Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records History and Archives Division
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The Remembrance of Past Things:
Or, What Have I Got, and Where Did I Put It?

by Richard Pearce-Moses
(RPM@Primenet.Com)
Archivist, the Heard Museum

Abstract
Sharing resources requires that repositories know what they have in order to share information about their holdings with other institutions and patrons. How can information about the diverse materials in libraries, archives, and museums be pooled for access? How can repositories convert existing catalogs and finding aids to a common format, and how can they find the resources to describe their backlogs? Pearce-Moses will discuss strategies for information sharing, retrospective conversion, and gaining control of large portions of material.
Biographical note
Richard Pearce-Moses has been an archivist since 1981. He has worked at the Photography Collection of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, as Local Records Management Consultant for the Texas State Library, as Curator of Photographs for the Department of Archives and Manuscripts at Arizona State University Libraries, and currently as Archivist and Automation Coordinator for the Heard Museum. Pearce-Moses compiled Photographic Collections in Texas: A Union Guide, a combined catalog of more than three hundred repositories. He regularly teaches workshops on photographic collections management for the Society of American Archivists.

 

I have often pointed to Photographic Collections in Texas as the archival education of Richard Pearce-Moses. Hence, my comments on it may be a bit personal. While confession may be good for the soul, I'll try to keep mine a little more brief that St. Augustine.

Photographic Collections grew out of a 1982 workshop sponsored by the Texas Historical Foundation for curators, librarians, and historians interested in photography as a historical medium. At that meeting Martha Sandweiss proposed that the foundation develop a directory of photographic collections in the state. She saw such a directory serving several purposes: By providing a survey of the universe of photographic collections

In 1985 I was hired by the foundation to do picture research for Historic Texas: A Photographic Portrait, a book of historical photographs published to celebrate Texas' sesquicentennial. I spent roughly a year traveling around the state rummaging through picture collections in local history museums and societies, public libraries, art museums, university and college libraries, archives, and parks. And, if I remember, the Alamo.

The foundation had included developing a directory in the budget for Historic Texas. When that book went to press, I began transferring my experiential knowledge to paper. The foundation quickly realized that because of the diverse collections in the state, a union guide detailing the contents of those collections would be of significant value to an audience wider than Texans. For example, the Harry Ransom Research Center Photography Collection at the University of Texas at Austin is one of the premier collections for studying the history of photography, with holdings of some 4.5 million images that range from the oldest surviving photograph to contemporary fine art. Other collections of international reputation included the Amon Carter Museum, the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection.

The foundation undertook an expanded directory project with support from the Robert J. Kleberg, Jr. and Helen C. Kleberg Foundation, Conoco, and Dupont. At the risk of relying on my memory, the Kleberg Foundation grant was for about $34,000 and the Conoco/Dupont funds from Historic Texas project were about $10,000. I spent usually two days at a repository, and I never spent more than a week at even the largest. The total project, from blank paper (or hard drive, to be exact) to published volume took under eighteen months. The published book runs just under 400 pages; it lists the holdings of nearly 300 repositories, some eighty of which are described in detail. I mention these numbers to stress that a cooperative catalog need not be prohibitively expensive or time consuming. With the rise of Web publishing and cheap computers, I suspect this project could be done for even less money and in less time.

What did I learn?
I am very grateful for the opportunity to have worked on the union guide. I saw thousands of photographs, which gave me a rich understanding of the medium. But more important for me was the chance to meet the many different people responsible for those collections. They ranged from professional archivists, curators, and librarians with formal training and years of experience to grandmothers with little more than good intentions running the local history museum. They worked in repositories large and small, famous and (in a couple of cases) infamous, rich and poor.

Getting to know my colleagues and the situations in which they worked, I saw many different ways to manage archives. I saw what worked and what didn't. And, what surprised me then, I discovered that well-funded, professionally staffed repositories were not necessarily exemplary. I'd give my eye teeth for some of those local history grandmothers!

I'd like to share some of the things that I came to believe strongly as a result of this project.

1. A devotion to collective description.
Many repositories tackled cataloging their photographs one item at a time. Unfortunately that approach was a losing battle. Not counting their backlog of uncataloged materials, these repositories were acquiring photographs faster than they could catalog them.

I will use myself as an example. Before I began work on the union guide, I was working at the Photography Collection at the Ransom Center. I had begun cataloging the photographs, one at a time. The collection staff figured that it would take twenty man-years to catalog the holdings and used that figure to argue for additional staff. I didn't recognize the futility of the situation; the solution was not more staff, but a different approach to cataloging the materials.

When I began work on the union guide, I realized that describing a repository's holdings at the collection level was exactly what I had needed to do at the Photography Collection. Cataloging some 285 collections was a lot more realistic than the Herculean task of cataloging 4.5 million images. In fact I was able to write a collection-level description of the Photography Collection's holdings in a week as part of the union guide project. The collection suddenly went from detailed access of a small portion of its holdings to summary access to all its holdings.

2. Collection-level descriptions give a perspective on holdings not apparent in item-level catalogs.

Many people may think that collection-level description is too broad to be useful. I would argue to the contrary. As example, I'd point to the one repository of any size that had a complete item-level catalog of its photographs. They found the collection-level descriptions extremely useful summaries of their holdings. Until the union guide was written, they would wind up photocopying many item-level catalog cards in response to researchers' questions; the guide provided them a more practical means of providing information about collections.

Similarly, when I developed a collection-level guide for the Department of Archives and Manuscripts at the Arizona State University Libraries, which previously had only an item-level catalog, several colleagues observed that they could finally see the forest for the trees. Although they knew the names of different collections, they couldn't easily characterize those collections from the item-level descriptions scattered throughout the catalog.

One of the side effects of having a description of all the repository's holdings is that, as curator, I had a tool for better control of the materials. I had a mechanism to locate materials because I had a place to link locations with collections.

3. Collection-level descriptions are practical as tools for access
Many people feel that important detail is lost in collection-level description, making it impossible to locate relevant materials. On one level, I have to agree with this point of view; the more details one has, the more accurate the catalog is.

However, one must consider the practical ramifications of collecting such a large amount of detail. Is it better to have highly detailed access to a small portion of your collections, while the majority languished unused because it is unknown to your researchers? Or is it better to provide broad access to all your holdings?

I have come to believe very strongly that broad access is preferable. Researchers can usually determine from collection-level descriptions whether a body of materials is likely to be relevant; this is particularly true for collections organized by provenance. A researcher looking for information on water in Arizona is going to be interested in the photographs of Dwight Heard, recognizing Heard's name as an important player in the Salt River Water Users Association; but if the description of Heard's photographs mentions only the excavations at La Ciudad, the researcher will probably pass over those materials for more promising collections.

Collective descriptions also reduce the amount of information in a catalog a researcher has to plough through. It's easier to read a single abstract of a hundred Native American portraits than to read a hundred item-level catalog descriptions; and often, the information on those individual catalog records is virtually indistinguishable due to the similarity of the images.

4. Collection-level description is not an end-point. It can be supplemented with additional layers of more detailed description.

In stressing the importance of collective description, I do not mean to say that item-level description has no value.

In some instances, the value of the materials demands it. A collection of items that could be sold on the market might be described at the item level as a security measure to have documentation that can prove ownership should the items be stolen. Similarly, creating an item-level record can save work searching for a frequently requested item.

My point in emphasizing collection-level description is to encourage people to develop broad surveys of their holdings before they tackle more detailed cataloging. Once one knows what's in the repository, it's easier to assess the relative value of the collections. One can then focus one's energies detailing those collections that justify the additional effort of detailed description.

5. Catalog descriptions can be written in a way that enables them to be shared.
When I compiled the union guide, I found every sort of description imaginable. Most were cards and lists, as computers were still something of a novelty. The information on those cards and lists captured widely different details about the images, and the formatting of that information was unique to each repository. I continued that tradition of anarchistic description by forcing all the information I found into my own idiosyncractic format used in the guide.

Those were the days that archives felt that because their holdings were unique, they required unique descriptions. Since then, archivists have come to see the power of using common standards to describe their holdings. The process of adopting APPM, USMARC, and more recently EAD, has not only provided a mechanism for sharing catalog information, it has made archives think critically about the quality of description.

If we're going to start sharing catalog information, we need to agree on shared conventions for structuring the catalog information and for indexing vocabularies. That also means that we're going to have to invest time in learning those standards. I'm curious how many repositories here let people start "cataloging" their photos and archives with only a little in-house training? This practice is not cataloging so much as it is creative writing, translating unstructured visual, physical, and contextual data into unstructured verbal data; I don't mean to discount the value of that interpretation, but I want to stress that without teaching people how to analyze materials in a consistent, principled approach, their descriptions will reflect the things they think are important rather than the objectives of the catalog.

If I can make a general observation, librarians use the word "cataloging" to mean something very different from what archivists and museum curators mean when they talk about cataloging. The former understand cataloging to be the transcription of information about an object into a structure that supports very specific access points. The latter tend to think of cataloging as the interpretation of an object, recording information about an object often invisible to an untrained eye; archivists and museum curators may use a form that lends some consistency to the records, but often the form is not completed in a manner that supports consistent access points. Neither approach to cataloging is superior; both have their strengths. However, a synthesis of the two methods would be of enormous value.

Conclusion
If the union guide had one failing, it was that researchers didn't used it because they didn't know about it. But when I mentioned it to them, they bought and used it.

Other union catalogs had other problems of accessibility. Even the online union catalogs of photographs on RLIN and OCLC were unused; I've yet to meet a researcher that's used them because they don't have ready access to them.

Today, we have the Web. Use of library catalogs is way up because people can get to them. On the Heard Museum's Website, the archives pages are the most heavily used after the home page. I'm convinced that a Website that contained descriptions of all of Arizona's archival collections would be enormously valuable and heavily used. And, unlike the printed guide, it would be easy to keep a Web-based guide up-to-date.

I've been teaching workshops on photographic collections management for almost ten years now. The one thing I've observed is that the notion of collective description is still fairly uncommon. Something about photographs makes people think at the item level. People will spend hours trying to identify every individual in a group photograph, while whole collections sit unprocessed on the shelf. I've seen manuscript archivists, who would never consider item-level control of their textual collections, unthinkingly start item-level descriptions of their images.

If I have a dream for Arizona's cultural repositories, it's that they adopt strategies for top-down description of their holdings and a web-based union catalog where collection-level descriptions can be shared. I believe that not only will a union catalog provide researchers improved access to the state's cultural resources, I also believe that those resources will be better managed.

Copyright © 1999, Richard Pearce-Moses.

 

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Updated:  12/20/2006

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