Donor Volunteers as Archival Appraisers? Possibilities and Considerations

Abstract

Using examples from recent archival practice at two western land-grant universities, this article examines the potential benefits of enlisting volunteers from donor organizations to appraise as well as process the archival records of their own associations. The discussion addresses questions regarding the use of trained volunteers to perform appraisal activities, challenges in working with volunteers, and outreach opportunities for archival education among interested members of donor organizations. Despite the substantial role of volunteers in public libraries and historical societies during the past century, volunteer assistance in American academic archives appears as a relatively undocumented and more recent phenomenon, usually involving retired individuals or students fulfilling course requirements. Assigned tasks have included reception desk duty, data entry, and routine re-housing of documents, while archival appraisal has remained firmly within the responsibilities of the professional archivist. Prior to 2008, the Colorado State University Archives and Special Collections Department in the Morgan Library permitted only people affiliated with the university to work as volunteers, including one professor and a few public history graduate students completing a mandatory practicum in archival processing. In the subsequent two years, four individuals from the surrounding community requested and were granted the opportunity to volunteer with the 1. Very little has appeared in archival literature concerning volunteers in academic archives. For discussions of volunteer service in libraries, see Erica A. Nicol and Corey M. Johnson, “Volunteers in Libraries: Program Structure, Evaluation, and Theoretical Analysis,” Reference and User Services Quarterly 48, no. 2 (2008): 154-63; Steven Howlett, “Volunteering in Libraries, Museums and Archives,” Cultural Trends 12, no. 46 (2002): 39-66; and Mary Detweiler, “Volunteers in Public Libraries: The Costs and Benefits,” Public Libraries 21, no. 3 (1982): 80-82. 1 Stanford and Meyer: Donor Volunteers as Archival Appraisers? Published by DigitalCommons@USU, 2011 archives. Similarly, individuals who recently worked with the Rio Grande Historical Collections in the New Mexico State University Library represented the first volunteers to serve in the processing room of that institution. Each of the examples presented in this article describes an experiment in utilizing volunteer archival assistance, not only to process manuscript collections but also to engage in appraisal activities for specific collections housed within academic archives. In both circumstances, the volunteers were members or officers of the donor organizations, who approached the repositories with the request to assist in managing the collections of their associations. Their motivations for volunteering included the desire to use materials in the collections for their own needs as well as to ensure that their records were preserved, arranged, and described sufficiently for easy access by researchers. With minimal assistance and basic training by archives staff members, the volunteers in both cases accomplished these goals. In addition to the benefits received by the archival repositories from enlisting volunteers from donor organizations, the volunteers gained an opportunity to learn records management techniques during their work with the archivists. These new skills will enable them to more successfully organize their current records and thus lead to future collection donations that would require less processing by the receiving repositories. Appraisal as an Appropriate Activity for Volunteers American archival theorists, especially since the publication of Shellenberg’s “Appraisal of Modern Public Records,” have regarded appraisal as a central task for professional archivists. In the sixty-fourth presidential address to the Society of American Archivists, society president Frank Boles reminded his listeners that archivists are “the selectors and the keepers of individual and collective memory,” that appraisal is “the key to all our endeavors,” and that selection “sets the stage for everything else archivists do.” Riva Pollard stated that guidelines for the appraisal of manuscript collections must address the questions of “which people within society should be targeted for the acquisition of papers, and which materials within those papers should be retained.” Archivists may shrink from the idea of permitting volunteers to participate in such a key process, even more from inviting them to take the lead. The following brief summary of archival discussion regarding appraisal provides justification for allowing a select group of volunteers to take part in these decisions. 2. Theodore R. Schellenberg, “The Appraisal of Modern Public Records,” reprinted in A Modern Archives Reader: Basic Readings in Archival Theory and Practice, Maygene F. Daniels and Timothy Walch, eds. (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Service, 1984). 3. Frank Boles, “But a Thin Veil of Paper,” 64th Presidential Address of the Society of American Archivists, 14 August 2009, Austin, Texas. The American Archivist 73 (Spring/Summer 2010): 21. 4. Riva A. Pollard, “The Appraisal of Personal Papers: A Critical Literature Review,” Archivaria 52 (Fall 2001): 140. 2 Journal of Western Archives, Vol. 2 [2011], Iss. 1, Art. 3 http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/westernarchives/vol2/iss1/3 One criterion for judging the value of records lies in their potential use. In her essay on collecting manuscripts, Mary Lynn McCree promotes the researcheroriented view by encouraging the archivist to select personal papers to “create a collection that holds a continuing interest and relevance for scholars” and that “will be used over and over again for a variety of topics and points of view.” McCree also advocates seeking the “advice and help of scholars with special knowledge or experience” of the subjects in the collection, in addition to relying on one’s own subject knowledge or the interpretations of historians. Although McCree’s advice focuses on the acquisition of personal papers, this viewpoint can apply both to acquiring and to appraisal or re-appraisal of organizational records in a collecting repository. For organizational records, the distinction between record creators and researchers may be small; in many instances, the two groups are the same. Association officers have a greater understanding of their organization’s documents than an archivist viewing the records for the first time. In the examples described in the following pages, the volunteers who appraised the records possessed relevant knowledge and first-hand experience with the subjects of the collection. As a counterpoint to the researcher-oriented view of appraisal offered by McCree, Terry Cook asserts that the assigned value of records should focus on “why records were created rather than what they contain, how they were created and utilized by their original users rather than how they might be used in the future.” Cook’s theories focus on institutional records, drawing on his work as a government archivist, and they apply very aptly to the two cases treated here, which involve records of organizations. In these two examples, the volunteers had assumed the roles of archivists for their respective organizations, although the records remained housed in a repository in the care of a professional archivist. It is important to consider that the wide range of records held by many collecting repositories precludes the ability of the archivist to fully comprehend the perspective of each donor, or the context and functions of each organization represented. In such settings, Cook’s viewpoint necessarily calls for record donors to participate in the appraisal process. Recent writings of Richard Cox advocate a stricter focus on evidence as the primary criterion for appraisal. In deciding which records provide essential evidence 5. Mary Lynn McCree, “Good Sense and Good Judgment: Defining Collections and Collecting,” in A Modern Archives Reader, 108.