To Find a Balance
If I were to tell you that I have recently paid a visit to a land of boxes, how would you respond? Would you call me a liar? Perhaps you’d wait in earnest for a punch line of some sort. In the end, your common sense would likely squelch any belief you might invest in a place as absurd as a land of boxes.
Nevertheless, a land of boxes exists within Cleveland‘s Severance Hall, the home of the world-famous Cleveland Orchestra. Beneath Severance’s grand concert chambers, you will find storage rooms packed with boxes of every size, description, and cargo capacity. This “land of boxes” is actually the Archives of the Cleveland Orchestra and the workplace of its recently-hired archivist Amy Dankowski. Her responsibility is the organization and management of the archived writings and artifacts contained within the aforementioned boxes. These writings and artifacts are most unique in that they record the 89-year history of Severance Hall and its resident orchestra. During a recent visit to the archives, I had the opportunity to speak with Ms. Dankowski about the Orchestra’s vast collection, and I learned the difficulties she faces as the caretaker of an irreplaceable collection of historic materials.
The archives of the Cleveland Orchestra house pieces that would make true music-lovers salivate. These items include George Zell‘s conducting batons, a Grammy Award won by the Orchestra, and the 1931 blueprints drawn by Severance Hall‘s original architects. Some of the archive’s oldest treasures are documents that date to as far back as 1918, the year in which the Cleveland Orchestra was founded by Adella Prentiss Hughes and Nikolai Sokoloff. In an e-mail I received from Ms. Dankowski, she wrote about the archive‘s oldest pieces of writing:
“[The archives] actually [has] a bunch of materials from the early years. In general,
it's office files or working files from the General Manager to and from
Board Members, staff members and musicians (think of how we communicate
via email, it's generally the same - but on paper), financial records,
programs from concerts, and scrap books. The scrap books contain
newspaper clippings (reviews, ads for upcoming concerts, or any stories
written about the Orchestra)”. -E-mail from Amy Dankowski November 7, 2007
According to Ms. Dankowski, the main reason to archive items such as concert programs is to provide primary research sources to persons interested in musical and orchestral history. Researchers of every caliber conduct research with the archives’ writings; yet Ms. Dankowski is the only person who is permitted to search the archives for relevant research information. She cannot release any writings from the collection, due to the fragile and sometimes confidential nature of archived writings. Instead, she condenses all pertinent information she finds for the researcher into a self-composed “summary,“ relying on her professional expertise to select the most useful information.
Though archived writings document history, they play a key role in orchestrating the future. For this reason, Ms. Dankowski says, the Orchestra’s staff and planning teams make great use of the archives’ collections when they prepare for future events. For example, in the months prior to a scheduled Orchestra concert, staff members must conduct extensive research into the musical pieces they select for the upcoming performance. Oftentimes, this “in-house” research reveals that the pieces under their consideration have been performed sometime in the Orchestra’s past. In these cases, the planning teams have only to locate the files containing any research conducted for the past performance, and “recycle” the program notes and advertisements for the upcoming performance.
Just as archived writings map out the Orchestra‘s future, so, too, do they correct the future - acting as preservers of truth. When Ms. Dankowski began working as the Orchestra’s archivist eight months ago, she made the troubling discovery that Severance Hall’s volunteer tour guides were “inventing” stories about the history of the Hall and the Orchestra. To rectify this problem, she built a most “user-friendly” version of the tour guide manual, based solely on facts verifiable by archival records. In this way, Ms. Dankowski relied on irrefutable writings to prevent untruths from circulating among Severance Hall’s visitors.
The Orchestra’s historic collection forms a timeline of the Orchestra’s 89-year history, and preserve significant events using archived items that hold enduring research value.
The foregoing sentence throws into sharp relief one of the most arduous tasks Ms. Dankowski faces in her line of work. She alone must make the ultimate distinction between those materials that are “worth” storing in the Severance Hall archives and those that are not. As simple as this task may sound to an untrained mind; to an archivist, reaching these decisions involves a complex process.
Space is scarce, even in a building as massive as Severance Hall. Therefore, space constrains force Ms. Dunkowski to transfer boxes of archived material from her “on-site” collection to “off-site” storage locations.
When deciding which boxes to expel from the Severance Hall facility, she must consider future accessibility to these valuable research sources. She must ask herself, “Forty years from now, what [information] will be pertinent [to researchers]?” She bases her judgments about “what stays and what goes,” on the topics that have been most researched during recent times. For example: if she has received regular inquiries about a certain Russian conductor, she responds to the high demand by keeping that conductor’s research files on-site, readily accessible. By using this thoughtful strategy, Ms. Dankowski can make an educated guess as to what the public will want to know in the future; and she can prepare the archives accordingly.
Another challenge Ms. Dankowski faces is balancing accessibility to the archives’ research material with preservation of the physical writings themselves. Much to her regret, the aging historical documents must be packed in archival boxes and stored in a basement, thus dampening Ms. Dankowski’s hope of sharing the unique writings with Severance Hall’s visitors. She believes that it is for the sake of the fragile documents’ preservation. The writings are in such danger of decay, that items such as paper clips cannot be used as a storing method. She herself must exercise extreme caution whenever she handles aging paper - gloves offer only minimal protection - as the delicate structure of the archived writings are adversely affected by the most minuscule droplets of human oils.
This bitter truth is no secret. At a ladies‘ fashion show, Ms. Dankowski met with opposition for putting on public display an archived scrapbook of dated fashion photos. Though her objective was to add accessible, substantive evidence to the show’s early 1900’s fashion theme, certain attendees were shocked by her decision to put yellowing photographs within reach of human hands.
It is Ms. Dankowski’s hope to someday find an indelicate balance, between accessibility to the archives’ research material and preservation of the physical writings themselves. By converting the archives’ writings to microfilm and databases in the future, her hope of today become a reality of tomorrow. At the present time, however, the fragility of the Cleveland Orchestra’s archived writings keeps them confined to their native land of boxes, while an archivist is striving to bring them into the light of public appreciation.
Comments