Had to make a milk run yesterday and decided I might as well put in an hour or two at the museum as long as I was going to drive right past it on the way to Larry's. Did some filing, and started thinking about the need to move a few things out of the vertical files and into document boxes. Once again the drawers in the filing cabinets are running out of space, but we don't have room to add another filing cabinet.
The large flat box, one of several purchased right about the time I started trying to get things inventoried, is full of newspapers, each carefully preserved in an individual archivally stable plastic sleeve. Seven years later, having learned a lot more through experience and workshops, that box now has me muttering "Why?!" every time I look at it. There is absolutely no good reason to preserve 90% of what's in that box. Almost none is unique or not found anyplace else. Our local newspaper, The L'Anse Sentinel, has been microfilmed and is in multiple archives and university libraries. It's also been digitized and is available online through Central Michigan University and the Library of Congress. We don't need crumbling hard copies.
I look at the things like that box of newspapers and think about the many hours that went into cataloging the contents and suffer retroactive regret. I really wish I'd attended workshops on archives and figuring out what to keep and what to pitch before I ever got started on inventorying anything. In hindsight, I wasted a lot of time methodically documenting stuff that didn't need to be documented. I now know that a general rule for any museum is to look at anything that hasn't been accessioned is to ask how it fits into the museum's mission. If it doesn't fit, it doesn't belong. When it comes to assessing documents like newspapers, the secondary questions are "If it does fit, is this museum the best place for it," "Do we need it," and "Are we set up for researchers to access the material?" You know, do we have a work space where a researcher can spread things out? (In my rich fantasy life, we'd get a massive grant, be able to turn the storage building into a climate-controlled, usable year round building, and move the archives and a work area into it. Never going to happen, but fun to dream about.)
As it happens, for a small museum, no matter how strong the temptation might be to hoard things, sometimes the best place for documents is a university library or regional archive. If it's widely published material -- newspapers, magazines, whatever -- odds are the universities already have it. Bottom line: I can take that large box, remove the newspapers in their nice, neat sleeves, and stack them out in the storage building with the other newspapers I wasted time inventorying after the box was full but before I learned it was basically a waste of my time. Having inventoried them and listed everything neatly in the index to the archives, I'm not ready to throw anything away. The box itself, which is archivally stable (it was, after all purchased from Gaylord) will be repurposed to hold textiles and then stashed in the attic.
I need to come see that museum and the next time you are here we'll have to make sure our little museum is open so you can check it out. It's really a great museum.
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