Matthew Headley on Public History

In class, we went over the case study of Ahmad V. University of Michigan. The debates we have in class over these case studies are great, and help me with better understanding the issues. I was on the side that the donor contract has to be honored and that Michigan University did the right thing by fighting it in court to defend keeping the records sealed until their release date. Donor confidence is important, and institutions should do their best to appease donors when applicable. These records most likely had a 25-year seal on them because they most likely contained information on right-wing networks and movements. Which is why Ahmad wanted access to them. This can be a dangerous precedence that could prevent orgainzations, political activists, or other groups not wanting to donate their records. Something Margery said in class has been sticking with me. She mentioned something along the lines of, what is 25 years to 200 years of use. 

This also could lead to donors not wanting to submit their records. They might just choose to destroy them instead of endangering members of their organizations or movements. I understand the frustration some classmates felt that these should be public records and that they should have a right to them, but I don’t know if we have a right to them. What I have an issue with is that we don’t have a right to everyone’s documents who ever lived, so why can we demand access to documents that are sealed? I can see this being weaponized against groups and we could lose a lot of counter-culture, or radical histories. The archive already has so many absences from the record, why should we be endangering those who want to entrust their records to us? Yes, this person is deceased but the people referenced in those documents may not be. I’m the furthest away from agreeing politically with John Tanton, but I want to see his records and I don’t want to rush his papers coming out because I wouldn’t want left-wing groups to face the same threat.    

I’ll be visiting The American Philosophical Society today at 2:30 P.M for my site visit today. I’m excited to be returning to APS and have prepared by printing out the questions to refer back to. I’m meeting with Bayard Miller, Associate Director for Research, Engagement, and Technology. He has an M.A. from Temple University in public history and archives. He’s worked with APS for 10 years now and was the person who helped bring me in as the Levitt Fellow over the summer. 

I sent the questions to Bayard a few weeks ago to give him time to prepare for our meeting. Most of the questions I can answer by myself, and will do so in my writing, but I’m mostly interested in knowing more about the funding and staffing. Especially with the collaborative project the Rev City is, where does the money come from? When I worked over the summer with them, it seemed like a small team was working on the project. I wonder if he can share more about plans to add to that staff as 2026 approaches or what the goal is. I’ll be checking in with Sabrina Bocanegra, Assistant Head of Digitization and Digital Access briefly during my visit as well. I’ve already started outlining answers to the 9 questions we were given, and I’m looking forward to writing my report on my site visit. I’ll also be reflecting on my time there and pulling from what I learned on how they operate in my report.   

The discussion we had around the Harding Affair Letters was something I continued reflecting on after class. I still don’t feel like I have a good answer, but this case study was thought provoking. I went home and told my wife the story to see what someone that isn’t in the history or archival field would think about the situation. The conversation shifted pretty quickly to destruction of objects and properties and not about the case study, so I didn’t get an answer on her full thoughts on the Harding Affair Letters.

The stance I had was that Ken Duckett did something incredible by preserving these letters, and there was a real danger of these being destroyed. Perhaps it’s simply just optics, but I feel like he went about it the wrong way when he originally obtained the letters from the lawyer. Especially because he had to hide it and prevent Russel from accesing them. I wonder how long he would hide the letters before he allowed for researchers like Russel to use them if they went unnoticed and that the law suite didn’t arise. My thought was that he could have waited to obtain the letters from the lawyer until he finished the negotiations with the Harding Memorial Association for more records on Harding. I’ve been thinking about that, and I can see issues with that as well. If he didn’t take the letters as soon as he can the lawyer perhaps would have done something else with them, like give them to the Harding Memorial Trust, or they may have been destroyed. The main hold up I was having was how Ken obtained the letters, and hid it because he knew him having it would be a problem. 

At the end I do have to commend his commitment and willingness to put himself in the line to preserve something that could have easily ended up in a trash bin or a fire place if he didn’t get involved. I really don’t have the right answer to this situation.

In class we discussed finding aids. I was amazed in how different they are across institutions. Two points I was fascinated by were the size of finding aids, and how accessible they are. Finding aids are helpful, and something I didn’t know about until graduate school, as they were something I never worked with before that I can remember. Perhaps I had, but it never registered to me what it was. I used to only use the search function on websites in collections nd follow the tabs on the side to find what I want.

Some of the finding aids we saw were incredibly wordy. I’m currently thinking about exhibit design, and the right amount of words for a label and how long you can hold someone’s attention. This is what came to mind seeing how long some of the finding aids were in class. I know I wouldn’t read all of that word for word, and would skim trying to find whatever was relevant for me. I liked how small the APS collection I looked at was, and how tight the finding aid was. Some of the finding aids made it seem like they were trying to tell too much, where the collection can speak for itself. It’s a hard balance though, because you want to showcase what you have, but sometimes it feels like less is more.

Finding aids and finding them on a website was something that I was interested in as we looked at different collections. My collection could be found through the object, so I’m happy it has that. I’d also like to commend HSP for including other collections they have and partnering organizations that have potentially relevant resources. I’d love to see more collaboration in the archival and special collection community. I wonder if there is a way to standardize finding aids in some way, such as how to find them. That cold be problematic for varying sizes of institutions and how certain findings aids may need to be retrofitted to meet any new standard introduced

One of the topics we discussed in Archives and Manuscripts class yesterday was disaster preparations. We were asked how we would respond to an incident like a fire, if you could have someone in to save materials what would you save? My thoughts were to save the materials that bring people to the organization or have irreplaceable value to the organization. I mean value not the monetary meaning of the word. I’m sure people would go for the expensive materials first, but that feels against the spirit of library services to be a provider of information to the public. The most valuable objects are the ones being used most by the community you serve. I know a little bit about ensuring collections on a much different scale from my time working at the Comic Book Store in Glassboro New Jersey. Our collection is secured, but it’s easier for us to have a full inventory of objects because they’re all posted online for sale. We had a robust network for identifying stolen objects as well, which was something we covered in class. Whenever we heard of a theft we would call all the stores up and down the coast, and other stores would do the same with us. They would give us identifiable objects in the collection to look out for and who to contact. I hope institutions like museums and libraries continue to develop networks for these kinds of issues.  

Something else I wanted to talk about was disaster preparations. Not too long after I finished my bachelor’s degree in history, I had an interview with someone from FEMA for an on-call job to respond to disasters to protect historic sites, museums, and libraries. That was probably about 4 years ago, so I looked into this again to remind myself of it. It looks like it’s a program co-sponsored by FEMA and the Smithsonian. Even though this sounds like an exciting program to work with, I’m happy I didn’t end up being picked for the job. I still have a lot to learn on this topic, and yesterday’s class was eye-opening on all the preparation needed for this. 

Our visit to the Special Collections Research Center at Temple University was exciting. I had no idea SCRC had so much material, nor did I know how new the building was. We were told that SCRC holds around 90,000 feet of material between two locations, and we saw only a third of the material. 90,000 feet sounds like a lot, but I didn’t know how to conceptualize that. When we entered the room filled with boxes with a mechanism that grabbed the books and shelves of boxes I was stunned. I couldn’t believe how much material was there!

Our tour continued and we saw some legacy equipment that could be used for digitizing different types of material. Then we went to the vault and saw some incredible manuscripts, books, and artifacts. The collection itself was amazing, and as I was going through I was scanning for books I may want to come back and read. I saw a book called, The Chalk Circle, which I’m interested in coming back to SCRC to read. I saw another book I may go back to look at as well, Wall Paintings in the Kondo Horyuji Monastery. With all the amazing things I saw at SCRC I left thinking to myself, wow, I’d love to work with materials like this. These kinds of moments make me excited about my future, and my hopes of pursuing a potential career in archives, libraries, or museums. I’m looking forward to my next visit to SCRC when I have some more time!     

One of the topics in class this week that I thought was interesting and wanted to reflect on is how to get people engaged and working with primary materials. In class, we saw an example of primary documents shared with educators with response questions for students to answer. Margery pointed out how using these objects like this doesn’t give the context of the world around the material in that period. I’ve spent much of my time thinking of different ways to make history more exciting and attention-grabbing. As Margery said in class, it seems most students’ least favorite subjects are math and history.

One of my thoughts on how to make history more entertaining would be to move toward the public/popular history route, but make it free and accessible. Archives can be intimidating and it’s easy to just rely on online sources instead of going to the repository. I’ve been work-shopping an idea in my mind about making videos using primary documents. These can be short videos showcasing the material and giving the historical context and importance of the object. These videos can serve as educational and also as a promotion of the materials you have and why someone should visit your site. I got this idea from trying to use popular history like movies or online videos as a way to bring attention to primary documents. I know museums such as the Mutter have had a successful YouTube page, and I spent a lot of time watching their videos. Making this kind of content could also help attract the eyes of younger audiences. I would hope that it may teach people what archivists are, what they do, and why they’re important. Little moments like these can change someone’s life. Who knows, maybe it may even inspire someone to become an archivist.

One of the issues we discussed in class that I’ve enjoyed thinking about is the article, “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archives Processing” by Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner. We also discussed how archives typically have a backlog of material and insufficient funds. My original thoughts after reading this article and discussion in class were well maybe we just need more archivists, but that runs into the problem that there just isn’t enough money to pay more archivists to do the work. It seems like a solution to get through the backlog of material would be to have more people in the field, but there isn’t money to pay the workers so this can’t happen. The article discusses how more product and less process can be practiced with twentieth-century archival collections.

The article raises an interesting point about how some archivists have been resistant to change, and the example they give is how there has been an influx of material from the 1950s forward that is creating backlogs. Margery said in class how she worked for an institution that was already practicing more product and less process. Something I’ve been thinking about since has been what institutions have adopted this practice, and why. Is it because they are doing it to meet demands and release more products, or is it because they don’t have the resources to devote too much time to each collection? I think it would be interesting to survey archives in the tri-state area and see what practices they are following. This would be a difficult and long process, but maybe some data could be found in regards to why organizations have adopted or refuse to do this. 

An interesting question was posed in the reading and in class, who controls the past? I have to side with the archivists here. When it comes to the collections and materials they are working with, they have to be allowed to decide what happens with these materials. For example, if they decided to get rid of redundant copies of something they already have that came in the collection. Archivists have the training, the knowledge of what their collection already has, and the scope of their institution’s collecting policy. That being said, archivists having control of the past has been problematic in some ways, but I still stand by my thoughts that if they are collecting ethically and doing their best to proactively find potential untold stories, especially from marginalized groups they are doing the best they can.

The archivist makes decisions throughout the process. What to take, what to keep, and what to get rid of. Collection development has been a problem, as there are absences in the archives such as people of color or women in certain time periods. One of the first books I read when I started graduate school was, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaves Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa Fuentes. Fuentes tells the stories of enslaved women by reading against the archive to find out information on them, finding information in sources such as escaped slave posters. We discussed in class how the archive has gaps like this with the example of learning about women and having to read through other sources to hear about them. 

With this in mind, I still stand by archivists making the decision, as someone has to do it. Perhaps one day my mind will change on this. Archivists are human, they have their own biases and limitations. Hopefully, the field will continue to document ethically.   

While reading the article, “ No One Owes Their Trauma to Archivists, or, the Commodification of Contemporaneous Collecting” by Eira Tansey I continued to reflect on my own work and question if I am practicing what is argued in this article. Tansey challenges archivists collecting trauma, and one specific point I’d like to reflect on is Jason Scott from the Internet Archive tweeted asking for protest footage. I recently worked on a project on the South Korean feminist movement and did a case study on a memorial site of trauma that was also a site of protest. As I continued to work on this, I found myself looking for photos from other protests and events. One notable feature was the blurring of people’s faces or wearing masks to protect the protestor’s identities, which Tansey shows that Jason Scott’s tweets did not do, though in one he does warn that they do not blur images and just retain information. 

A question posed by Tansey is, “If you’re feeling compelled to rush in and document things, ask yourself why you’re doing it. Are you fully prepared to follow all the best practices for documenting in times of crisis?” Tansey asks the reader to reflect on the relationships they built, and why they haven’t built those relationships yet. Tansey ends her article or blog post by making it clear that more permanent and well-compensated archivists should be hired to do the work to ensure a better future, which I agree with on multiple levels. Reading works like this makes me excited about the field, and seeing how archivists are fighting for the bettering of the profession, ethical decision-making, and progress in the field for more community engagement. The humanities in general are struggling, and one of the ways to help them would be for us to do what I believe we should always be doing, serving the community. We have to break down barriers in academia and in the profession and connect with our community or else we are doomed.    


Eira Tansey, “No one Owes Their Trauma to Archivists, or, the Commidification of Contermporaneous Collecting”, Archival Ethics > Making Adminstrators Look Good, EiraTansey.com, June 5, 2020. https://eiratansey.com/2020/06/05/no-one-owes-their-trauma-to-archivists-or-the-commodification-of-contemporaneous-collecting/