The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in
Detroit, the world's largest institution dedicated to the African American
experience, holds a collection of more than 30,000 artifacts and archival
materials. African textiles and sculptures, items from the diaspora, Malcolm
X’s papers, fine art, music recordings, and many manuscripts, books, and
photographs are housed in a facility the size of two football fields. However,
before 2007, nobody knew for certain what was in the collection or where each
item was located, in large part because the museum lacked a professional archivist.
Access to the archives was by appointment only.
In 2006, Juanita Moore was hired as the museum’s
president and immediately began upgrading the museum’s capacity to
serve the community. Among the first projects that she and her staff
proposed was the Archives Professional Capacity Project, in which the
museum would hire a full-time archivist, provide professional development
for the archivist’s assistants, organize the archives, and improve
access to them.
In August 2007, the museum received a one-year, $106,318
Museum Grant for African American History and Culture from IMLS for the
project. The Whitney Fund and the Ford Foundation both provided matching funds.
Building a Foundation
To kick off the project, Bob Smith, the museum’s director of
curatorial and archives, hired three consultants to assess the archives’
conservation needs. Then, in October 2007, the museum hired archivist Alexis
Braun Marks. She met with the consultants, made her own assessment, and
developed a plan in early 2008 to carry out the project’s objectives. Among
her highest priorities were to organize the collection and establish basic
policies and procedures for handling and processing items. There really was no
foundation, so my role was to create some foundational structure and then to
lead everybody through the process and be the consummate cheerleader,” Marks
explained.
When she arrived, Marks found gaps in what had been
processed. For example, there was a card catalog, but many books did not
have spine labels, and nothing was on the shelves in order. There was no
reliable inventory for any of the collections.
“There were no finding aids and there was a lot
of record keeping that had sort of gone by the wayside, and so it was
like looking at a once beautiful home that had clearly fallen into
disrepair,” said Marks.
Marks served as project director and trained the two assistants
who were transferred to her department. Matching funds paid for one assistant
to enroll in Wayne State University’s Graduate School of Library Science
to get more education in archival administration. Marks also hired two part-time
paid interns from Wayne State’s School of Library Science—one for
cataloging and one for processing.
The team began by revising and setting procedural standards.
They also began using three separate software programs to manage print resources and
track equipment and materials that were checked out.
“Part of the problem with the profession as a whole is
that there’s no one good database that does everything that you need it
to do. So a lot of repositories end up using multiple systems,” said Marks.
Marks also expanded the museum’s relationship with Wayne State,
which now sends many of its library science graduate students to do their processing
practica at the museum. During the project, four students completed a 40-hour
practicum at the museum; two of them stayed on as volunteers.
To make more materials available online, the team began a
photographic scanning project, supported by a new scanning practicum at the
university. As many as 25 students per semester helped to chip away at the
collection’s thousands of photographs.
The museum also forged a partnership with the Detroit
Academy of Arts and Sciences’ community outreach program, which led to two high
school seniors volunteering in the archives to earn their community service hours.
Organizing Makes an Impact
During the project, the archives team conserved or preserved
472 collection items and gave 3,472 items new or enhanced accessibility, including
3,179 items that were made accessible to non-museum staff for the first time.
The staff now has an understanding of all archival content and
where each box of a collection is located. Marks’ team also revamped the rare
books collection and discovered some collections that had been forgotten.
One rare book the staff found unlabeled on a shelf was
a first edition of The Dream Keeper, by Langston Hughes, who
signed it on a visit to Detroit in 1941.
The team also created a complete accession record for the
manuscript and photograph collections and cataloged 95 percent of the
archives’ published materials, which are now in the online catalog.
In addition, the library, archives, and research center are now open to the
public four days a week.
Internally, the archives’ reorganization has been a boon for
museum staff. “People know they can now come to us and get information,”
said Marks. “Everything that’s in our online catalog is on the shelf, it has a
label, we know where it is, and we can retrieve it quickly.”
In addition, the archives can now help the museum produce
original exhibits. Before the project, the museum primarily rented exhibits,
but in 2009 it created three of its own, including one about world champion
boxer and Detroit native Joe Louis. The archives gathered relevant items from
the collection for the curator and designer and performed photo research.
“If the archives were not functional, we would not have
been able to do that exhibit,” said Smith.
Externally, the revamped archives have benefitted visitors,
researchers, and item donors. More researchers are coming in and more people
are willing to donate artifacts and papers, whereas before the project, people
were less comfortable with the idea of giving their collections to the museum.
The changes have also reassured previous donors, because
they can see progress being made as the practicum students help process the
backlog of donated items.
Challenges and Lessons Learned
Although the entire project was one huge challenge, maintaining
momentum while trying to meet a tight deadline proved to be particularly daunting.
“In archives, there is the predisposition to slow down and
linger over documents,” noted Marks. “As I tell my practicum
students and volunteers and interns, don’t get bogged down. I don’t want to
catch you reading anything, except for the general content. It was definitely
a challenge to keep people moving forward.”
For those considering similar projects, Marks advises
taking time to plan, if possible. “Looking back, I would have done
probably a museum-wide survey of records, because people had stuff at their
desks and in closets. A lot of that’s institutional, but really give yourself
a month or a little bit more to really sit back and survey and plan.”
The Work Continues
In May 2009 after the grant period ended, the team launched a
Virtual Archives and Exhibitions Web site. It features online collections and
exhibits, as well as links to the image collection and the museum’s library
catalog.
The archives staff continue to arrange and describe collections,
catalog published materials, and gain better intellectual control over their holdings.
They have processed the entire photograph collection, and each picture has a finding
aid and is in the Archivists’ Toolkit database.
“My hope is to have, by the end of next year [2010], all
of our finding aids for completed collections in the database and online for
researchers,” said Marks. “From there we’ll just keep processing as
best we can. I think it will be some time before we’re finished.”
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