Vintage U.S. political buttons, Joe Haupt from USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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It feels like every few months a viral tweet or news story arises about a library throwing books into dumpsters. Members of the public respond with outrage, while my library colleagues once again find themselves defending the action and explaining that weeding is fundamental to the profession. Archives are no different. Weeding, reappraisal and deaccessioning are all essential archival functions in the face of less physical storage, less funding, and fewer staff. And I’ll even add this: throwing things away is joyful. It’s cathartic. It’s necessary for archives that want to tell the full story.
Archives are powerful, political institutions. For most of their existence, white people decided who and what got preserved in collections. The field is still overwhelmingly white today, too. But thanks to the hard work of marginalized archivists and activists, there has been a concerted effort from professional organizations and standards to correct past oppressive practices, and reevaluating the value of collections is part of this process. For example, the collections I inherited at my former place of work are roughly 95% white. The storage is also beyond capacity, bursting at the seams. But I know that in order to build a more inclusive archive, they will need space to store boxes of new documents. One way to make space is by reevaluating what is currently on the shelves based on recent research trends, historical and/or evidential value, and its relation to other collections in the archive, and then asking myself The Clash Question: should [it] stay or should [it] go?
If an archivist decides some records are no longer needed, those records do not typically go directly into a trash can or recycling bin.1 We do our due diligence to find them a better home. If the donor or donor’s relatives are still alive and can be contacted, then returning the collection to them is ideal. Yet, in my experience, donors rarely want their stuff back—they don’t have space either, which is one reason they gave it to the archive in the first place.
A second option is transferring the items to another institution, a place that collects the kinds of items you want to discard. But aren’t most archives (and libraries and museums) begging for more storage and preservation funding? Ah, yes. You are starting to see the problem. The archive shouldn’t keep it and nobody else wants it or needs it, so, yes, archival records get dumped.
Perhaps “buried” is the more appropriate term. At the end of the day, we knew the documents had a decent life, but they didn’t belong here anymore. Researchers were not requesting to read them, and their subject matter was long past trendy. It was time for the records to give up their coveted space for something greater, like original copies of a city’s first gay newspaper, manuscript materials from an important Black alumnus, or records from an activist group that opposed the death penalty. These are all items my former archive has been able to acquire in the past decade, and deaccessioning made it possible.
Archivists also “discard” materials before they ever enter the building through one of the first steps in the lifecycle of the archive: appraisal. They don’t appraise your stuff based on monetary value—although that can happen for collections from high profile individuals, like Members of Congress, famous artists or writers, and the like.2 But for the most part, archivists appraise potential acquisitions based on enduring evidential and/or historical value: Does the material complement and complete the full story of other collections already in the archive? Does it fill a gap in the archival record? Is the material relevant to the local community’s history?
Archives and museums are looking for things that are unique, that capture a particular story of historical importance. And yet, if I had to create a bumper sticker based on my archival experience it would be this: just because something is cool doesn’t mean it belongs in an archive. Even materials that seem to be right in a given archive’s wheelhouse may not be wanted or needed. At my former institution, I was constantly batting away political buttons. Word had gotten out that we acquired a large political memorabilia collection. Suddenly, everyone wanted to donate their campaign buttons to us. But do you think an archive really needs 50 variations of “Elect JFK” buttons? Never. When storage is an issue—and it always is—the last things an archive needs are duplicates or repetitive collections.3
And yes, determining the “importance” of these potential acquisitions falls to archivists, returning us to the political nature of the profession. Despite our expertise, however, we are sometimes outranked in the appraisal and acquisitions process by our managers or institutional administration, who might acquire things to appease big financial donors or simply because they think the items are “neat.” The worst part about these acquisitions based on political or social favors is that they can (probably) never be deaccessioned. You, the archivist, are stuck with whatever abominable collections your manager or university president acquired. You are literally and figuratively buried by buttons from bad decisions.
My message to the public, to administrators, and managers is this: next time you see an archivist discarding papers into the recycling bin, kindly ask how they came to that tough verdict rather than undermining our years of experience and training by gasping in horror at our actions. We would love to show you our thought process. We have the receipts…actually we don’t because we threw those away. Seriously, why are you all keeping your McDonald’s receipts from 1995 and donating them to the archive?!
- The archive’s effects on the environment is another essay entirely.
- The people donating those collections want those tax deductions!
- But can’t archives just digitize things to save space? Read “Why Do Historians Still Have To Go To Archives?” to find out why that’s not an easy solution.