Writing the archive...
What there is writing that goes on in an archive besides the stuff going down on the stuff they are saving? Yep, and depending on where you you go, they could be saving something completely different than you thought they would.
There are many reasons that things should be kept—they are valuable, they are needed for clarification of a newer thing, or they are just interesting and someone thought that they might be needed at another junction in life. One of the main questions that arises when dealing with this area is who decides what is kept and what is saved? One mindset is like what we experienced at the visit to the Western Reserve Historical Society: a subjective saving—save what the curator or archivist wants to save. Another mindset is what we encountered at the Dittrich Museum: a keep everything that is necessary mindset—they get everything from a couple of organizations and then they must sift through it to find what is important to the collection or isn’t. In both instances writing plays the same role: tell what the collection is and what is in the collection.
The process for detailing the collections was described in a lot of depth at the Dittrich Museum. Archivists and curators must write out everything from a brief introduction to the collection to a very detailed container list that explains everything that is in the container that the patron is looking at. The people working on the projects must have an analytical mindset because they need to be able to look at a document and decide which container is the best place for the document, or if the document is indeed pertinent to the collection. One example of this was the 60-container collection with everything from the one medical organization. The archivists had to—and still have to—go through what is given to them and organize it because “it seems like they give [them] everything off of their desks.” With other collections they have the opposite problem—they don’t have enough material. When a hospital closes they generally destroy the records they have, leaving little to be archived—they must still go through the same concrete patterns of writing for them, even though there isn’t much to write about.
What about museums? Museums like archives have writing that denotes what is in the collection, but the main thing is the little excerpts explaining what you see. But there is more than that behind the scenes. Curators detail the collection before it goes out so they can put the best or most interesting aspects of the collection out for the public to see. The process of cataloguing the collection involves interpreting the collection (critical thinking and consultations with other curators), identifying the themes of that are supposed to be conveyed to the audience, and capturing the stories behind the collections. All of the writing that goes into all of those areas is like the cataloguing of the documents.
No matter how you slice it, the curator will keep what they think will be a tasty addition to the collection—either it is what they want to see kept based on their ideology, or what they deem as necessary for the wholeness of the collection. Also the writing that is involved will generally follow the same patterns because they get the job done in an efficient way.
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