Archival Practicum: Day 7

This week, there were two major things I wanted to bring up; this is a long post, and it gets dramatic at the end, so buckle up. The first is something that I've been trying to navigate pretty much this entire practicum. Remember when I said the patient files were sent off to be digitized by Family Search? Well, I have found several (several!) documents that have been recently taped. I checked with the archivist to see if there was any chance someone had worked on this collection anytime in the last few years, since the tape looks brand new, but she said the only ones who have handled the collection for decades, as far as she knows, was Family Search. We figured that it was most likely that when the documents were being scanned, they were taping documents together. Now, of course, tape is terrible for preservation, so at first I was attempting to remove all the tape I was finding, but since there has just been so much, the archivist advised that as long as the tape doesn't look to be actively deteriorating, that I can skip it for time sake. This has been the first big trade-off I've experienced since working here; ideally, we would want to remove every last piece of tape (unless removing it damaged the original document), but in the real world, we need to balance processing time and productivity as well. Every day, I have found documents taped together, but this week was one of the worst, hence why I'm bringing this up now. There were several handwritten letters taped together in one of the files today.

Before. You can see the tape between the pages of the same letter.

After I removed the tape.

Outside of the basic lack of preservation knowledge that led to this issue, I am also very frustrated from a digital archive standpoint. I know that sometimes, traditional archives are cautious of digitizing physical materials due to concerns about damage to the original or some sort of mindset that the original can be disposed of now that there is a digital copy (nonsense!), but this has also confounded me; I digitize materials at work, and outside of simply handling the materials or short amounts of light exposure, the materials are not damaged and we would never dispose of the original materials! Yet, here I am, processing a collection where the digitization crew clearly damaged the original materials. It's been driving me crazy and severely disappointing me.

On another note, the other interesting thing from today was one particular patient file. Funily enough, when I pulled this file out of the box, saw how thick it was and that "EXPELLED" was written on it, I made a comment to the archivist that this was going to be an interesting file. And, boy, was I right. I was expecting the patient was expelled due to drinking (the most common reason I've noticed so far) or due to fighting (the second most common), but no, instead he was expelled because he was sneaking out to visit a teenage girl in town (it gets so much worse). Now, this patient was in his late 20's and was married with two very young children (in another state, of course), but he met this girl in town and the two supposedly started a relationship. Her parents weren't happy, called their pastor, who called the sheriff, and they met with the superintendent of the home. There was an intervention, where they told the patient that he must stop seeing this girl, to which he agreed and the situation was supposedly all cleared up. However, that night, the man snuck out, rented a car, picked up the girl, and they drove up into the mountains to supposedly enact a suicide pact. Except the young girl died and he survived long enough to return to town but later died at a local hospital. The case was investigated as a murder; the coroner reported the girl had not died from ingesting poison and there were notes written in the man's handwriting, but claiming to be written by the girl, that explained the suicide pact. The case was determined to be a murder-suicide.

I'll admit, I spent quite some time reading the documents in this particular patient file. I was not expecting there to be an entire 1920's true crime murder mystery, but that's indeed what it was. There were letters from the superintendent to the patient's widowed wife, court proceedings, and newspaper clippings. Interestingly enough, at work in the library archives, I have been correcting metadata for our local homicide index, and indeed, I pulled up this case the next day to read more. This has been, by far, the most interesting patient file I've processed yet (and one of the saddest, for the poor victim and the patient's young family).

Stats:

• Files processed: BRUECHNER - CARLETON, 63 folders (283 total folders processed)

• Hours: 8hrs (56 total hrs)