Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:23:09 -0500 From: Sara Steele <smsteele@wisc.edu> Subject: Re: Archive vs Reference Message-id: <000201c8d227$d551e250$0000a398@CPQ21854107312>
Hi
I hope someone else will take a more official response to your question, but here is mine from a practioner standpoint. I've been trying to create both for our Cottage Grove Area Historical Society. I had been deeply into searching out families' histories before I became involved in our Historical Society's room and had used the WHS archives extensively as well as several libraries and Historical Society collections in southern Wisconsin so when I set ours up I did not use any general guidelines but just went at it. It just sort of grew and now is out growing space..
I knew that personally in my professional life i had never used file folders and drawers effectively--considered them something like a dog buring a bone. I also did not like the archives boxes at WHS because it was so easy to hurt fragile paper. shuffling through a box looking for a specific piece. Plastic sleeves came to our attention early on, and, as you will see, we now use them extensively. We get binders second hand.
Commonalities--Both archives and reference sections deal with text material and
--are subject to the various kinds of care which should be taken with paper and print
--both need to have space planned for them to grow into
-- both eat up a lot of plastic sleeves and binders
-- both need to be indexed and kept track of.
.In my mind, they are the heart of the work of a Historical Society. It is the archives which provides the verbal context and shows how an artifact or photo fits into a locality's history. It is the archives which preserves the stories and news of the community. It is the archives which holds the details which help writers capture the history of a community in written form..
An archive's purpose is to 1) preserve original documents and 2) other text information about a locality which is not readily available.
Original materials
Original Text material: Examples in are archives include a Justice of the Peace book and school records which are too large to fit into binders. We are buidling a collection of family histories and family trees which take various forms.
.
In addiiton we now have 14 or 15 archival binders full of numbered items such as someone's 1940 hospital bill, a bill from the 1880s's from one of our earliest stores, a letter that a boy wrote before he died in his teens, short items written by some of our older members on specific subjects like a specific winter or when the man worked on the railroad section. Some people call these pieces "fugitive papers." The fugitive or specific subject papers provide examples and sometimes are good display material, but need to be carefully inventoried and maintained because they are easily lost and somewhat fragile over time. We use sleeves and binders rather than file folders or artifact boxes.
Other materials
The second kind of materials include drawings and other material about our railroad when we had passenger serivce and a depot from the C and NW archives,.I have spent hours copying things from the WHS archives pertaining to Cottage Grove--a Civil War diary, a farm homemaker's diary, correspondence, reports etc from our Farmer Governor.
We are also building a collection of special project binders. For example, one member prepared a binder of photos when the Gov's farm buildings were taken down and the farmstead turned into the Cenex convience store. Another has built a photo story of our airport. A couple of us have built a fat binder of photos and clipings about the life of the boy who discovered comets from his home farm..
We have never had a newspaper so we also have both year by year and topic specific binders of newspaper clippings. Most areas do not need these binders if their local newspaper or library has a complete set. If there is a local newspaper it is probably more efficient to buy the micrio films and a mircorfilm reader, perhaps in partnership with your library, than to invest time and space in clipping books.
Our reference section includes such thngs as::
Cemetery lists, copies of all the biographical sketches published about CG people, obituary binders, wedding binders, a man's narrative account house by house of the village of CG in the early 1900s, histories of our rural schools copied from WHS files. (Yes, some of these also are archival material, but they are that part of the archives that our CGAHS members and others in the community are most likely to use,)
Reference a sub-section of archives?
If you stretch your view of archives beyond preserving original papers, a reference section could be considered part of the archives. The distinction in terms of organization and location would be the 1) expected frequency of use and 2) the extent to which an item could be easily replaced.
How you view archives and reference collections also depends upon what your Historical Society sees as its mission. If you only have the mission of preserving original documents, you will focus on that and disregard the reference function. If you have a mission of making your area's history available to others--then you will concentrate on the reference section and consider how you can make your text resources most useable both locally to schools and the general public and to people across the country who are working on family histories. If you have interested person power enough, you may try to do both.
Some Historical Societies, especially those who maintain a historic building or a museum may give relatively little attention to either an archives of reference section simply because there is so much need for person power in relation to higher priority goals.
Photo collection
A photo collection may be part of an archives or be a separate archives. A photo collection may have two components. We have about 3,000 listed and indexed 8 1/2 by 11 copies of local photographs which are in binders available for use in our History Room. It costs a bit to have each photo copied on a color copy machine to the same size, but the uniformity of size makes it much easier to locate and use the photos. Our Photo Archivist also keeps a copy and any originals of the photos that we are given in a picture archives. Sometime we hope to scan and label our whole collection. if you begin scanning photos as they come in. be sure to number and label them and develop an inventory of your scans..
I use Excell for the listing of the text archives. I probably should have used it for the photo index but I started it in Microsoft Word and have not tried to change it over. The Photo Archivist uses his own system. Each photo is numbered and people or context identified on the back of the enlarged photo. He numbers the photos consequitively as they come in which means that there is no subject organization of teh binders. I write articles from our material and use as many photos as I can. When the number of photos got beyond two or three binders, I started doing a subject matter listing in Microsoft word which I then can organize alphabetically and or by subject. It takes time to prepare but makes it much easier to locate specific photos quickly and to monitor who and what you have and what you need to search for.
I'm sure you have gotten much more than you wanted and I hope that others will present different views.
Sara Steele
Text Archivsist
Cottage Grove Area Historical Society
(We are a small society with membership across the country, but only about 20 active local members. We cover a township and village with a current combined population of about 12,000 people. Madison now touches our western township border. CG does not as yet have a library or a newspaper.)
----- Original Message -----
From: Bill & Barb
To: localhistory@listserve.uwec.edu
Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 4:55 PM
Subject: Archive vs Reference
What is the difference between an archive and reference materials?
Bill Gover
Bayfield Heritage Association