Collecting Recent History
This article originally appeared
in Exchange, a
newsletter published by the Wisconsin
Historical Society. (Volume 45, Number
3, 2003) It is the 11th in a series of articles titled Public
Appeal. The series deals with public
programming and public information. It was
written by Tom McKay, retired local history
coordinator for the Wisconsin Historical
Society.
Almost every local historical society that acquires a building wonders initially if it will be able to collect enough historical materials to develop a successful museum or research center. In a far shorter period than most can imagine, virtually all of these same societies will experience the opposite problem of the space to house collections filling rapidly. As the room available to add historical materials diminishes, a historical society faces increasingly difficult choices about what it can collect. Materials documenting the recent past can pose some of the hardest challenges because they are the materials that exist in the greatest abundance even as room to house new collections may be declining.
Even if historical societies had unlimited space, historical collections are more than simply warehouses of objects and records. Historical societies collect materials for their value in preserving a usable record of history. A volume of historical documents too large to process or a bulk of artifacts too great to manage or provide with care would lose most of its historical value. While anything potentially may be of historical value, historical societies realize that they cannot possibly preserve everything. Sometimes, however, they make the mistake of preserving almost nothing of the recent past. Collecting recent history revolves in part around setting priorities in light of the potential material that.
All historical societies benefit from
having a written
collecting policy. The
policy is a tool to guide decisions about
collecting items of either the recent
past or from more distant history. It
should contain guidelines about the thematic
or geographical scope of the collection,
collecting procedures, and standard considerations
such as the condition of items collected
or the presence of duplicate items in
the collection. While the policy sets
criteria for collecting decisions, the
decisions still require judgment by
the people delegated authority to make
recommendations about acquiring and disposing
of historical materials and by the board
of directors which makes final decisions.
Because collecting recent or current
history presents a vast array of possibilities,
identifying priorities assumes heightened
importance. The decision to collect a
town team's baseball uniform from the
1920s may be driven by the possibility
it could be the only one remaining in
existence. By contrast, dozens of high
school baseball uniforms of the past
decade could be spread around the same
town. Collecting one of the recent uniforms
now avoids facing a time when only one
or possibly none exist. The challenge
of collecting recent material may come
in deciding how many other uniforms,
such as a girl's basketball jersey
or bowling league shirt, are needed to
adequately represent this part of current
history.
People tend to keep objects to which they have a personal attachment or which seem to have usable life left in them. Historical societies need only look at their existing collection to see the results of this principle. Few societies have had difficulty collecting wedding dresses, manual typewriters, or parlor furniture. These are objects people kept. So too, leisure suits, old televisions, and electric power tools of the recent past will probably emerge from attics and basements in adequate numbers to fulfill the future needs of historical society collections fifty and seventy-five years from now.
In setting priorities for collecting items of recent history, a historical society might seek clues from the things of seventy or one hundred years ago that do and do not exist in its collection today. A society might have scores of early-twentieth century photographs of downtown businesses but not a single restaurant menu of the era. The same society's collection might include a dozen historic wedding dresses and almost certainly would not have a single paper chain used to decorate for a wedding reception. The menu and the paper chain were ephemeral materials that, from their inception, were not intended to have a long life. Yet, the prices on the menu or the customs represented by the paper chain would have held important insights into life in the community in the past.
Ephemera exists in such profusion in the present that it cannot all be collected, but it disappears so quickly that historical societies should be prepared to accept or seek ephemeral materials that capture a sense of daily life in the present and recent past. Saving just one of the table decorations that a soccer mom made for the annual league banquet may say as much about soccer as an activity that brought young families in the community together as the soccer ball that is offered to the society out of someone's attic fifty years from now.
Even the most intentional collecting of recent ephemera produces a record that is not, by its nature, systematic. Local historical societies do have the opportunity to collect some readily available current materials that create a more systematic record. The local telephone book constitutes a directory that includes most of the households and businesses in a community every year. The Mount Horeb Area Historical Society annually adds the current telephone directory to its historical collections. In the same spirit, the Stanley Area Historical Society and others in Wisconsin maintain collections of the local high school yearbook.
Collecting recent history confronts
historical societies with the question
of what is local. Many present local
businesses are parts of large national
or international chains. Today's
entertainment comes more in the form
of cable television or surfing the internet
than church box socials or fraternal
organization dances. Looking at materials
collected from the more distant past
will show that the challenge of deciding
what is local is not completely new.
Local communities have participated to
an accelerating degree in a national
consumer economy since the last decades
of the nineteenth century. The box of
Gold Dust Twins laundry soap or old Postum
jar already in a historical society's
collection are no more or less local
than the menu of a national chain restaurant
located in the community today. The chain
restaurant's menu may find a place
in the collection with that of a current,
locally owned cafe, just as the Postum
jar sits on a shelf beside the flour sack
from a local gristmill.
A historical society must decide whether
an object fulfills the basic criteria
established by its collecting policy
and whether it can house and care for
the object when it considers acquiring
the item. Once these questions are answered,
the judgement remains to be made about
the value of the object in preserving
and interpreting local history. Determining
whether the object played a role in the
special events or everyday life of the
community's past is more central
to the judgment than the object's
place of origin. Drawing on examples
of older materials collected by the society,
a Wisconsin historical society appropriately
could have a cast iron pot made in Alabama
in its collection but would not have
a cotton bale press even if the hardware
cast in the same foundry as the pot.
For most societies in Wisconsin collecting
objects of recent history, a Japanese-made
computer monitor would be more representative
of everyday life than an American-made
missile guidance computer. Yet in Chippewa
Falls, home of Cray Research, the same
highly sophisticated computer could be
a very significant part of local history
preserved at the Chippewa Falls Museum
of Industry & Technology.
While collecting recent history presents
special challenges, it also offers special
rewards. It greatly enhances the opportunities
to ensure that ephemeral materials that
might be totally lost or current systematic
records that might be incomplete at a
later time are saved while they are readily
available. Collecting recent history
can promote interaction with individuals
or groups of people who may have little
awareness of the local historical society.
A young soccer family, the manager of
a chain restaurant, or the student yearbook
staff probably would be pleased to learn
that the local historical society recognizes
the role they play to the community and
the fact that people in the future will
want to know about it. Initiating relationships
with diverse groups of people through
collecting recent history enhances the
local historical society's public appeal.
For societies that do not have a written
collecting policy, an example can
be
obtained by writing to the Office of
Local History, Wisconsin Historical
Society, 816 State Street, Madison,
WI 53706-1482.
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