Essay: That Time I Processed Archive Collections at a Republican Think Tank.
Our lives and the material we produce are ephemeral, so the work an archivist does to physically & mentally process sex and war collections is significant too.
In light of my last essay…
I recently wrote about exhibiting my artwork—let’s loosely say it’s “artwork,” okay?
I briefly touch on the notion that I’ve made my career out of processing the work of others as a subconscious motivation for preserving mine.
I’ve always been this way.
As a kid, I noticed my mother wasn’t the tidiest when it came to organizing her invoices. Her bookkeeper was going insane and about to quit on Mommy. My mother was stooped over her desk in the back of her beer, wine & grocery store trying to make sense of the invoices.
So I said, “Mommy!? Can I organize them?” This was before I alphabetized the beer that summer.
She narrowed her already narrow eyes, inhaled her cigarette, then blew out in thought through her nose, and asked:
“Will it bore you??”
“No Mommy!” I exclaimed. That’s right. Hell no! I wanted to sniff all the carbon copy paper.
“Okay. You go.” She scooted me off to go organize her invoices.
By Sunday afternoon I had the invoices alphabetized and in chronological order.
And no one suspected I had autism. I was—still am—a girl.
This was The Store. My mom bought a turnkey business in East Hollywood in the 1980s, and it became a way out of our troubles until it became dangerous. Dangerous meaning my mother was held up at gunpoint more than once.
Things change. And perhaps, it’s why I told my therapist that I was afraid of success because I’ve seen success get robbed from my mother. Cognizant of that, I knew life could change drastically.
Our lives—and the material we produce—are ephemeral. For only a moment we have our memories. Similarly, groups in society have only their fleeting collective memories.
Knowing all of this at an early age makes you believe that nothing lasts forever.
Enter: The Sex Archivist
Growing up, no one goes, “I wanna be a sex archivist, and I want to touch all the dirty magazines alive!” But the job came naturally to me.
In my days as a little one, I had the first hand experience of organizing all the magazines in my mom’s store—from the dimestore comics, to the sensacionales, to the Playboys, Jugs, and Hustlers too. Surreptitiously, I read them.
The position was thrust upon me, really. After my two internships there, they asked if I wanted another non-paid position as their archivist-in-residence, and I said yes. In the information world, the more experience you have the better. Paid or not.
(Yes. I’m keeping a straight face writing this).
I’ve seen it all. Almost. I can’t say I’ve seen everything, because life will then throw me a curve ball. Like, once you think you’ve seen all the adult material, something comes along to turn your heard. For instance? There are all the kinds of magazines out there that glorify the human body. All kinds. My favorite was Foreskin Quarterly (Internet Archives) at The Center.
Periodicals aside: Cataloging, grouping, classifying text, materials, you name it, have been incredibly fun. Below is the “Zineology” we (the now shuttered Center for Sex & Culture) produced because we had box after box of old-timey zine.
These were zines our founders, Drs. Carol Queen & Robert Morgan Lawrence collected as sexologists & educators as well as others who donated them to our…repository.
The Center is the same place in San Francisco that hosted the longest running circle jerk. They were called The San Francisco Jacks (GLBT Historical Society). But not to make light of that either: it is the sanest safe-sex practice ever known to man.
The Jacks and FQ are gone—but they live on in their respective collections. We owe our cultural memory to archivists who painstakingly make records so that we find it all later.
And the librarians? Well, librarians are more about keeping material in circulation—that are still temporally relevant—in circulation. Librarians weed. Archivists? They preserve and make it findable in the future.
Librarians serve it up. Archivists put it away. We put things away by making these finding aids.
What Are Finding Aids?
It sounds very technical, huh? They’re bread crumbs for archival collections. It’s like making a really elaborate label for box you never affix. The finding aid is kept outside of the box. It’s like making a pirates map to where the booty is located.
When an archivist processes a collection, they write about what’s in the collection. They note the type of material it is, how many boxes, what the collection is about, where is it housed, and so forth.
We also have to upload industry standards on top of remaining impartial and ethical.
Then, there are technical standards.
Modern finding aids are written and then edited using a markup language—XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and then encoded in a specific XML standard like EAD (Encoded Archival Description) because XML on its own stored and transfers the data.
Like this:
<xml> This is the body of the text. </xml>. There are no specific meta tags (labels that classify code). So a standard like EAD is used so that there’s a controlled vocabulary that’s used by other organizations. The data is standardized so all the systems can “talk” to each other. With EAD, there’s more specificity.
The way the works are described use cataloging rules—like DACS (Describing Archives). To make it machine readable (by a system or even AI) we employ RDA (Resource Description Framework). Numb your brain out here on the LoC (Library of Congress) please.
So yea. If you want to make the world of our content highly connected and meaningful, tagging your work on Substack is vital.
The list below are links to finding aids I wrote on the OAC—it’s the Online Archives of California. The naming convention for these collections entail the creator name or organization’s name be in ALL CAPS.
Disclaimer:
I’m a staunch queer and liberal. However, as an archivist, I set aside my personal values to shed light on making all information accessible.
So, while I did work for a Republican think tank—The Hoover Institution—I can also say I’ve worked for one of the queerest organizations in the world—which was an educational non-profit. I had the incredible experience doing an archivist-in-residency for The Center for Sex & Culture where I got to process collections that are now part of Harvard & ONE Archives.
All information workers move in circles. Sometimes your circle is quite big. We have gangs too. I was part of a few Meetups and Facebook groups like Librarian Think Tank and what not. I’m still on the invite list for the ALA (American Library Association) Zine Pavilion.
I take pride in the fact that I can be very dispassionate around all forms of material.
From Sexarchivist to Warchivist
Before I took the job, I asked my advisor, “What if I get pigeonholed? What if I get blacklisted?”
“So what? Any experience is experience,” she told me.
After a while, I got tired of being known as “The Sex Archivist.”
Besides, that was the title for the archivist at Playboy Magazine last I heard anyhow. I don’t like being teased. I had enough of that as a kid.
I looked through my connections, and sure enough, I had a friend whose ex-husband worked for the Hoover Institution. And, he let me know they were hiring interns. I was already out of school 3 years, so I got the job as a postgraduate processing collections there.
They asked at the end of my interview, “You’re going from sex to war in terms of content you will be processing, how do you feel about that?”
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
The Process
In the process of processing, I’ve written blurbs about some of the collections I’ve handled that still bother me.
They bother me because the conflict still can be seen today. Problems that arose at the time the collections were produced are still occuring.
History has sorely repeated itself, and it’s alarming in this one collection that’s at the Hoover called the Eunice B. Armstrong collection. That one was also doozy.
Why? Because I had to remain incredibly impartial. Maybe it’s why I have been able to sit with Trump supporters over cocktails. It’s a very ego-erasing thing to do, by the way.
But, let’s say, this collection is a good one for modern historians who want to make sense of the nation of MAGA—Make America Great Again. Its origins can be traced all the way back to The America First Committee. The words written are oddly familiar in rhetoric. The correspondences. What mattered to them still matters to Americans today: They wanted out of “The War.” They wanted America to be strong, and un-beholden to any nation.
One of the most chilling—yet foreboding things—I’ve read in the collection is a letter from George Deathridge. The letter itself smelled like sweet cigar and dirt.
The weight of the paper, and the detail of it. Archives unlock powerful magic.
They’re mental time machines: On an afternoon in the processing room, I see this white flower embossed into the paper.
I’m holding it up to the sun. I had to look the man up. Sure enough, it’s short Wikipedia entry. The letter is buried in a folder. I show it to my boss, and we agree to keep it housed in a separate folder.
The truth needs to stay true for everyone to read—so that we learn from people.
The story of how I got it processed in record time can be expanded. However, it’s important to say that a lot of material is obscured. The rewarding part of being an archivist is coming across material like this, and making note of it—so that others can too.
In the same collection, there were these 4 x 6 flyers that basically read, “Jews are vampires,” in bold serif on golden rod. However, one had foxing. That gave me a clue: Something on top of that paper sat in the sun. I couldn’t find that paper.
It was only until the last box in the last folder that I saw the same flyer, but with marginalia—Eunice’s handwriting in pencil in the margin, “This is not who we are,” or something to the effect.
I put that flyer on top of the other flyer—that had foxing—and viola! It was a match.
People—dead or alive—are interesting. Maybe Armstrong didn’t want the Women’s' arm of the America First Committee want to be known as anti semitic? She was, afterall, someone who worked for Planned Parenthood. It was confusing. She was someone who helped people with mental health issues, yet was part of a very politicized organization hell bent on staying out of the war. Someone educated.
Yet this
That collection took the longest to process in terms of sifting through things and describing them fully. There were boxes.
The boxes carried emotional weight too.
Collections I processed, then wrote finding aids for
Impressions of them in italics.
Henry N. HAMMOND
The first collection I processed, and encoded. It’s only a box or two—but it took forever:
- http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8mc925c/
Claude M. OWENS
I took on this collection to get in touch with parts of my heritage. I’m a bi-racial American. My father was white, my mother was Filipina. It’s impossible to think that I could hold it all in, but I have seen the most damaging, heartbreaking photos of people—from my mother’s homeland—burned, homes destroyed, and worse:
- http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt8q2nf3wf/
Charlotte Ellen MARTIN
This American woman bonded with the Filipinos in World War II—and evaded the Japanese Imperial Army. And, no. I can’t fix the typo. Do you know how long it takes for everyone to review a finding aid before we release it?
- http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8xw4mhj/
William Rudolph GRUBER
Ah. The papers of a WWII war general. I discovered classified material in it—regarding the Panama Canal. We had to get declassified—which took a while:
- http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt258032ht/
CENTER FOR LIBERTARIAN STUDIES
A group of economists and libertarians form. What they do next is create a lot of papers that smell like cigarettes:
- http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt4290334k/
Catherine Sylvia BASTIN
World War I stuff.
- http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt75803675/
Mary RIXFORD
- http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt6w10366x/
John Richard SHAFFER
- http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt4c6035bm/
Eunice B. ARMSTRONG
If you want to learn about Neutrality, and The America First Committee, this is quite the collection:
- http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt1f59r5tg/
John SWEENEY
- http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt0v19r4qr/
Hubert Coslet ARMSTRONG
Evidence of Japanese Americans in concentration camps found here. This collection was one of the hardest to process by virtue of the material covered in it:
- http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt1r29r5rd/
ASIDE: Careerwise, as a librarian & archivist—
I’ve done archives work, which led me to library work—where I talk about it in my latest essay, “For Every Library, There’s a Librarian Story.”
I’ve done digital asset management, which led me to document control, which led me to digitization projects at the public library, which led me to more digital asset management, then a little more, then taxonomy (web taxonomy work), then content & asset management, and finally content development.
That's a story with many aspects! Very interesting to see how a life can develop, and a skill can be utilized in various ways. The same skill that otherwise could have been considered a problem to be fixed. The skill of paying attention and make order is a quite useful one, and I guess we all rely on some people having it.
Thanks for this slice of your life, it was an interesting read.