How much of the ‘personality’ or ‘essence’ of a person can be known from their archival materials? When processing or even viewing collections of personal papers, it’s not uncommon for archivists to construct a mental image or a persona of the records’ creator, even (or perhaps especially) when they have not personally known them. This parasocial construction can be impacted by countless factors, for example, the content of the collection and/or the arrangement of the materials upon first arrival: we might infer specific personality traits based on the (dis)order of their papers, or we might glimpse intimate materials unseen by others, making us feel as though we truly know them. It’s important to recognize, however, that these personas are likely based on unfounded assumptions. Neither do they paint a realistic picture of the creator nor do they fully capture the complexity of their experience.
In my (albeit uninformed) view, the characters we construct are less reflections of the creator, and more projections of the viewer’s own self onto them. We may empathize with them, but we can never truly know them. In any case, these reflections can have a real impact on how we archivists process our collections. To explain further, I want to highlight here my experience seeing myself reflected in an archival collection and to explore how that imaginary relationship between archivist and records creator affected how I processed the materials.
I recently processed a collection of materials from memory worker and folk musician, Joe C. Hickerson. Born on October 20, 1935, in Highland Park, Illinois, Hickerson first became interested in folk music in 1948, when he saw a performance by Pete Seeger, legendary folksinger and labor activist, at a campaign event for the Progressive Party. He later developed a personal friendship with Seeger after organizing numerous Seeger concerts during Hickerson’s undergraduate studies at Oberlin College. After leaving Oberlin with a B.A. in physics, Hickerson applied his interest in folk music to his academic pursuits, coming to Indiana University Bloomington for graduate study in folklore and ethnomusicology.
Hickerson was very active in campus life at IU. To name just a few of his activities, he performed numerous times on and off campus, and he was a founding member of the IU Folksong Club. Hickerson was also involved in campus politics and activism: not only did he perform at many political events — including leading a folk-sing at an event sponsored by the NAACP (see below) — but he was also elected as a student senator and was the Democratic Student Party candidate for student body president in 1961.
Hickerson left IU with a master’s degree, having completed all the requirements for a doctorate except for his dissertation. He leveraged his education and his professional experience working as an archivist in IU’s folklore department to pursue employment at the Library of Congress’s Archive of Folksong, and he eventually became the director of the division. He remained at the Library of Congress for thirty-five years, retiring in 1998. Now residing in Portland, Oregon, Hickerson continues to write, lecture, and contribute to publications relating to folklore and folk music.
It is perhaps easy to see why I connected so readily with Hickerson’s materials, being a grad student at IU studying Archives and Records Management as well as a lover of bluegrass and folk music. Because our goals and interests are so similar, I found myself “buying in” to the significance of his materials much more than other collections I’ve processed. Perhaps out of a sense of pride or pseudo-ownership, on multiple occasions I convinced myself that there was research value in parts of the collection which other archivists might have discarded without much thought.
The most substantive example of this pertains to Hickerson’s research on the tune “Our Goodman,” which he believes to be among the most widespread and most adapted folksongs of all time. For what would have been his doctoral dissertation, Hickerson collected a wealth of information on the numerous versions and variations of this song across the world, including written correspondence and field recordings with informants. Hickerson remained fascinated with this tune even after leaving IU, and he continued to collect every version, variation, and reference that he could find. Spanning a whopping seventeen folders, these records consist mostly of photocopies from books, articles, and songbooks.
It’s uncommon for archivists to keep large portions of material like this because so much of it comes from published sources, and thus it can be accessed elsewhere. Knowing this, I certainly considered just throwing them all out. But upon examining them, I again saw a reflection of myself: among the mountain of papers was a photocopied page from a certain songbook series, Rise Up Singing. These songbooks were the de facto bible of my own folk-singing group during my undergraduate education. I couldn’t get rid of something that so connected me and Hickerson. Thinking more about these materials, I began to see value in that such as diverse range of material on “Our Goodman” was here, in one place. Scholars hoping to research “Our Goodman” would certainly find Hickerson’s compilation invaluable to their own research. This value is even evident from the correspondence in the collection, which indicates that Hickerson communicated and shared his research with other scholars as late as the 2010s. Additionally, because Hickerson never completed his dissertation and thus his research remains private, his files can now only be accessed through the IU Archives.
To be sure, my decision to retain this material is certainly valid from an archival perspective, but I think it was my perceived connection to Hickerson and his work that enabled me to recognize that this material was something worth keeping. Had I simply adhered to the established norm of discarding large volumes of published materials, these materials would be lost to future researchers. Beyond merely enabling a parasocial connection, then, the persona of Hickerson that I constructed prompted me to be more thoughtful about who might use these materials and how they might experience them. It encouraged me to question perhaps dogmatic archival practices and to shape the collection on my own terms.
Some archivists argue that feeling such an empathic connection to a collection’s creator is naïve or unprofessional. But I hope to have shown here that connecting with a creator’s materials can be a first step for archivists in questioning dominant stable archival practices and innovating the profession. It was not long ago that archivists predominantly saw themselves as impartial custodians of history. Only recently have we critiqued this ideal of impartial objectivity in archives and realized that our subconscious biases are reflected at every level of our work. Based on my experience with Hickerson, I believe it’s this self-reflection that has prompted archivists to empathize more deeply with collections creators for the benefit of our users and holdings more broadly.
For instance, thinking about whose stories are and aren’t reflected in our repositories has revealed the importance of representing marginalized voices in archival collections, mitigating archival silences, and resisting the whitewashing of history. Likewise, rather than remaining “impartial” to materials in our collection that uphold systems of oppression, by empathizing with creators and their experiences we can signpost material that may be harmful (broad as that term may be) to users who encounter them. While we can never truly know the experience of the creator of a collection, especially if their identity differs from our own, our empathy can nevertheless prompt us to educate ourselves about their history and to consider how we can best present their materials to our users.
