The Power of an Archivist
How an archivist can alter people’s perceptions of an archive. When and how you view an archive are key.
Writing has an important function with relation to archives including determining how accessible the archive will be. Without any writing at all, no one would even know the archives existed, but it can also limit an individual’s exposure to an item from an archive. Therefore, whoever writes about the archive controls when an archive is viewed. This coupled with a writer’s ability to interpret the archive allows them to shape how the public views an archive.
For my UCI visit, I journeyed to the Cleveland Botanical Gardens, whose library, and its resources, composes the institution’s archives. The director of the library initiated a major reclassification of the library so that people can more easily find what they want. Also, on December 1, for the first time, the library’s holdings will be online. This will give people all over the world access to the contents of the library. In this way, writing has given more people the opportunity to be exposed to the archives of the Cleveland Botanical Gardens.
Conversely, the writing done by the library director also limits who can access the books. The rare books section exemplifies this, as the books can only be viewed for a limited amount of time and cannot be checked out. Policies written by the library director caused these restrictions, in response to a very real need to protect these books. Regardless, of the soundness of the rationale though, these policies limit access to the archives. Another Botanical Garden policy calls for keeping only back issues of magazines less than five years old on display, which further limits access to materials. This forces anyone seeking an issue of a horticultural magazine older than that to look outside of the Botanical Gardens Library, given the rarity of horticultural libraries, finding these issues of magazines elsewhere borders on the outrageous.
I mentioned earlier that most of the Botanical Gardens’ holdings were books and magazines. While this is true, they also possess unsorted boxes of books and pictures of unique and important horticultural resources in the basement. These items are not displayed because none of the previous library directors thought it necessary to catalogue them, likely because their backgrounds were as horticulturists, not librarians. By cataloguing these resources, the Botanical Gardens can make more items from its archives available. Moreover, labels produced to inform people of important background data of a picture, such as date and subject will undoubtedly shape people’s understanding of the picture, through words included and excluded.
The director of an archive can shape how it is viewed through their writing. He or she helps interpret it, and decides how to display it. Clearly, shoving an item away in a basement or a dark corner tells people it lacks value. Archivists can link items through writing or display that can forge an unbreakable link in the mind of the reader that otherwise may not have existed. This gives an archivist great power to shape when and how people view that archive’s materials, and the great changes underway at the Cleveland Botanical Gardens library exemplify this perfectly.
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