To Laura (and others with patience for a long post):

 

You’ve taken on a tough question, about which not enough has been written. I have some ideas to throw out, and I hope that others on the list will weigh in, as I’d like to hear responses.  I hope your conclusion might also include what the museum profession can learn from Archivists.

 

My sense is that while both archives and museums are mission driven, a key difference has to do with potential future research vs. historic association and exhibit potential. Archives seem to accept groups of documents relating to a person, organization or business. While they may ‘weed’ for duplicates and extraneous materials, there is the realization that the value of individual items in a group may not be known until it is used by the researcher.  Museums tend to selectively collect individual items or groups of items chosen more with exhibits in mind than research.  A third and somewhat in-between situation are historic house museums, especially if donated with their entire contents, in which case everything large and small may be meaningful to reconstructing the lifeways and values of the inhabitants and the themes of their historic context. (These collections are almost an archive of artifacts.)

 

Archives acquire primarily or exclusively for research value, and internal order and association are important. Museums also consider similar associations and also with historic themes.  Additionally they consider usefulness in future exhibits –in how they will help visitors feel connected to an early time, place or concept of history.  While museums do collect some artifacts solely for their research potential it is probably more common that they are evaluated based on their visual appeal or their historic associations.   Perhaps this is because artifacts given to museums often have been lifted from their original context and associations, reducing their usefulness for research.  (The historic houses previously mentioned, on the other hand, may more closely resemble archeological sites –artifacts found in situ having provenance that increases research potential.)

 

We have probably all have had large or small personal epiphanies from which we have developed a gut level sense of significance —years ago when I held a small beautifully crafted projectile point in my hand I was completely awed to realize that the last human being who had touched it lived almost 6,000 years ago.  More mundane, but also meaningful, was seeing a bottle of Lepage’s muscilage, with it’s slanted, slit rubber cap, on a desk in an exhibit from the 1940s, evoking memories of spending hours pasting things into childhood scrapbooks.

 

So your question of determining historic significance is critical, and often it is not at all easy or clear cut. If one first realizes that any item made by a human being (“artifact”) was originally made for some meaning, in some context, for some purpose, then every artifact (or documentary artifact in the case of archives) has some innate significance, however small, and that is what we must first understand.  Only after that comes the assessment of relation to institutional mission.  Further, even though significance may not warrant acceptance to the collections of a museum or archive it does not necessarily mean that it might not have significance to the mission of another institution and if the innate significance warrants, we may have some responsibility as preservationists of cultural heritage to guide it on its way to another repository.

 

All this is probably why, over the years, I’ve found that determining historic significance was the most difficult concept for students and lay people to grasp, and why I eschew pat answers about what to keep and what not to keep.  It also suggests why, if practical, it may be a good idea to keep borderline things until it is clear that they are of no use to a collection, particularly if it is unlikely that another one will ever be available for acquisition.  I think that probably no matter how experienced we are, we all will sometimes struggle with decision making for those items that are right on the line, especially if it’s a case in which only the passage of time will validate our decision.  It isn’t about being right or wrong in the moment, but about giving a curator 25 years hence, with the perspective of the passage of time and events and who may see more clearly the significance or lack thereof, a choice, and the ability to retain it or to deaccession it.

 

Collecting the late 20^th century (or any other period that, as time goes by, is in the very recent past) that has been an ongoing discussion in the museum field since about 1975. A seminal article about this entitled “Contemporary Collecting” by Edith Mayo of the Smithsonian appeared in History News in the 1970s, and obviously the debate continues as history unrolls. A key concept in collecting is that those things that are most mundane are least likely to be kept, and therefore, over time, become increasingly rare until they are again seen as worth keeping, and in fact may become highly desirable to own because of their rarity, and so it is probably the mundane things of the present that are most difficult to make decisions about.

 

Developing a sense of historic significance seems to take time, is somewhat experiential, and perhaps only partially can be taught.  My own awareness began in archeology, with the problem of determining significance for archeological sites. From there I went to historic and ethnographic artifacts, and natural history collections. Clearly the passage of time is a critical factor. To many, the older something is the more is seems worth collecting, the closer it is to the present the more it is disregarded. I have noticed that a time lag of about 50 years is typical (about the length of time from marriage to old age) in what is offered to museums by donors, which suggests that museum curators collect more proactively to avoid losing important items from the recent past. For instance, Railroad artifacts were all but gone or priced out of range by 1975, Vietnam and Peace Movement artifacts, and artifacts from the early days of the environmental movement, are now difficult to acquire, and most curators of the era missed the chance to acquire them at little or no cost. 

 

This leads to my belief that those making decisions about collecting, really need to be futurists as well as historians. They need to develop their instincts and awareness of cultural trends that will affect the future, so as to collect those things that will be of historic importance or of interest to the museum visitor 30, 40 or 75 or more years hence (In general, I suspect that archivists, because of the records retention component of their training, do better at ‘collecting today for tomorrow’ than do collectors in museums.) 

 

While there are many good recent books that deal well with the topic, we need to continue the dialog, to develop decision making aids for determining historic significance, and, perhaps above all, to educate Boards and others especially in mostly volunteer run small historical museums.

 

Sorry for the length of this post, but the subject has long been very interested in.  I hope some of you will toss in your ‘2-cents’ worth.    

 

 

Lucy Sperlin

Butte County Historical Society

Oroville, CA

 

 

 

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