Differences in Approach

In the absence of a catalog, the archive functioned more interactively and orally. As I explored the shelves for items relating to Alaskeros, Dorothy would come up and tell me about the different items, providing a brief description and how it wound up in the archive. Eventually, I stumbled onto a very interesting scrapbook, spanning 1938-1939, the black pages containing some of the most candid, first person documentation of Alaskan cannery life that I’d found so far in my research, though the prints themselves were quite small, sometimes only two inches tall, and often under or overexposed. The scrapbook was also about half stripped of its contents, with only the glue backing remaining for most of the second half. When I asked Dorothy about it, she relayed that researchers (many of whom are family genealogists) must have borrowed the photos and they’ll be returned at some point.

In retrospect, this was the first major rift where my training as an archivist and librarian butted against the everyday realities of community archiving. How could any institution let such important materials leave their archive? The answer is straightforward: because that was also how items came in. Being completely family and volunteer run, the organization didn’t have the hours, budget or training to implement a formal accessioning process for materials, they may not have had the means to afford a copy machine and the age range of their researchers meant they might not have access to phones or email to share digital copies of the documents they wanted. Additionally, demonstrating this amount of trust with researchers is an act of good faith that connects the archive to their community and likely makes people more comfortable donating their own materials to the institution in the future.