for research in return.
If nothing else, know that postcustodialism recognizes that custody is power, and well-known institutions like Cornell or the British Museum should not be monopolizing power over lots of different kinds of materials from people. Especially people who have been excluded from the control of those objects within these institutions. Especially people for whom acquired objects are not artifacts and remnants of the past but living objects of perpetual import. Fielding’s papers, for example, will contribute to Mohegan language revitalization.
I proselytize a lot about the value of open access and teaching libraries, where anyone from anywhere can request to see documents and use resources, and I think intuitive collecting contributes significantly to the usefulness of libraries. It’s nice when big institutions have a smattering of everything, because then we can rely on them to have something we might need or are interested in. Or, sometimes, an archive might be split over multiple locations with different handling policies, which can allow people to see things they wouldn’t otherwise: one of my cousins is a huge (like, huge) Emily Dickinson fan (hi, Deb!), and she was able to access Dickinson materials at one institution but not another, as the latter doesn’t allow Emily fans without scholarly reasons to interact with materials.
But just collecting for the sake of having prioritizes sterile criteria over specific consideration of objects themselves. Another example: a few years ago, Brown University had the opportunity to acquire records from the first Apollo mission, and the archives included a lot of very cool things (Science! Stars! Signatures!). But the rest of the archives from the space race and moon landings were, understandably, in Texas (yeehaw). Why would a space historian or space enthusiast want to travel to Brown when the rest of the documents are 2,000 miles away? Whatsmore, who would even think to look at Brown for a random set of space records? Postcustodialism recognizes this on a micro scale: why should documents necessarily be centralized, often to an incomplete degree, to one non-intuitive location?
This isn’t to say that centralized holdings are not valid, because they are! They’re so useful. The nice thing about this theory, and I’d argue librarianship in general, is that it allows for a lot of customization, and it forces us to think about a lot of different priorities, and it doesn’t allow blanket solutions for everything. Complexity! A novelty.
I really enjoyed writing this paper, mostly because I learned a lot, and especially because my incomplete assumption about a very popular policy was wrong! It developed from something else! And I was so thrilled to see the variety of topics my peers presented on: religious discrimination in the workplace, managing resources for prison libraries, translanguaging libraries (i.e. creating multilingual services and programs), effective mentorship for early-career professionals, using AI to vet resumes, managing neurodiversity, improving historic house museums, walking the tightrope of providing legal information, preferred traits in library leaders, and defending intellectual freedom through LGBTQ+ services. An impressive array of management questions, which comes as no surprise from a class that generated a lot of useful and thought-provoking conversations. These two weeks of presentations signal to me the kinds of issues my peers, and eventual colleagues, are contending with and prioritizing in their librarianship. These are the things we care about!
Housekeeping and Birdseeding:
house
Correction: last week, I wrote that my Grandma Phyllis’s friend Ruth was a librarian. Ruth rightfully pointed out over Shabbat Zoom cocktails that once a librarian, always a librarian. Ruth is a librarian!
What I read this week: The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow, gifted to me by my friend Jeremy. A fun YA read that combined portal stories with a book-within-a-book framework.
What I’m currently reading: Black Girl, Call Home, a poetry collection by Jasmine Mans, which my mom gifted me for my birthday. Mans is from Newark, New Jersey, and she makes a lot of Jersey references, proving yet again that the more New Jersey you mention, the stronger your writing is.
the semester may be over, but this newsletter is not. I will continue to write throughout the summer, though I may move to every two weeks depending on my varying verbosity. As you might have gathered, I have a lot to say. So this is a good time to share this newsletter with your friends from New Jersey and your friends not from New Jersey:
bird
Today on our walk, my mother and I saw two very healthy mallards wading along the low stream.
On our way home, we ran into two neighbors who are also very invested in our local bird populations, and my mom asked if they had any advice on how to get rid of house sparrows. That we have made it twelve issues without discussing house sparrows is astonishing to me, because my mother’s perpetual battle with the sparrows will likely become my 15-minute closing bit in a future stand-up special. We shall return to this tug-of-war.
I am so excited for Ms. Morning Dove’s eggs to hatch. I have a perfect view from the office. She is currently nesting and bunkering down. I love her.
More later.