Researching the Library of Congress

OK, so now for the substantive post about doing research at the Library of Congress (and a bit more on the National Archives at the bottom...)

After assorted computer and access issues (see below) I finally got to pend two good days in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division. The LOC itself is split into three buildings, and the MS division is in the Madison building, away from the main reading room. Unlike the National Archives, you store your stuff in lockers inside the Manuscript reading room (though before passing through security.) Each day you check in at the security desk, and they hand you a key for the lockers (also unlike NARA, where the lockers cost $.25.) Your locker number is more or less your ID number for the day, and every time you enter or leave the room, you give the guards your number, and they mark down time of entry and exit (presumably for security reasons...I'm guessing no one really cares how long I take to use the restroom...) The reading room itself is pretty large, and even during the middle of the summer, it seems as though it can hold probably four times as many people. In general it seems like the vibe is much more casual here - most people are wearing shorts, most seem like graduate students or young professors (i.e. much younger than NARA,) and there doesn't seem to be as many casual researchers. People flock to NARA to look through genealogical records, but the LOC collections are mainly personal papers and organizational records, so I would imagine most people have a more serious research interest. (Although I did see one girl watching a movie while going through her materials!)

The advantage to doing research in more clearly defined collections like personal papers is mainly in the organization of the collections. The papers of Congressman Emanuel Celler that I came to look at were donated in two batches, instead of over time like some of the Congressional or State Department Records in NARA. This means that the collections were organized and indexed in one period, so the finding aid is pretty well put together, and pretty comprehensive. Granted it's still a print-only finding aid, and the paper itself looks like a dog might have chewed on it at some point, but it's still all there, and easily accessible. There are something like 500 boxes in the collection, and the finding aid contains an annotated list of the boxes and their contents (i.e. Box 19: Immigration, Notes and Clippings through 1954.) After looking through the collection, I think I'll need to see about 24 boxes of materials.

The archivists at LOC are incredibly helpful and friendly, and seemed very eager to try and help me with my research. Unlike NARA there are no "pull times" for materials, so you just fill out a call slip and they bring you your boxes about five minutes later. They only let you take out four boxes at a time, but again, since you can request materials at any time, it's really not a problem. (The one interesting quirk I found is that they make you fill out a new call slip every day, even if you've placed boxes on hold already. One of the archivists told me that the only real advantage of placing things on hold here is that the carts are left at the front of the stacks, instead of filed away, so you save a minute or two.)

Other advantages of researching in the Library of Congress is that they have free wifi (really helpful for googling names, acronyms, etc. that you come across while researching,) and that the desks themselves are really spacious, and don't have dividers (only two people per desk, though because of the amount of space, no one seemed to be doubled up.) The major disadvantage I've found is that while the room is pretty bright, it's not particularly well lit for taking photos. The images I'm getting from the LOC are much poorer in quality than those from NARA. Oh well...I'll need to spend much more time here before I can get a better sense of the collections, but so far what I've found has been really useful.

On a separate note, it seems like I'm starting to run out of materials at NARA I. I've looked at a lot of the materials from the 1950s, and am trying now to access some of the stuff from the 1940s, but it seems as thought the records from the 1960s are much harder to get at. For one thing, there is a blanket 50 year rule on records containing personal information, so at the very least I'd have to wait another two years before seeing the records (and up to another 10, considering my project goes through 1968.) Congress is also exempt from FOIA, so I can't exactly press for their release. There might be a workaround or two, but I think after this coming week I'll be spending the majority of my time left here at NARA II and the LOC.

Tombstones From My Home State? In Front of the Archives? Should I be Worried?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the National Anthropological Archives is located in the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland.  It is a haul for me to get there from where I live in the city, but I find it to be worth the wait, especially considering some of the factors highlighted in Phil's recent posts (going to bigger archives can be a pain).  

As far as I can tell, the Museum Support Center consists of two main buildings.  The one pictured above is the main facility housing much of the behind the scenes material for the museums on the Mall.  At the same site the National Museum of the American Indian has its new Cultural Resources Center (CRC).  I've never been in the CRC myself, but I've seen pictures and it look like a stunning new facility.  

Down the road, the museum has another support facility for the Air and Space Museum.  You can tell its not a regular office building because they have one of these sitting in the parking lot. Just chillin'.  

Upon walking onto the grounds of the Museum Support Center (after showing ID of course) you have a pleasant walk towards the main building, pictured above.  The Smithsonian has done a nice job adding outdoor sculptures to what would otherwise be a  normal looking government building.  Still pretty plain, right?  

Not so fast.  

I noticed one day when walking into the building that a number of tombstone-like objects adorned one side of the facility.  Upon closer inspection, the objects all bore the names of places and quarry companies, most of which were from my home state, Minnesota.  You can probably see why I walked past these things for a couple of weeks thinking that they were, in fact, tombstones.  When I looked more closely, however, it was clear that the inscriptions bore no names or dates, just the name of quarry companies and cities, including Minneapolis and St. Cloud.  

I finally asked around inside the Museum Support Center this week.  Most of the security guards I asked shrugged their shoulders.  They asked me to let them know when I finally figured out what the heck they were.  My archivist at the NAA told me that she wasn't quite sure what they were, but she promised to e-mail around.  She mentioned that they just kind of showed up one week awhile back -- as if the secret geology police had moved them there in the middle of the night.  A few hours later she was able to give me a tentative answer.  

Apparently, geological specimens, at one point, would be carved and adorned in order to show where they had originated from.  The collection comes from the Smithsonian's mineralogy collections and may have been on display at one point.  

Again, this is the tentative answer the staff was able to provide.  I've never seen any pictures of carved geological specimens on display, but it wouldn't surprise me.  Moreover, I study mainly art and anthropology so I could have easily missed displays of this kind.  It has long been commonplace for paleontology and geology exhibits to display polished petrified wood like this. Petrified wood, as it occurs in nature looks more . . . well . . . natural.  

The Smithsonian's online catalogue contains a number of beautiful images of geology exhibitions including this gem (pun intended) from 1903.

But the 1903 exhibit shot does not show any of the mysterious quarry stones.  Nor does this shot from 1919.  The 1919 picture, however, clearly contains a polished stone, center right.  The stone appears to be clean, however, and not adorned with its location like the stones outside of the Museum Support Center.  Later images of gem and mineral displays at the Smithsonian show mainly smaller specimens.  This image from 1930 provides an example.  

My hunch would be that the answer may not lie in the geology exhibitions, but rather in the collections and displays of the Arts and Industries Museum.  The main hall of the A&I Museum circa 1927 can be viewed here.  I think it would make sense to consider geological mining an "industry" to be displayed in exhibitions showing the various geological resources in North America.  

Apparently, my home state of Minnesota was reppin' it at some point in the nation's attic.  

I'll continue to poke around to see if I can find a more complete answer.  

What a Week...

Apologies for the breaking in blogging...I was actually in the middle of writing a new post last night, when my hard drive died. So now, after spending a full day at the Apple Store, I have a new drive, more or less updated. (Thank God for extended warranties and external hard drives. I'm really glad I picked one up before I left, otherwise I would have lost all of the photos I've been taking in the archives.)

The dead hard drive capped a really mediocre week in the archives. This was supposed to be my first full week (without weddings, holidays, etc.) to work, but so far I've managed only to get in a full day on Monday, and two half days - Tuesday and Wednesday. I started the week with 14 boxes of materials at NARA, thinking that would take me the better part of the week. I found some great stuff on Monday, but when I got back to the archives on Tuesday morning, I realized that at least 8 of the boxes weren't useful at all, and much of the materials in two other boxes just didn't relate. (You just never know beforehand.) Plus the archivist I'd been working with wasn't going to be back in until Thursday, so I decided to call it a day.

With the lull in materials, I decided to head to the Library of Congress, to check out the Emanuel Celler Papers. It took me a bit of time to find the correct entrance ot the building, and to get to the research room, so by the time I got there, it was closer to 9:45am. I got to the front desk, and the woman tells me: "We're shutting the building. You need to leave now." Considering it was still early, I was a bit confused, but she reitreated. "We're shutting the building for an emergency preparedness drill in five minutes. If you don't leave immediately, you'll be locked in with no power in the building. Come back after 11." Great. Just great. So I came back at 11, with all of the other people who had been kicked out, waited on a very long line to get my reader's card, and finally go into the manuscript division closer to noon.

I've got a lot more to say about the Library of Congress and their collections, but I'll save that for another post...

Meet the Record-O-Fone

I came across a reference today to a message being left on a "record-o-fone".  I delight in futurama - particularly material culture and technology from the 1930s through the 1960s which were often given names intended to sound really futuristic.  All you have to do to make me laugh is to make a joke somewhere in this genre.  This is no doubt a big part of the reason I love the show Futurama, which riffs on these themes all the time. Historian Rob MacDougall cracks me up with his jokes about "electromail" and the "interwob".    

From our perspective, many of these names sound deliciously outdated.  When I noticed the reference to the device in a letter, I had to take a 15 minute break to find out what the heck it was.  My guess is that fifty years from now, historians will no doubt view some of those engaging in today's Futurology or "Future Studies" in the same way.  

I frequently mock the Bay Area's "Bay Area Rapid Transit" (BART) heavy rail as being the product of a designer in the 1970s imaging what the year 2000 would look like.  See for yourself.  The BART even has carpeted floors, which, as you can probably imagine, have not stood the test of time.  They really should have chosen the shag carpet instead. 

Here is an up-close picture of a record-o-fone, more specifically, the Bell RT-65 Recordophone.   

Today, while looking at correspondence from the National Anthropological Archives, I found a reference to a record-o-fone from 1969 in a letter from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.  The reference was fleeting, to paraphrase it was sort of a "We got your message on the record-o-fone," type of thing.  Wenner-Gren is a non-profit which promotes anthropological and social scientific research.   Apparently, the foundation had acquired one of these fancy devices that recorded the voices of those calling a phone with nobody on the other end available to pick up.  The record-o-fone was the precursor to the answering machine, which is also known as the answerphone, or telephone answering device (TAD).  According to Ye Olde Wikipedia, the answering machine was invented by 1935 by a man named Benjamin Thornton, about which Wikipedia knows nothing else. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the terminology here, "Hey there, this is Sam, leave me a message on my TAD."  The lingo must have taken some getting used to.  

The snazzy thing about the record-o-fone is that you could use it to tape pretty much anything with it, not just phone conversations.  The Watergate Tapes were evidently created on a similar device, called produced by Sony, the TC-800B.  You can see nerds talking about it here.  Those working on behalf of Nixon had "bugged" the Oval Office with several microphones which allowed it to record the crazed ramblings of our elected officials for our listening pleasure. 

Early answerphones used tapes to record the voices on the other end of the line.  The digital answering machine was invented in 1983, but didn't catch on for millions of grandmothers (who still used those little tapes) until years and years later.  Another letter in the archives complains that the one caller had a mere fifteen seconds to record a message for the Wenner-Gren Foundation before being cut off.  Instead of recording the message, the individual in question, in his secretary's absence, chicken pecked a letter to the foundation instead.  While snail mail may have been winning some minor victories over telephone recording devices, the record-o-fone was already well on its way to winning the war.  The answering machine became standard in both the workplace and home in the United States in the later half of the twentieth century. The answering machine is still common place in American homes today, but voicemail has largely replaced the answering machine in the workplace and is also standard on mobile phones.

For further proof that the web is amazing, and my life is awesome, moving picture of a recordofone in action can be viewed here.  While this video borders on the verge of life-changing, I'm not exactly sure what is up with the leopard print blanket in the background.  

Clearly, the record-o-fone has little to with my research on the history of American museums. While the device has little to do with my research, I like to tell myself that by taking a 15 minute break to learn about it may just help me understand the people I study just a little bit better.

The "Linear Foot" and other Sexy Archival Terms

Before arriving in D.C. for the summer all three of us conducted a certain amount of internet research.  Grant proposals typically require a description of your proposed project, plus a timetable of how long you expect the work to take to complete.  For historians who work in archives, the term "linear foot" should be a familiar one.  Archives typically have online catalogues, sometimes with finding aids describing what is available in each collection.  If you're lucky, you will get all of this plus a notation of how many linear feet the collection is. Two of the collections I was interested in peeking at this summer were noted as being about four linear feet.

The Society of American Archivists (SAA) defines a linear foot as, "a measure of shelf space necessary to store documents," or alternatively, "a measure of motion picture stock; film footage."  The SAA provides a little more detail here: linky.  

So what does that mean for you, Joe Grad Student?  Not much, unfortunately.  

Preparing for this summer was really my first experience in writing grants based on archival materials measured in linear feet.  Most of my archival experience up to this point has been based in museums, or in archives nearby where I lived.  So I guess you could say that this is my first trip taken specifically to visit an institution that bills itself as an archive, rather than requesting to see files in museums that could be considered archival.  

In fact, the majority of the museum archives I have worked in sort the files I look at by catalogue number or accession.  An accession can basically be defined as a specific acquisition to a collection.  Museums change how they register collections over time but accessions are usually discreet groups of objects brought into the larger collection.  Let's say I donate my collection of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures to the Smithsonian.  It would be considered a single accession with each of the action figures being assigned individual catalogue numbers.  The museum then creates an accession file and places in it all of the relevant documents recording the acquisition.  An accession file could include a huge number of documents, an academic journal article a famous scholar wrote about the significance of my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle collection, or an article based on an interview I did with the New York Times on my collection.  The accession file might also simply contain a catalogue card recording that I had four action figures and donated them to the museum on X date.  The accession file could be a single sheet of paper, or it could be several inches thick.  

You get the idea. 

Unlike an accession file, an archival box is consistent in size.  About four inches.  A linear foot, based on my California Math, is about 3 boxes.   

But, as I've been reminded this summer, the fact that a linear foot is consistent in size does not mean that it will be consistent in the amount of time it takes to trudge through as a historian. The first collection I looked at this summer was listed as containing correspondence, catalogue information, and other miscellaneous items.  I was mainly interested in looking at the correspondence in the collection, and, in all, it turned out to be a little less than a fourth of the collection.  

When I wrote to archivists preparing to take this trip this summer, I continually asked, "How long do you think it will take to get through this collection," or, "how long does it take to get through a linear foot?"  The answer was always the same, "it depends."  While this was frustrating for me as I tried to write grants, it has turned out to be painfully accurate. For some reason, granting agencies don't really like, "I'm not really sure how long," written in crayon all over grant applications.  

Here are some of the compounding factors I've begun to think about when estimating how long a collection will take.  

When was the collection created?  In the very late 19th century and early 20th century, carbon copies of correspondence started to become more common.  Carbon paper, while invented much earlier, seems to have become more widely utilized when married with typewriter.  In my experience, handwritten correspondence, despite the fact that it is written on thicker paper takes longer to comb through.  Cursive writing of the 19th century almost has to be translated, as if in another language.  Part of what I was hoping to accomplish this summer was to become more proficient in reading post Emancipation American scribble.  Later documents, often typed on carbon paper, are typically easier to read, but are often printed on the super-thin duplicate copy paper.  Because of this, I've found that archivists are typically able jam more information per linear foot in collections created later.  As you move back in American history, collections tend to be more fragile and the paper becomes thicker, so it takes up slightly more room on the shelf.  

I'm sure that by now you're really, really curious about the history of carbon paper, so click here for the non-stop action of paper history.  

An additional factor when thinking about what an archival collection contains is to ask, how much of the collection will be useful to you?  While an undergraduate, I looked through some of the YMCA archives at the University of Minnesota.  The collection contained a large number photo slides that were of interest to me.  The slides, held in thick plastic sheets, take up a lot of room compared to paper.  In other words, if your linear foot contains only correspondence it will probably take a bit longer to trudge through.  If the collection contains things like photo slides, pamphlets, or, I don't know, how about credit cards and gift cards (really?), the collection should take less time to examine per linear foot.  This picture is closer to what I'm thinking of, except, instead of some nerdy card game, the sheets contain sweet historic slides.

Finally, what type of notes do you take when visiting archives and how much do you intend to copy or photograph?  Historians frequently talk about their methods of taking photographs in the archives, but we often fail to create dialogue about how we take notes.  I use Microsoft Word's note taking feature on my MacBook.  I find this to be must faster than taking notes by hand and it allows me to transcribe a much larger number of documents word for word.  If you hope to take photographs of archival materials, make sure the archives allow you to do so.  If not, inquire in advance how much it will cost to make photocopies and budget the added cost into your grant proposals.  If you're taking notes by hand, it will probably take you much longer to get through the "average" linear foot.  If you're taking photographs, you can get through documents much faster, because you only have to skim them to see if they are relevant to your project (I'll only add that having a camera that snaps and reboots quickly is essential for efficient work in the archives).  

The difference between the two collections I've chosen to look at for this summer could not be more striking.  While both involve museums, one consists of documents from the mid-19th century while the other comes from the mid-20th century.  The first contained thicker documents and more miscellany that wasn't useful for my project.  I moved through the collection fairly quickly and certainly much faster than I anticipated.   The collection I am working my way through now contains hundreds of information filled sets of correspondence, all typed on extremely thin carbon paper.  The work is extremely slow.  

So how long will it take you to get through that linear foot of archival documents?  The answer, unfortunately, is "it depends".      

FOIA!

Update (6/19): Amazing how much can change in one day...yesterday I FOIA'd 119 boxes of material. 119. Just about everything I tried to access yesterday (from State Dept. records on refugees to Congressional files) was still classified. Lovely. Setting aside the issue of State granting my request, every single file would have to be screened before I could see it. Chances I see these boxes before I finish my Ph.D.? Slim. (Granted if there was an actual list of boxes, rather than just a collection description, I wouldn't have had to request all 119 boxes - I probably wouldn't have had to request more than 20 or so, but since there isn't, there's no way to know. What a wonderful catch-22.)
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I filed my first Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) today. The request was surprisingly easy – I just had to fill out a brief form with the location and description of the documents (indicated by a slip of paper in the archival file, stating that the documents had been removed for security reasons,) and my contact information. No reason needed or requested. They are required to respond in writing within six weeks, though this doesn’t mean that I’ll actually get the documents.

For some reason filing this request made me very happy. We’ll see what happens…

Delving into State…

I finally got out to the National Archives College Park today. The shuttle from NARA I took about 45 minutes each way, and the building itself is pretty set off from the highway. The archives building is massive and quite beautiful, though very modern and minimalist - supposedly it’s the biggest archives building in the world. The reading room has massive floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over a forest that makes for a really pleasant experience, especially when the sun is shining. As opposed to the neoclassical (or just plain antique) reading room of NARA I, the entire College Park building is relatively new, spacious, and brightly lit.

The amazing thing about College Park is that many if not most of the procedures are completely different than those used by the downtown facility. For one thing you check your bags in lockers BEFORE going up to the research floors, meaning that you don’t have to have security look through all of your stuff on the way out, since your bags were never anywhere near archival materials. Also, whereas at NARA I, the archivists filed all of my requests (and found the boxes themselves as well,) here the archivists help you with the massive binders of finding aides, and then help you fill out the call slips. (Granted there are MANY more people using the College Park archives, but still.) They are also much more strict about security clearances – to copy, or even photograph, declassified materials you have to first get the boxes checked by the staff, and they give you a small tab (with the collection number and DECLASSIFIED on it,) to place on each page before copying.

There are a number of collections at College Park that I wanted to look at, but I came today to look at the State Department Collections (RG59,) so that’s what I’ll talk about.

Holy. Crap.

I had been warned that the collection is NOT easy to access, but wow was this was a challenge. The issue isn’t so much getting access to the actual records, but navigating the finding aides. There are two types of aides for the State Department records: Central Decimal Files, and Lot number files. The Central Decimal Files are basically just subject index guides, arranged chronologically (so there is a 1910-1949 binder, a 1950-1963 binder, etc.) These binders are broken up into different “classes” of records (and the classes don’t carry over from one binder to the next.) Even working within the classes themselves is difficult. Once you find the numbers you’re looking for (say, 150 for immigration,) you then fill out a call slip with the number and the years. The kicker is, there’s no way to tell how many boxes you’ll get, and you can only request a total of 24 at a time. (My first try netted 10 boxes for 6 call slips.) Also, many of the Central Decimal Files that involve correspondence between two countries require you to find the special country code for each before submitting.

Lot number files are arranged in binders by category – Wartime Refugees, International Organizations, certain major figures, etc. With these files you have to first find the proper Entry number that you are looking for, along with the box numbers that you want. Then you have to go to the location files (marked with a blue dot), and look up the stack location, shelf position, etc., before filling out all of the information.

The archivists have to check all files to make sure that (a) they’re not a microfilm, and (b) they’re not classified. Even if they’ve been declassified though, they can still be harder to get – if the records are in the “631” area, they can only be pulled twice daily. Oh, and did I mention that regular files are either housed in the “150” or “250” section of the archives, and you can only request files from one location per pull? Thankfully the archivists are very patient and helpful…

I think I’ve got the hand of the system, but honestly, there is a TON of material out there, and unlike the legislative records I’ve been working with, it seems like I’ll have to do much more digging to get through these records.

I have some more thoughts on the State Department records themselves, and the range of equipment being used at College Park to document the materials, but I’ll save that for another post.

What I learned today...

A few random thoughts on my time at NARA today:

I started on the Senate Judiciary Committee records today, and the first thing that hit me was how well organized these records were. Each box and file was clearly labeled (and the label matched what was inside,) the boxes had indexes in some cases, and more or less the records were in good shape. 16 boxes so far...and these only cover 1954-1960, and only on refugees.

I also found out that I can only take about 170 pictures (w/o flash) before my camera battery dies. I need to start bringing my camera charger with me - I think this is going to be brutal on my rechargeable battery.

From what I read today it seems like the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 was much more controversial than I had previously thought (or had previously seen in the literature.) The Act is usually portrayed as either an emergency piece of legislation that only functioned on a very narrow level, or as one of the first to break down the strictures of the McCarran-Walter Act, by letting in refugees over and above quota limitations. From what I saw today, it seems that while the Act itself contained a number of more liberal provisions, the administrators dragged their feet and really slowed the numbers being admitted. This led to a showdown between between John Foster Dulles (the Secretary of State,) and Edward Corsi, a former Commissioner of Immigration in 1955. The archival record seems to show much more pushback on the restrictiveness of the RRA in general, and much more of a connection to the Refugee-Escapee Act of 1957 than I've seen anywhere. I'm still working out what exactly this means for the greater story of postwar immigration and refugee policy, but it is promising...

Adventures in the Library of Congress

I went to the Library of Congress today as the National Anthropological Archives are closed on Mondays.  I think I nearly avoided a lifetime ban from the Main Reading Room.

In the midst of my afternoon, with my pile of books sitting next to my laptop, I heard some noise and fuss next to me.  I was sitting in the last row, up against the wall, with only two other patrons.  By the time I looked up, the lady sitting next to me was packing up her things and whispering loudly to the man next to her in an upset tone, "This is a library!"  Obviously, the man next to her had done something inappropriate.  It was clear that she was getting up to immediately report him to security, but I had visions of her saying to the guard, "the man in the back said something inappropriate to me," causing the guard to flip a coin and ask me, instead of the man next to me, to leave the reading room never to return.  

Thankfully, the accused was given a verbal warning and he picked up and left.  Anyway, I am grateful that the other library patron gave security a detailed description of the man that was bothering her.  Thanks to her description, I will be allowed in to the Library of Congress again next Monday.

Welcome to DC or Spinning My Wheels

I finally made it into D.C. yesterday, and stepping off the train the first thing I felt was the heat and humidity. I forgot just how hot it is here, and I think after two years in California, I’ve lost my tolerance for anything other than temperate climates. I also forgot about the flash thunderstorms on the east coast, but thankfully missed the vast majority of the heavy rain. (There is something really beautiful though about sitting inside watching the lightning.)

This afternoon I went to NARA (Downtown) for the first time. I had already spoken with the INS archivist (see previous posts,) who assured me that there were two boxes of materials already waiting for me here. I got to the archives and went through the registration process (signing into the building and going through the airport-style security; registering my computer and camera serial numbers; registering for a researcher card and going through an informational slideshow about preservation.) At this point the archivist on the main floor told me my materials should already by in the reading room, so I headed to the second floor. When I got into the reading room and went through security, the people at the desk told me they had no record of my materials, and sent me back to the first floor. Back again on the first floor the front-desk archivist sent me to the finding aid room, where they also could not locate my files or an archivist who knew about my case. After about 45 minutes we finally reached the INS archivist who came down and found my boxes. By this time I had missed the 1:30pm pull time, and had to kill another half an hour before the 2:30 pull time (basically I had to wait for a page to literally bring the boxes two flights up. This is only done at specific times during the day, naturally.)

Thankfully while I was waiting I did have the time to meet with an archivist from the Legislative Division, to talk about Senate and House Subcommittee Hearings. Hopefully I will be able to get unpublished documents on committee hearings for various Congressional legislation, but again, since everything needs to be screened in advance, I need to write up a list of the House and Senate Bill Numbers for each piece of legislation I’m looking for, and email it to the archivist to see if they have the files I need.

At 2:30 I headed to the reading room and finally got 2 boxes of materials. Surprisingly, considering all of the security getting into the room, the staff basically leaves you alone once you’re there. I was also struck by how noisy the room was – people freely talking loudly…shocking for a library. Of the two boxes of materials, one contained nothing really relevant – mainly documents too early for my project. The other box seems promising, and I was able to photograph most of it today. Unfortunately it’s mostly correspondence INTO the INS – I was hoping to find responses FROM the INS as well. I may just be missing an obvious oversight, but where do I find the outgoing records???

In terms of equipment – I bought a new tripod before I left California, and it’s made life a lot easier. I’m using a Cannon PowerShot SD400 (5 Megapixels) to document my work. So far so good…

National Anthropological Archives: Day 1

After taking a bus to the train station, then a train to the Mall, then a shuttle to the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center, I began work in the archives this morning.  The trip takes a little over an hour.  I plan on trying a different route tomorrow to shorten things up.   

Getting started was a pretty painless experience, given the fact that the Smithsonian is a big place and the archives there are pretty vast.  The people have been exceedingly friendly and helpful.  

This morning I dove into the Army Medical Museum files.  Combing through this material is somewhat like looking for needles in a haystack, except that I find a needle every couple of hours.  So maybe it is more like buying a bunch of lotto scratch tickets, winning big from time to time, and winning just enough to buy more tickets with a few others.  The general narrative of the transfer of human remains has been laid out pretty clearly by other scholars, but little has been done to illuminate the details of how this collection was brought together and later transferred to the Smithsonian.  Some of the details, as I learned today, are more than a bit gruesome and bring to light some of the more painful legacies of the racial struggles of our nation's history.  

As a side note, this project is also giving me an opportunity to work on reading 19th century penmanship.  If you have any words of wisdom on reading mid-to-late 19th century writing, I would love to hear them.

Pre-NARA part 2

Still not quite in D.C. yet, but I did hear back from the NARA archivist in charge of the INS collections. I had sent him a list of about 40 files that I wanted to look at, to see if they existed, and to get them approved. Of the 40, he's gotten through about 20, and of those 20, about half don't exist. Interestingly enough, almost all of the missing files are categorized under the keyword "children." I'm not quite sure if I should take that as some kind of sign...Still, it's nice to know there are already 2 boxes of materials ready for me to look at.

I've also sat down and compiled a list of all the collections I want to look at - INS records and legislative archives at NARA Downtown; State Department and Displaced Persons Commission Records at NARA College Park; and the Emmanuel Celler records at the Library of Congress. There's also a number of items related to "National Origins" in the Secretary of Agriculture's "Foreign Policy" files. I'm still not sure what immigration, foreign policy, and national origins have to do with Agriculture (at least post-WWII), but I guess we'll find out!