Post-Its and More: Dealing with Supplementary Material

One thing we have learned this semester is that often the value of a photograph does not lie in the content of the photograph. Without context, historical photographs would mean much less. This week I began working with my family’s old photographs, including a 19^th-century album of CDVs. This is a case in which context means everything. Just as important as the photos themselves are the identity of the sitters, their relationship to us, and the long process of continual reinterpretation that the book has undergone through the years.

This album has proved problematic for me. Besides some obvious preservation problems, there is a lot of supplementary material. There is a newspaper clipping in front, for example, and I have no idea what its relationship to our family is. There are also handwritten notes on lined paper stored in the pages, as well as sticky notes my mother stuck over each page when she was trying to figure out who the sitters were. Going through this album I was reminded of the associated material that was mentioned in Teper’s article on newspaper morgues, when she surveyed other newspaper morgues about how they handled all the notes, newspaper clippings, and other assorted material that often goes along with newspaper photographs (Teper 2004, 116). Like many newspaper morgues, I have all of this extra material that has become associated with these photographs. So what should I do with it all?

Photo of the album. See the sticky note on the left and two captions on the right in two different styles of handwriting.

At this point in the album’s history, the supplementary material and the notations have become archival themselves. The notations are the result of several generations of family members going through the book, adding names and making notes. On my mother’s sticky notes there are occasional cross-outs and additions as she discovered new information about who might be depicted in the photograph. While this further reinforces the idea that you cannot trust captions, it also shows the continued reinterpretation of the photographs and shows an intellectual process that might prove important later (we still do not know for sure who they all are, and it is interesting to know what other theories have been suggested in the past).

Three different sticky notes, including several cross-outs and additions.

The extra material in this album all add to its value and context. The extra material supplement the “associational” value of discussed in Photographs: Archival Care and Management (Ritzenthaler and Vogt-O’Connor 2006, 109-110). The pictures and their notations are most significant because of its association to my family, rather than because of its historical, monetary, or artistic value. The notations are part of the context of the album and part of our family history. I think that they should be retained, but they probably should not be retained inside the book itself. The sticky notes in particular are not good things to leave inside; they are certainly not acid free. I have personally seen enough adhesive damage from my brief period as an art museum conservation intern to know that the sticky notes should be taken out sooner rather than later. In this case, I would argue that their value is not so important that they warrant being left alone at the risk of damaging the album itself. But what is the best way to retain the intellectual idea of these items without leaving them physically in place?

Two separate notes (with cross-outs and additions), plus a handwritten caption.

In Teper’s survey, she found that 54% of respondents kept the associated material together, but did not necessarily keep the material with the photograph (Teper 2006, 116). I did not find this information particularly useful for my case, so I did a little more research to find the ways in which other people had dealt with this sort of problem. In 2001, there was a thread on the Archives and Archivists Listserv that discussed how to handle sticky notes, and a few different options were thrown around: 1) photocopy the whole item with the sticky notes on and then take the sticky notes off (and possibly throw them away); 2) photocopy the whole item just to be safe but still leave the sticky notes on; or 3) take the sticky notes off, fold them into archival paper, then clip the protected sticky notes back onto the original (Hayes 2001).

As with many situations in the archives world, I do not think there is one right way to do it. Each situation is unique, and if there is important context or other information that you need to preserve then you must think about the way that makes the most sense for your case. But the important overarching idea I can gather from this discussion is that documentation is always important, especially if you are going to change things around. Retaining important context is always a priority, and that may mean that you have to take a lot of extra steps to make sure that context is documented if you decide to change things around. For my own project, I have decided to be as cautious as possible and document too much, rather than too little. I have not removed anything yet, but I think I may do the following:

1. Photograph the entire album with the sticky notes in place.
2. Make an inventory in Word or Excel recording the text of every notation given for each photograph in the album, and who supplied the caption (if known). Include cross-outs in this inventory.
3. Remove the sticky notes and loose paper notes from the album. Store the notes in a separate folder in their original order, to be used for reference if there is any confusion.

To me, this method makes the most sense for my situation. It will preserve the intellectual thought process, it will provide us with a digital copy of the original with sticky notes intact in case we need it, and it will allow us to view the original album without the intrusive sticky notes while simultaneously helping to preserve it for a longer time.

Context is important, but figuring out how to preserve that context can sometimes be tricky. It is up to us as archivists to figure out a solution, and hopefully in this case I have made a reasonable one.

References

Hayes, Katherine A. “Post-it Notes in Collections.” Archives and Archivists Listserv, July 11, 2001. Accessed April 26, 2013. http://www.ibiblio.org/archives-archivists/msg14267.html.

Ritzenthaler, Mary L., and Diane Vogt-O’Connor. Photographs: Archival Care and Management. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006.

Teper, Jennifer Hain. “Newspaper Photo Morgues – A Survey of Institutional Holdings and Practices.” Library Collections, Acquisitions, & Technical Services 28 (2004): 106-125.