Archivists at University of ArkansasSpecial Collections in Mullins Library are processing former Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s papers for public research. The digital portion tops 50 terabytes. The largest accession arrived after Hutchinson left the governor’s office and had more than 400 records boxes. Staff are also processing Institute of International Education records on the Fulbright Program, a donation of more than 800 boxes. October is American Archives Month.
There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of items available to researchers, including the public, through Special Collections at the University of Arkansas. This month is American Archives Month, and to observe, we’re spending a few minutes this week exploring Special Collections in Mullins Library on the UA campus.
“So I’m here on a project basis working on the Asa Hutchinson’s papers digital component. So I am taking a look at the born-digital materials, especially things that were made on a computer and looking at how to preserve them and make them accessible to patrons.”
Laura Harmon is political papers archivist with Special Collections. Think about all the material associated with former Gov. Asa Hutchinson that will eventually be made available to us. He wasn’t just governor for eight years. He served in Congress, with the DEA and DHS. He was the head of the state’s Republican Party as it became the dominant party in the state.
And it’s likely his years as governor during the pandemic will have interest from researchers for decades to come. And archivists like Laura have to do a lot to get the materials ready for public inspection.
“A lot of what I did early was looking through all the materials, seeing what was there. It’s harder than people think to look through a lot of digital materials. I’m working with over 50 terabytes, which is hard to put into perspective, especially with all the pictures and documents.
“And then I’ve used a lot of automated processes to sort of go through everything, pull metadata, pull information and determine how it would be useful and how people can access and find it. Because preserving digital objects is one thing, and then letting people find them easily is an entirely different one.
“And at the University of Arkansas, there’s not a lot of set procedure or precedent for how we do this. So a lot of what I’ve been doing so far is figuring out what is best and what can be done in the future for other digital collections.”
“This is the material before we get to it.”
Todd Everett Lewis is lead processing archivist at Special Collections, so he sees donated and acquired materials long before we do.
“And what we’ll do is that we’ll go ahead and put that information into an inventory. Then we will remove the papers from this and put it into new folders like this. These are acid-free folders.
“And now for this particular assignment I’m having Rose write out this number here. That’s a series number in the subseries in the box number, folder number. And then this is the information on the person.”
And that means he leads a team that meticulously scrutinizes every inch of what needs to be processed. And that can require years because collections like the Asa Hutchinson materials are plentiful.
“The first accession came right after he retired from Congress. So that’s around 2001, 2002. Sometime back then. Then we received more materials after he had finished with the DHS in 2005. And then finally, we got our largest accession after he finished being governor. And that accession had over 400 records boxes.”
The staff here is working on more than one mega project at a time. Kayci Kruhmin, International Education Project archivist, is intimately familiar with donated materials from the Institute of International Education relating to the Fulbright Scholarship Program. This haul included more than 800 boxes.
“And about probably over 100,000 digital files. And so this project is mostly sorting that, getting it rehoused and getting it into a finding aid.”
Kellams: So when a donation like this is made and it’s massive, or what I would think is massive, I don’t know how it is relatively.
“Big to our standards.”
Kellams: OK. So do you just start?
“There are preliminary inventories that I can reference to kind of get an idea of what’s already in here. This one in particular came in a little bit mixed up. So really just keep track of everything you go through. And I’ve been trying to go through it linearly, just to try to keep track of everything. There’s no right way to do it.”
When these materials are eventually available to the public, they’ll likely be used by students, historians and other researchers. And in some time, that information passed along to the rest of us in books and articles.
Todd Everett Lewis says the generational importance of cataloging such substance is appreciated by the archivists in Special Collections.
“Yes, absolutely. And one of the great things about that is that we’re preserving history in a way in which it can’t be altered. Other people in the future may try to come up with interpretations, very often ones that are self-serving and politically motivated. But we have the documents here that shows what really happened.
“And I’m a historian first and foremost, more so than an archivist. I have a Ph.D. in history. And among the topics that I’ve done research on is lynching in Arkansas. And that’s what I did the research, which was in the early 1990s. There had been no research done on that topic.
“And so I ended up using old microfilm to find this, going back to the 1919 through about 1929. And it just astounded me just how many lynchings were occurring in Arkansas.
“It’s one of those things that you think happened in Reconstruction and that it’s sort of like it’s gone away. But no, you start going through the historical record and you discover these things.”
And yet there is still one more step to preserving and sharing all of this history. Once the information is annotated, cataloged and identified, it still must be actually digitized for public consumption. Just how that happens on Ozarks at Large next week.
Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
