Fecking amateurs.

Or, Another Museum Horror Story.

It is astounding how much damage people can do when they don't have a clue as to what they're doing. This is especially true when they think they're doing something good. For example, I've experienced many a day spent quietly weeping, figuratively speaking, over labels written in ink on photographs and documents, especially labels that weren't necessary or were positioned on the front instead of the back. You name a practice or activity that is an absolute Never Do This for archival documents or museum objects and I can say with certainty it's been done at our local historical society museum, and done multiple times by people who were sure they were doing the right thing.

The latest nightmare: because there's no heat in the building, I decided to take uncatalogued archival material home to sort through, scan, and get into the PastPerfect database. I figured out back in December it's hard to work with documents when you're wearing mittens. There's been a clear tote packed full of documents sitting unsorted since I began volunteering in 2012. It's about a 40 quart size. I popped the lid on it awhile back to get some sense of what was in it. Didn't take long to figure out the overall theme for the stash was "schools." I'd grabbed a few things out of it in the past couple years, like some rolled up diplomas that I flattened and encapsulated, but never penetrated very deep into what looked to be a spectacular mess.

That changed this week. The last time I went into town, the S.O. and I stopped by the museum. I dropped off a stack of material that will be filed once things warm up a little and grabbed a fresh stack from the "schools" box. It is indeed a mess. Today I weep.

Why do I weep? Because salted in with a lot of odds and ends are pieces that were obviously pulled out of a scrapbook -- the residue of scotch tape adhesive is a telling clue. A ticket stub from the Milwaukee Road, matchbooks from Chicago restaurants, and other souvenirs. A few have "senior trip" scribbled on them. I have a strong hunch where they came from. Last year I inventoried several scrapbooks that belonged to a woman who graduated from Baraga High School. One had a lot of gaps in it, spaces where things had been removed. Of course, I have no way of knowing that these things came from her scrapbook other than the fact that a souvenir program from the senior girls' tea has the woman's name and adhesive residue. That constitutes a suggestion that the other ripped from someplace else items might have been hers, too, but there's no way to ever know for sure.

So what's the result in the end? If this were a crime investigation, I'd say the chain of custody has been broken. In museum terms, provenance is now unverifiable. And just in general interpretive thinking and cultural history, what happened is some well meaning amateur took a scrapbook that if left intact would have provided a really nice slice of late 1950s high school life, a coherent picture of one person's history, and turned it into a stack of miscellaneous out of context incoherent junk. All that senior trip stuff, for example, if it was still in the scrapbook would have been really nice to incorporate into the schools' exhibit with the album open to those pages. As it is, even if a matchbook has "senior trip" written on it there's no way to know which school, what year, who the student was, or anything else. In short, a potentially valuable piece of local history got converted into garbage. 

Some helpful tips if you're planning on donating something -- anything! -- to a museum

Tip Number One: Don't drop off a box of stuff, fail to fill out a detailed donation form, and then return 5 years later expecting someone at the museum to be prepared to give you back anything and everything that was in said container that "the museum didn't need."

But that's what happened today. A lady walked in, asked the volunteers working this afternoon about the items in question, and they called me. I am, after all, the person who plays with the database. In theory, I know where stuff is. But something that got dropped off at least a year before I began volunteering? And that apparently had no documentation?

Definitely a head*desk (or perhaps a head*wall) moment.

It turned out I did recall the box in question. It was sitting in the office when I first began volunteering in June 2012. It had a note on it saying that the historical society's military history expert had gone through it to see if there was anything war-related that the museum could use. The container was waiting for Karen, the museum's volunteer curator for everything else, to look it over. And then what? I don't know. Based on the lack of other instructions, the assumption would be to pitch (or give to St. Vincent de Paul) anything that didn't fit in with the museum's mission. Karen never did get to the box; eventually it became my duty to dig through it.

It turned out to be an interesting mix of stuff, some of which was total trash (old store receipts, for example) and some that was really neat. I sorted, cataloged, and filed. Some artifacts wound up incorporated into exhibits, some went into storage. Documents got sorted into several different categories -- a family history file, World War I, World War II, Boy Scouts, and some others -- and it all got recorded as having been donated by a specific family.

In any case, by the time I was done going through the box, everything that was in it was either something that the museum needed, however need may be defined, or so obviously worthless it went into the trash. There were a few things that had teetered on the line between keep or discard, but when in doubt I opted for keep. Of course, one reason for that clear dichotomy -- catalog or jettison -- was there was no indication I should do otherwise. The container came into the museum in 2011; I didn't start to get into it until at least two years later, possibly 3. There was nothing to indicate it was any different from the other boxes of miscellaneous weirdness we get, the stuff that's left over after the estate sale, the odds and ends a family can't manage to toss in a dumpster themselves so they drop it at the museum instead.

Personally, I find it hard to believe that anyone associated with the museum would have accepted a box full of stuff with the understanding that we were going to look through it, take out a few things, and then hand the rest back given how many boxes of unsorted stuff were already taking up space in the building. I am reasonably sure that if Karen had still been capable of scampering up the ladder to the attic that's where the box would have gone to gather dust indefinitely. I have a hunch that what happened is the lady came in, talked with our now-deceased past president, and the two of them managed to talk past each other. He thought she was giving the museum a no strings attached box of stuff; she thought he understood that at some point she'd be back to pick up whatever the museum didn't want. But we'll never know for sure -- Jim's been dead for over 3 years now.

Bottom line, people, is that you all need to do your sorting first, taking out anything that has any sentimental value for you, and then drop the leftovers at the local historical society. When you do drop it off, make sure you get a receipt, a document that spells out what rights (if any) you retain and what you're giving up. You can't count on people's memories. People die, they stop volunteering, they deal with enough people and donations that everything just blurs together. It was sheer luck that when the volunteer on duty at the museum called me I could actually recall a few details about the box in question. We now have approximately 4,000 artifacts in the database; if I'm pushed, I can remember specifics about maybe a few hundred of them. Or maybe a few dozen. Or maybe six or seven. And those are the ones I did most recently. If it went into the database a year or two ago, odds are that I've forgotten the thing exists. The whole point of the database is that we won't have to rely on people's memories; we can look stuff up.

Finally, if you're considering donating with strings attached, don't do it. Don't assume you can treat the local historical society museum like a storage unit, dropping off your family's tchotchkes for awhile and then coming back a few years later to pick them up because you've had an attack of nostalgia or a delayed inclination to hoard. If you're not willing to abide by the line on the donation form that says once the museum receives an item we can do whatever we want with it -- add it to the collections, put it in an exhibit, give it to another museum, sell it, or throw it away -- then don't donate at all.

Another head*desk day at the museum

I spent a few hours at the local county historical museum yesterday. After I rejoined the county historical society last year, I looked around to see where my skill set would be most useful to the museum. It didn't take me long to figure out that the archives were a mess. Over the years, the historical society has been remarkably successful in obtaining donations of artifacts and documents. The holdings include records from local businesses and fraternal orders, family histories, scrapbooks, and various historic documents. There is a wealth of material. There was one thing that society had apparently never possessed, however, and that was someone who knew how to file.

The first time I looked in a filing cabinet, my immediate reaction was to mutter, "Holy shit," and then close the drawer quickly. There were multiple 4-drawer filing cabinets, and each one was a mess. Unlabeled file folders, folders that were labeled but had contents that didn't match up at all with what the label said, multiple file folders with the same name. Naturally, nothing had ever been cataloged or accessioned; finding aids were nonexistent. This wasn't a surprise; most people don't join historical societies because they love to file. They join because they're interested in some aspect of local history and enjoy talking about it with fellow enthusiasts. When I asked the other volunteers how they ever found anything, the answer was "Jim knows where everything is." They apparently believed Jim was going to live forever, which, of course, no one does.

So I asked Jim [the historical society president] if it was okay with him if I took a stab at creating finding aids and getting the archives into some sort of order. His response was an enthusiastic yes. That was back in June. Since then I put in a few hours a day one or two days a week at the museum slowly going through the vertical files.

I never trained as an archivist so I do have moments when I wonder if I'm doing it right -- I'm definitely doing some stuff wrong because the historical society has never had the budget to purchase the right supplies (buffered acid-free file folders, for example) -- but I do know the alphabet (more or less). I've also heard that you're supposed to create finding aids after you're done cataloging, but I'm doing it more or less simultaneously. The nice thing about everything being computerized is that it'll be easy to either clump or split subject headings as the collections sort themselves out. As long as the catalog/finding aid is a Word file, it'll be easy enough to find almost anything by using the Find function.

One sure thing is that every time I go in, there will be at least one head*desk moment, sometimes several. It isn't just that stuff is misfiled or badly labeled. There's also the frustration of finding truly nifty things that have been literally vandalized by well-meaning people who didn't know better -- e.g., historic photos that have information written on the front with a ballpoint pen -- or interesting newspaper clippings that have no identifying information (what newspaper printed the article and when?) or are incomplete. I've found a lot of second pages of articles with no first page to accompany them and vice versa. You know, a clipping with no context or incomplete content isn't particularly useful to anyone, either an ordinary person looking for genealogical information or a scholar doing academic research.

My head*desk moment yesterday came when I found several No. 10 envelopes tucked to one side in a file drawer. Each one was just bulging with newspaper clippings; none of the clippings included the name of the paper and almost none had the date of publication. It is, incidentally, positively amazing just how many newspaper clippings it's possible to cram into one business-sized envelope.

One envelope was labeled "local businesses" and turned out to be full of box ads for various businesses in Baraga County. There was, of course, no information given on which newspaper or papers the ads had been clipped from. A few of the ads did have dates written on them, so it's possible to know that during 1948  a local hardware store was having a 3-box cars sale on new refrigerators. (Not just one box car load of refrigerators, mind you, but three! They must have been counting on a lot of demand for new appliances.) Unfortunately, the dates were written in ink right on the ads -- not above or below it or on the back of the clippings, but right in the ad. Which means, of course, that not only is that ink going to make the paper rot faster, it makes the ads harder to work with for curatorial purposes. As soon as I saw the ads, I thought they'd be cool to work with to create a photo montage for a background in an exhibit case highlighting local businesses, but all those handwritten dates would be a bitch to photoshop out.

Then I opened the envelope labeled "deaths," looked at the mess, realized it included not just obituaries but also marriages (which really makes one wonder about the label on the envelope), and decided it was time to quit for the day. Even my CDO has its limits.

I threw someone's life away today

Figuratively speaking, of course. It was an odd feeling. I volunteer at the local historical society. We get donations all the time of stuff people think we can use. Sometimes we can. And sometimes, like today, it turns into a depressing project that involves hours of sorting through the bits and pieces of a person's life that are left after various family members have taken the photos, old letters, whatever, that mean something to them (or that they think they can sell). Then they hand us a box with the trash. Check stubs from a job that ended 50 years ago, school pictures of children that are worn out from being kept in a wallet for decades, receipts for union dues -- the decedent drove a truck delivering milk door to door in the 1940s, and they had a union -- and other bits and pieces that are basically meaningless out of context.

What to keep? What to jettison? The historian in me says to keep it all. The day may come when some researcher would like to see just what the wages were like for a milk truck driver back in 1948. The practical part says, but who's going to go looking in an obscure county museum for minutiae like that? In the end, it comes down to what makes sense to go into a file based on what people are usually looking for when they call the museum: family information. The man's high school diploma, family photos if they're labeled, a death certificate, some papers from the VA regarding his military service, and not much more. A log with hours worked and wages paid for a stint in a Ford assembly plant will go into our Ford Motor Company collection -- we keep anything related to Ford because, among other things, Ford had three sawmills in Baraga County so was a major influence on local history. And that's about it. Several shoe-boxes worth of paper distilled down to one not very fat file folder. The rest of it -- the wallet photos, most of the check stubs, several dozen unlabeled snapshots, greeting cards the man had saved, and a lot of other miscellaneous pieces of paper -- hit the waste basket.

I probably shouldn't have felt as depressed as I did when I saw those kids' photos go into the trash. They're all adults now, probably about the same age as me, and they'd already gone through the boxes and taken what they wanted. Besides, this man isn't going to be totally forgotten. He's now a file folder. If a generation or two from now his descendants come looking for information, they'll actually find something. That's more than is true for most of us.