Preserving Family Papers — an Archivist’s Approach
It was really great to be included in this New York Times story about “saving family stuff” — but as I looked over the email interview with the reporter, I noticed that the bigger themes of use, appraisal, memory and decay didn’t really make it into the article. Here are my fuller thoughts on “saving” my own stuff and I think it parallels my professional curatorial philosophy too.
A quick note on terms — generally, preservation encompasses actions that we can take to protect and extend the life of a group of materials; conservation is more about the remediation of damage already done to a single object to restore it to a previous state. Almost all of my advice falls under the heading of preservation, not conservation.
At the most basic, what are the keys to conservation for a non-professional?
Conservation has the potential to be expensive or time-consuming if done indiscriminately, so it’s important to know why you’re taking the actions that you are. This often means making decisions about what you want to save, what these records mean to you, and how far you’re willing to go to protect the significant physical properties of a given object.
Your family records will mean so much more to you if you have a bit of context. So often, I work with donors who struggle to identify individuals in photographs from decades ago. My best advice would be to spend as much time thinking about making meaning in your family records as you do worrying about longevity — label the backs of photographic prints with the date, the location, and the names of people in the photos. If you can’t do this for each print, put a notecard at the front of the roll of photographs with this information. If you have family letters, put them in file folders and label where they came from. We love when families write autobiographies or family histories over time, because this helps us understand how the records all come together to tell a story. If you want for the young people in your family to understand what this all means and why it’s important, it’s best to be explicit and to label records clearly.
What are some mistakes you see non-professionals making consistently?
Water and vermin are the greatest enemies of paper. Store your records in cardboard, not plastic — if water is trapped or finds its way into plastic bins, mold will grow. You can buy acid-free boxes from vendors that sell materials to archives, but they can be expensive. Folks also often store family records in basements or attics, where heat and humidity can fluctuate wildly and where water is more likely to enter. I recommend storing family records in the top shelf of a linen closet — the climate is a bit more temperate, and it’s unlikely to flood!
I also see that families are sometimes much more careful with the “cool old stuff” than with their own records or the records of their parents’ generation. The slightly-embarrassing retro ephemera of today will be the “cool old stuff” of tomorrow. The sense of nostalgic wonder can be misleading and can result in saving stuff that isn’t particularly special, just old, and not saving more recent important documentation of family memory.
This is particularly true for digital records, which require a real plan if they’re going to be preserved and used in the future (I have about a thousand things to say about this).
What do you think people new to conservation absolutely need to know?
Death and decay is inevitable, and not everything is worth saving. I think that sometimes it’s hard to accept this idea, but it really is okay for old records to be loved to death. I enjoy seeing records that are worn out, because it means that they were useful to someone. There are measures that you can take to extend the life of a physical object if it’s deeply important to you, but if it’s just the information on the object that’s important, it’s okay to make a photocopy or a scan too.
Are there any ways to do kind of preventative care? Setting things up now to be conserved easier later?
Environment is key! Just like people, records don’t like to be too hot or around too much humidity, and large swings in temperature or humidity can be damaging. If records become moldy, it can often be prohibitively expensive to remediate them, although there are solutions — vendors are available to freeze-dry and clean moldy records to help stop active mold growth and kill mold spores. If records are eaten by mice or silverfish, there’s rarely much that can be done.
What kind of measures that you take to preserve archives could be replicated or mimicked by people trying to keep their heirlooms safe?
In modern archives, we tend focus much more on access than on preservation (in fact, we often think of preservation as “future access”). I would definitely encourage families to adopt this mindset — bring out those family records often, at holidays and birthdays. Take the opportunity now to tell stories and share memories. These records are only really useful if you make use of them!
Archives also employ the concept of “appraisal” — in our case, appraisal isn’t about financial value, it’s about research value. When archivists appraise, they decide which records from a collection have lasting research value, and which are duplicative or not meaningful, and can taken out of the collection. This is our way of distinguishing signal from noise.
I would encourage individuals and families to employ the same mindset. Be discriminating — if you are overwhelmed by records (and you don’t have a sense of why you saved them and what they mean), you’re far less likely to go through them and folks from the next generation probably won’t know what to make of them.
