Cleaning Up Freer’s Attic

Collections change over time. Collections often come from chaos. Archival collections are often a rushed boxing up after someone passes. The collector is no longer there to ask questions of. This inherently leads to questions. What was this ledger for? Who were these letters to? How did they want their art displayed?

Archivists, museum staff, and researchers grapple with these questions every day. It is often where interesting exhibits come from.

Head Archivist, David Hogge, puzzling out how to organize various photographs.

The Freer | Sackler Archives made the decision a year ago to overhaul the Charles Lang Freer Papers. Please click here for a link to his new and improved finding aid! Freer was the founder of our museum. Opened in 1923, it was the first topic-focused museum at the Smithsonian and its first art museum. Freer did not live to see his museum completed, but the museum did receive, on top of all of his art collection, his vast collection of papers.

Freer was a meticulous man when it came to his correspondence, his purchasing, and, well, everything. This has left a rich collection of papers for museum staff and researchers to use when studying a Freer art object or the man himself.

Not all paper is of equal size.

The finding aid (guide to any collection) for Freer’s papers, like so many other “legacy” archival collections, was created before modern archival standards were established. F|S Archives staff made the decision to overhaul the Freer papers after having many problems in recent years, both finding items for researchers and dealing with how to organize their digital surrogates. You must have a firm handle on the physical side of any archival collection before you can even contemplate digitizing it.



Working in an archives means using your hands and handling physical objects from paper to film canisters.

Physical collection? What is that you ask? It must be hard to imagine in this age of digital smorgasbord that there are still items in the world that are only available in the physical format. Well, a large part of what archivists do is make available in a digital environment what was once only sitting on a shelf in a box and only a few passionate researchers even tried to look for. Everything in an archives is unique, one a kind, the only one in the world.

Archivists are working hard around the world to make unique pieces of human history available and accessible to all, please see this great blog post about putting more of human history online. So
digitizing archival materials is crucial to both outreach (anyone in the world can look at the digital surrogates from the various Smithsonian Archives) and to the long term life of the materials. Paper lasts a long time, but it does not exist forever.

How does one organize a physical collection? How does one re-think it? A collection is always organized to preserve any original organization of the creator, in this case Freer. There are times where it becomes obvious there was no organization to begin with. This is often the main mystery that archivists struggle with on a daily basis: did so and so want these papers this way? Were these postcards meant to go together? Was this part of their research patterns? Their collecting patterns?

Organizing ones thoughts the old fashioned way, on paper.

When archivists make decisions about organization, we are not copy-pasting some files to a new folder in a computer drive. We are weeding through boxes and boxes of materials and attempting to form them into a unit of thought or creator's process. Think of it this way, what if you had to organize Bob Dylan’s writing process. There would be tons of paper or scraps of papers and you have to figure out if he had an order to begin with or was it all chaos? Is imposing some sort of order, potentially where none exists, harming the integrity of Dylan’s creative process or are you creating just enough access points so that a researcher writing the next bestselling Dylan biography can find what he/she needs to do their job?

Basically, does taking a mountain of paper and creating an access pathway (e.g. putting the materials in folders and boxes with labels), a way of thinking about them, looking at them, destroy intrinsically what they are?

The slow task of properly identifying and labeling boxes.  Lots of glue gets on your fingers.

There were many sections of Freer’s papers like this; piles of paper all next to one another and yet had nothing in common. F|S Archives Staff had to separate out these papers into neat pathways that would lead researchers to access points of useful information. For example, what now constitutes Series One in the Freer Papers, was once a few boxes that were just near one another. If you look at the finding aid now, you can see clear pathways/access points (e.g. Memberships and Honorary Awards, Freer Residences, Genealogical Materials, etc.). These pathways are called Series and Subseries in the archival world. Neat piles of paper that all have their own theme and purpose. This makes it much easier for researchers to find what they need; whether that is physically handling the materials or doing a Google word search. We have made these important documents that much more accessible to the citizens of the world.

This aspect of creating finding aids is the complex intellectual part. There are other aspects to cleaning up a collection that are much more hands on.

One of the biggest decisions the F|S Archives made was to completely re-number the boxes and materials in the Freer papers. This may seem like a small thing. Well, the Freer papers hold over 300 boxes and this would not just be re-numbering the boxes in a digital document (the Freer finding aid), it would entail physically pasting new labels on all of the over 300 boxes. You are probably thinking, why would you do that?!

A wall of a job of well done.

Well, most of the Freer papers are not digitized. The only way to track and monitor the small physical components of the collection is to have solid and accurate box numbers. In addition, the archives has to have strong control of the physical space our materials reside in. We have a space matrix documenting where the materials of all of our, over 100, collections are shelved.

So, yes, having accurate labels on the physical materials in an archive is essential. The long term goal – archives often have to think in the long term, collections are too large to allow for instantaneous work – is to enable much of Freer's papers to be digitized, so that more scholars around the world can examine his materials and learn more about Charles Lang Freer, his art collecting, and the art pieces themselves.

Lara Amrod, Archivist

F|S Archives

Collection Spotlight: Thomas Indian School glass plate negatives

Thomas Indian School Class of 1912 (N49053). Thomas Indian School glass plate negatives (NMAI.AC.061), National Museum of the American Indian Archive Center.

As classes come to an end and students sign ‘best wishes’ in freshly printed yearbooks, it is also a good time to highlight and remember the history of Indian boarding schools in our country. The Thomas Indian School glass plate negatives collection (NMAI.AC.061), newly processed, digitized and now available online, is one collection in the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), Archive Center that brings attention to this important story.

Thomas Indian School student performance (N49048). Thomas Indian School glass plate negatives (NMAI.AC.061), National Museum of the American Indian Archive Center.

While NMAI holds many Indian boarding school photographs in its collections, this set of photographs is remarkable for many reasons. At first glance, the photographs appear to depict fun or happy events at the institution such as school plays and graduation ceremonies. However, as any good photo historian will tell you, only part of the story is captured in the photographs themselves. By observing what is left out of frame the photographs can reveal a much more complex student experience.

Notably absent from the Thomas Indian School photographs is any evidence of Native cultural heritage or material culture. The school most likely enforced acculturation and assimilation by means of prohibiting Native languages and traditional cultural practices which was common for Indian boarding schools of this time period. Instead of photographs of children playing with traditional corn husk dolls, for example, there are scenes of Girl Scouts, basketball teams, and Christmas celebrations. Other photographs in the collection depict girls in cooking classes, boys in woodshop, and children tending livestock. These classes were designed so that Native students could practice a trade within non-Native communities after graduation.

Thomas Indian School cooking class (N49104). Thomas Indian School glass plate negatives (NMAI.AC.061), National Museum of the American Indian Archive Center.

Although not as well-known as other Indian schools- such as Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania- the Thomas Indian school was one of the oldest and longest running Indian boarding schools in North America. It also maintained one of the largest student bodies housing as many as 200 students during the school year. Located on the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation in New York State, the Thomas Asylum for Orphaned and Destitute Indian Children, as the school was originally called, was established as a private institution in 1855. In 1875 the school was transferred to the care of the New York State Board of Charities and in 1905 it was renamed the Thomas Indian School. Iroquois children from Seneca (Cattaraugus), Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Tuscarora communities attended the school until it was finally closed by the state in 1957.

Thomas Indian School Girl Scouts (N49064). Thomas Indian School glass plate negatives (NMAI.AC.061), National Museum of the American Indian Archive Center.

While there are reports of some students having positive experiences at the Thomas Indian School, in part because of the friendships they made, it is important to remember that this was not the experience for many Native boys and girls. In an era when most boarding schools had a mission to “civilize” young American Indians or as the Carlisle motto dictates, “kill the Indian, save the man,” many children suffered poor treatment and were stripped of their culture, identity, and families.

Though we can deduce a lot of information by reading and interpreting the photographs there are still many unanswered questions. The most obvious and perhaps the most important lingering questions being--Who were these students? What were their names and what stories are still untold? Moving forward, NMAI plans to provide these photographs to the Thomas Indian School reunion that will take place in New York in the fall. The hope is that family members and former students will be able to identify individuals so that we can finally put names to faces and make sure their stories don’t stay untold.

Emily Moazami, Assistant Head Archivist
National Museum of the American Indian