Public History & Philly

  After reading Timothy D. Pyatt’s article The Harding Affair Letters: How One Archivist Took Every Measure Possible To Ensure Their Preservation , I pondered upon the way that the letters were handled by archivist Ken Duckett and also how letters disclosing an affair of someone out of the public eye may have been treated during Duckett’s lifetime. For instance, if Duckett received a box which included documents about the life of someone who was a well-respected figure in their hometown, but not so much on a national or universal scale, would the same measures to preserve the Harding letters be illustrated in the case of this hypothetical figure? Would these measures have been different in Duckett’s time vs. what would occur today? Pyatt discloses that Duckett believed in preserving the letters to allow a fuller understanding of Harding’s narrative. [1] In contrast to the Harding letters, it can be argued that the letters of people who are not affiliated with political or public-r...

  In Ellen M. Ryan’s Identifying Culturally Sensitive American Indian Material in a Non-tribal Institution (2014), the accessibility to the contents of a collection pertaining to the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho found within the Special Collections and Archives of Idaho State University are called into question. This collection, the “J.A. Youngren Papers,” includes photographs of Shoshone-Bannock practices such as the “Sun Dance” (a ceremony of the Great Plains tribes) taken and acquired by the university in the early 20 th century without the consent of Shoshone-Bannock members. [1] In 2013, an undergraduate student and sun dancer tasked with processing and housing these photographs took note of the rituals captured within the photographs and the problematic nature of displaying these photographs online without the consent of tribal members. He thus brought this concern up to the Head of Special Collections of ISU and the photos were soon after ...

  Chela Scott Weber’s Research and Learning Agenda for Archives, Special, and Distinctive Collections in Research Libraries (2017) extensively explores options to improve the functions and quality of archives and special collections by placing attention on both the collections within these places as well as the skills that archivist, stakeholders, and others who work collections can offer to the public. [1] Weber also proclaims that to improve the innerworkings and missions of special collections and archives, diversity of the workforce as well as a push for accessibility and diverse collections must be prioritized. Weber argues that a blockade to drawing in more employees who want to instate these features is the reality of “soft money” funding: a highly unstable way to maintain employment of archivist and special collection staff. In this case, how can more concrete manners of pay be given to these employees? [2] From my knowledge, though this article was published in 2017, I w...