{"id":16097,"date":"2021-05-18T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-18T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/?p=16097"},"modified":"2025-04-08T10:37:41","modified_gmt":"2025-04-08T10:37:41","slug":"on-archival-access-in-a-pandemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/on-archival-access-in-a-pandemic","title":{"rendered":"On Archival Access in a Pandemic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Catherine A. Nichols <\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Exchanging Objects<\/a> and my broader research agenda considers how and why certain objects left museums, institutions so often associated with preservation, archiving, and keeping. It can be an odd thing, to go to a museum to intentionally study things that aren\u2019t there. When the idea for this research was suggested to me by anthropologist Nancy Parezo, I admit I was first puzzled, then intrigued. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Thirty years prior, as Nancy tells it, in the waning days of her\npost-doc at the Smithsonian\u2019s National Museum of Natural History, she stumbled\nacross a set of records at the Smithsonian Institution Archives pertaining to\nexchanges of anthropological objects, referred to by curators as \u2018duplicates\u2019.\nThe exchange records themselves are mostly catalogue-style lists enfolded in\nbureaucratic correspondence. But when you begin to follow the archival\nbreadcrumbs, things get interesting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thousands of catalogued anthropological specimens, not to mention\nhundreds of thousands natural history specimens, were routinely removed from\nthe Smithsonian\u2019s collections in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They\nwent to small towns in middle America, as well as a host of international\ndestinations: Paris, Shanghai, Sao Paolo, Melbourne\u2026 While the traffic in\nscientific objects has and continues to be a global phenomenon, museums have\nlargely been viewed as repositories, not suppliers. It wasn\u2019t only the\nSmithsonian who was shedding their duplicates, nearly all the major (and many\nof the minor) museums were involved. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Catherine Nichols in the anthropology collections at the Museum Support Center, Smithsonian Institution in Suitland, MD. Photo Credit: Nancy Parezo <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the last decade, exploring the reasons and rationales for\nexchanging specimens has markedly increased, reflecting engagements with theories of\nmobility<\/a> and exchange, as well as attention to the social and\ninstitutional networks that museums exist within. How effectively a researcher\ncan do this depends first on if the records exist (they don\u2019t always, but in\ngeneral, museums are decent record-keepers), and if you can get access. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While access to physical repositories for academic researchers may\nhinge on time and money, the COVID-19 pandemic has upset timelines and plans in\nways I could not have imagined a decade ago. Though it took me about a year to\nassemble the resources I needed to spend my days pouring over ledgers and gently\nunfolding withering papers in Washington, DC, I enjoyed the luxury of being\nable to devote myself to piecing together the intricate details of\nanthropological specimen exchange at the Smithsonian for months on end. For all\nthe researchers whose best laid plans were to undertake projects fashioned\nunder a similar model in the last year, they have found themselves shut out,\nalong with museum and archival staff alike. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now more than ever, archival and museum holdings in digital format\nare not only in demand, but it\u2019s also simply all there practically is. In\nresponse, archivists and collections managers working from home provide access\nto whatever they can \u2013 from directing researchers to digital files hosted on\nwebsites, to combing through folders kept on cloud storage systems. An informal\nnetwork has also sprung up, and I found myself with the opportunity to share\ninformation and digital files sitting on my computer hard drive that may be\nuseful to researchers who are waiting for some semblance of scholarly inquiry\nin the pre-pandemic times to return. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While digitization and digital access has increased significantly\nin the last decade, the enormity of what remains in analog format approaches an\nabyss. And specimen exchange records, the ones that I relied on so heavily in Exchanging\nObjects<\/em>? Those have never been high-use items, perhaps because of the\ndissonance involved with study things in a museum whose absence constitutes\ntheir relevance. I often think to myself, those will never<\/em> get\ndigitized. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While I lament what I hope will be the temporary shuttering of\nmuseums and archives, this moment has also been a time to sit with persistent\nquestions about access. Access to museums and archives has always involved some\ndegree of gate-keeping, reflecting a desire to balance availability and\npreservation. While this is justifiable, limits on physical access have too\noften excluded people who have relationships with things kept in repositories\nthat don\u2019t neatly register as \u2018scholarly\u2019. Even if folks can get in, archival\nreading rooms and museum research areas are not wholesale welcoming places for\neveryone and there are both explicit and implicit rules and norms of behavior. A\nsomewhat humorous example of this would be the intercepting speed with which an\narchivist can move when they spy a patron placing friable historic documents in\nthe copy machine\u2019s automatic document feeder. But this current situation has\nbeen a powerful reminder that unless you have the time, money, credentials,\nknowledge, and legible justification, physical archives and museum collections\nare typically inaccessible\nfor most people<\/a>. The promise to equitably increase access via digitization, or\nengage in digital repatriation, I think is well-intentioned, and in many cases\nsuccessful when undertaken collaboratively, but this pandemic has brought forth\njust how far there is to go. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In closing, I return to Nancy\u2019s story of how she stumbled across these records, and how she held the memory of them for three decades before passing the idea to me. As a Smithsonian fellow, my ID badge was magic. Not only did it mean you could inhabit the archives for days and weeks on end, politely requesting nearly any record unit available, it also meant that you could pad the silenced hallways of the exhibits afterhours, steeped in noiseless wonder so different from hours earlier amongst the din of elevator buttons, exclaiming children, and hordes of tourists. There\u2019s a lot of power in the badge, and incredible privilege. And for those of us that have had that have held that privileged position and watch as its promises of the joy of discovery have evaporated during this pandemic, I am reminded of how pressing the need is seriously consider what access means and what it lacks, as well as the limits of digitization in efforts toward equity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Catherine A. Nichols<\/strong>\u00a0is an Advanced Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology and Museum Studies at Loyola University Chicago, where she serves as Director and Curator of the May Weber Ethnographic Study Collection. Previously she was the Assistant Curator at Arizona State University’s Museum of Anthropology. Her work on exchanges at the Smithsonian Institution and Field Museum has been published in\u00a0Museum Anthropology<\/em>,\u00a0Museum and Society<\/em>, and\u00a0History and Anthropology<\/em>. In addition to curatorial work, she is currently developing critical digital projects with museum databases and archival systems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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About the book<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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EXCHANGING OBJECTS<\/a>
Nineteenth-Century Museum Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution<\/strong>
Catherine A. Nichols<\/em>

As an historical account of the exchange of \u201cduplicate specimens\u201d between anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and museums, collectors, and schools around the world in the late nineteenth century, this book reveals connections between both well-known museums and little-known local institutions, created through the exchange of museum objects. It explores how anthropologists categorized some objects in their collections as \u201cduplicate specimens,\u201d making them potential candidates for exchange. This historical form of what museum professionals would now call deaccessioning considers the intellectual and technical requirement of classifying objects in museums, and suggests that a deeper understanding of past museum practice can inform mission-driven contemporary museum work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Purchase the eBook<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Berghahn Journals<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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Celebrate International Museum Day (18 May)<\/strong> with Museum World’s first Open Access volume<\/a> in the #BerghahnOpenAnthro<\/a> collection. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Catherine A. Nichols Exchanging Objects and my broader research agenda considers how and why certain objects left museums, institutions so often associated with preservation, archiving, and keeping. It can be an odd thing, to go to a museum to intentionally study things that aren\u2019t there. When the idea for this research was suggested to me… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":16099,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,200,220,108],"tags":[107,1288,1665,1437,2014,1303,111,2015,462,391,1533,647,278,783,461,1080,1532],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16097"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16097"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16103,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16097\/revisions\/16103"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}