This post is part of the Intergenerational Conversations series.

Review of Trudy Peterson, “Reading, ’Riting, and ’Rithmetic: Speculations on Change in Research Processes,” American Archivist 55, no. 3 (1992): 414–419, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.55.3.r34727q673748802.

By Elliott Kuecker, Teaching Assistant Professor, School of Information and Library Science at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill [PDF Full Text] | [PDF Article + Full Text]

In 1991, Trudy H. Peterson, president of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) during 1990–1991, delivered her presidential address “Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic: Speculations on Change in Research Process.” By the time she wrote this, she had formerly served in the position of assistant archivist for the National Archives (1987–1993) and would a year later be named Acting Archivist of the United States, becoming the first woman to hold such a title. She had also written theoretical pieces on what constitutes a document[1] and an experimental piece—“An Archival Bestiary”—that provided a genus, species, habitat, and distinguishing characteristics for archival norms like personal papers and files.[2] In fact, ten years before this address, she had already written a different speculative piece on how recordkeeping practices may be changing, which delved into the history of counting and accounting for phenomena, and potential futures for this in light of computational methods and computer data.[3]

Peterson uses the term speculation in the title of several articles, including her 1991 SAA Presidential Address, suggesting that she is comfortable reflecting and theorizing about issues impacting archival science. Particularly in this presidential address, she focuses her attention on the fundamental aspects of education and research skills—reading, writing, and mathematics—which grew out of national conversations centered on how these literacies were declining among the population. She cites the College Board’s assessment that the 1991 class of high schoolers had the poorest SAT reading and writing scores in the history of the SAT (p. 416). News sources had reported that more people were watching TV news than reading the newspaper, fewer jobs were requiring writing skills, most people were calculating their daily math problems with devices rather than paper, and, in general, the public was exhibiting less of “what the Germans call sitzfleisch, patience, if you will” (p. 416). As Peterson notes, at least in a democratic ideal, all citizens are potential users of the archives, and thus it matters how the general population goes about reading, writing, and calculating problems. Her presidential address, then, is a speculation on how shifts in literacies might urge archives to adjust to better serve users.

A major theme in Peterson’s address that stood out to me is her discussion of textuality as it relates to literacies and archival practice. She writes that there is “the category of users who want nontextual material. They seek an image, a bit of footage, an architectural rendering. They have always had trouble deciding what they want from a written description, and archivists have always had trouble providing satisfactory words to substitute for pictures” (p. 416). Peterson’s claim is nuanced in that she is not suggesting that a decline of traditional literacy skills has led to a population only interested in visual materials; rather, she notes that there have always been users who sought out nontextual materials in the archives. What’s more, existing modes of archival description can often fail to adequately represent such materials. In this way, Peterson is moving away from the simple argument that might suggest that literacy skills had been in decline and therefore that people cannot properly understand text-heavy archival descriptions. She is also not exactly writing the more contemporarily common commentary that argues that some archival description are harmful or colonial in nature.[4] She is suggesting, rather, that language itself is limited when it comes to representing objects and ideas in the world. It is not always the fault of the reader (the archival user) or the writer (the archivist), but sometimes merely a limitation of medium, as text can only do so much.

In some ways, we could say that by now, more than twenty years after Peterson’s address, the problems of representing the visual have been improved through digitization. Digitization can solve some problems by letting the visuals represent themselves with fewer text-based mediators. At the same time, Peterson’s point remains true, given that most nontextual archival materials remain undigitized, and many of them exist ad hoc within text-heavy collections. In these cases, it is still common to see a finding aid merely gesture toward the existence of a nontextual source by noting that one might find a photograph or blueprint in a folder. To learn more, users would have to find and consult the physical material, bringing us back to the original limitations that Peterson describes. Complicating the conversation further, Peterson’s concern about the ability of text to represent the nontextual could also be expanded to other conversations of representation. There are plenty of claims—Walter Benjamin’s famous “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,”[5] for example—that argue that a facsimile is merely a poor representation of the real thing, containing no aura, and a changed context and physicality. In this way, Peterson’s concern about representation and textuality could manifest into other concerns over limitation.

Another particularly interesting facet of Peterson’s idea is her choice to say that some users have always desired nontextual archival material. This is a pertinent claim given the ongoing work within archival theory and practice regarding diversifying medium and format in archival collections, a topic that is far from settled. Hugh Taylor had written, some years before Peterson, about the importance of art as documentation, noting that archives could treat art as records, which differs from how museums treat such materials.[6] Notably, Joan Schwartz wrote a convincing piece advocating that texts are not the only important record type and that archivists had “paid little heed to visual materials” through time.[7] Archivists, she says, not users, are to blame for the emphasis on textual documents.[8] It can be easy to take for granted just how text-focused archives have been and continue to be, given that there are so many examples of other kinds of materials being kept in the Library of Congress alone, including field recordings, baseball cards, buttons, and film.[9] Peterson’s piece also conjures very contemporary truths: archivists struggle with how to properly collect and maintain certain nontextual or nontraditional records because they introduce peculiarities into processing[10] and caretaking,[11] and the creation of textual and nontextual records imply something about our emphases on certain kinds of literacies as more important than others.

The reason why it is important to emphasize the nontextual is also a topic Peterson addresses, and for some readers, our interest in the nontextual may differ from Peterson’s. For her, as someone who represents a national organization, the importance of nontextual materials directly relates to how general American users consume and circulate information. Her piece continually mentions the difference in “elite” and “non-elite” users, as she is equally interested in the trained academic researcher, curious non-expert, independent scholar, and genealogist. She notes that knowing how to read has not always been a human skill afforded to all, but oral traditions have long been important, including public readings of information. In this way, Peterson bases many of her claims about creating democratic archives on the historical proclivities and shifting skill sets of average Americans. She often cites demographics to show that she is aware of the general population’s education status at the time of her address. In other words, part of her goal is to push for the nontextual precisely because that is likely what the average American is interested in, from the material type to how they must request access to those materials from the archives.

While it is important to consider the interests of the general American public, I would add to Peterson’s emphasis by saying there are more ways to frame the significance of the nontextual in the archives. Beyond the idea of a nation of citizen archivists, I have often found myself more interested in the niche, marginal, and specific. While it is important to understand how archives can create or maintain broad appeal and keep up with trends in users’ tastes, there is also value in speaking to specific audiences, providing a kind of appeal that is deeply contextual. Looking at something like Land-based sound archiving, as described by Spy Dénommé-Welch, Jean Becker, and Cecilia Garcia Vega, we can consider archiving a nontextual entity—sound—that is so hyper-specific to one location that it must be recorded on-site, constituting a type of fieldwork.[12] Or we might consider the goals of something like a queer community archives that keeps buttons, t-shirts, and other ephemera from a local queer community. These nontextual materials are important in nearly opposite ways from Peterson’s original justifications of such: they do not represent all of America’s preferences and interests, as most people would likely not have a deep research interest in them, and they have very little to do with national literacies or skill sets. Peterson’s point about archives responding to the general population of America is important, but it can also be complicated to think through the value of representing the niches of human experience that might not fit the general needs and proclivities of the broadly construed population at a given time.

Beyond textual representation and nontextual materials, Peterson’s general concern over the textual also informs her ideas about access. She notes that finding aids, in addition to being limited in representing visual materials, require a kind of tedious reading practice on the part of users. In Peterson’s moment, when the national conversation was all about how much people did not want to read when they could access information in other ways, there was a sense that users would not desire to use finding aids. She notes that even the “intellectual elite . . . [may be] less patient and more resistant to reading written finding aids” as computational methods and visual literacies become more widespread (p. 416). Finding aids and their limitations seem to always haunt archival studies, and it is right around the time of Peterson’s address that we see the rise of discussions about Encoded Archival Description (EAD), when it began as a research project at the University of California at Berkeley in 1993.[13] Though EAD 1.0 was not released until years later in 1998, it provided a way for users to access finding aids in digital form.[14] Furthermore, it allowed for different ways of representing finding aids including drop-down menus, hyperlinks connecting collections or tags, and other features. In many ways, however, the finding aid is a textual form that went from paper to digital, without significantly changing other than being available in digital form. Peterson’s speculation about what users might want with archival description is something beyond the finding aid altogether, perhaps more like user tagging[15] and the use of folksonomy in archives,[16] where there is greater interplay between user and archives, and the distinction between the “elite” and “non-elite” user is flattened in some ways.

Finally, Peterson’s emphasis on the ways in which a user’s literacy skills impact the archives led her to yet another topic that is still significant today. She speculates that archives were suffering from users’ poor perceptions of them, noting that “these persons are already intimidated by coming to an archives; as the facility in reading declines, and if archives are perceived as places where you must read—a page, a screen, anything—to get service, archives will seem even more intimidating” (p. 416). Her speculations are indeed true today if we align them with recent work around archival outreach and primary source instruction. In many cases, the goal of outreach and instruction is merely to reduce the intimidation users purportedly feel regarding visiting the archives. Peterson’s way of describing archives as “places where you must read” (p. 416) is perhaps not so different than the findings of those who study perceptions of archives and who note that the general stereotypes of the public include “dark, dusty stacks filled with ancient paper.”[17] Dark and formidable, clinical and sterile, or perhaps a place where one mustread and read well—these descriptors suggest that plenty of people may not know who the archives are for, but they believe archives are not for them. Expanding Peterson’s take on the archival issue of intimidation as centered on reading could be a useful future theoretical investigation.

Peterson’s tendency to reflect on her time and respond with optimism and invitations for change, rather than giving into the anxiety that can easily overcome all of us during changing times, is quite refreshing in an era when concern over generative artificial intelligence (AI) has overtaken many conversations about literacies and skill sets. As Peterson notes, the concern over changing literacy was a trending topic in 1991, but it was indeed one that had existed long before that time. Word processors and word processing software also caused a great deal of anxiety, and of course typewriters before that.[18] It can be easy to forget that one’s own time is not the only time in which humans felt urgent concern over how changes in the way people create and circulate information might turn a field upside down. Revisiting Peterson’s address shows not only that the field has been concerned with issues like these for several decades and has often adjusted, but it also provides a good example for how to embrace the spirit of speculation—reflecting and theorizing on what the field might do in light of big changes in things like literacy. As they always have, not only are users’ skills and preferences changing, but the very concepts of reading, writing, and calculating are dynamic themselves.

Given this, Peterson suggests that we “look at the public appetite for archives” (p. 419), urging that we “remember that we hold information that our fellow citizens crave” (p. 419). The language of appetite and craving takes us to a place that Peterson did not directly go but still implied: some people have a sense of desire for the archives. I pondered Peterson’s reason for ending her address in this way. Perhaps the questions of literacy and their shifts can be reframed to ask: who desires the archives, what do they desire within them, and how do we create the conditions for those desires to be fulfilled?

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[1] Trudy Peterson, “Dangerous Archives,” Fourteenth Polar Libraries Colloquy Proceedings, Summer 1992, 21–28.

[2] Trudy Peterson, “An Archival Bestiary,” American Archivist 54, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 192–205, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.54.2.w66674576j316v53.

[3] Trudy Peterson, “Counting and Accounting: A Speculation on Change in Recordkeeping Practices,” American Archivist 45, no. 2 (1982): 131–34, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.45.2.fr6m5133860t0j66.

[4] Tonia Sutherland and Alyssa Purcell, “A Weapon and a Tool,” The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion 5, no. 1 (2021): 60–78.

[5] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

[6] Hugh Taylor, “Documentary Art and the Role of the Archivist,” in Imagining Archives: Essays and Reflections by Hugh A. Taylor, eds. Terry Cook and Gordon Dodds (Lanham, Md., and Oxford: Society of American Archivists and Association of Canadian Archivists in association with The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2003), 75–89. 

[7] Joan M. Schwartz, “Coming to Terms with Photographs: Descriptive Standards, Linguistic ‘Othering,’ and the Margins of Archivy,” Archivaria 54 (Fall 2002): 145.

[8] Schwartz, “Coming to Terms,” 143.

[9] Library of Congress, “About the Library: Fascinating Facts,” https://www.loc.gov/about/fascinating-facts/ (accessed January 21, 2024).

[10] For example, sheet music can introduce descriptive issues even though it is similar to more traditional textual sources, as described in Adriana P. Cuervo and Eric J. Harbeson, “Not Just Sheet Music: Describing Print and Manuscript Music in Archives and Special Collections,” Archival Issues 33, no. 1 (2011): 41–55.

[11] Some materials, such as video games, present issues related to technological obsolescence and the decay of both physical and digital properties, mentioned by scholars including Benjamin C. Todd, “Preserving Video Game Significance: A Practical Guide for Video Game Preservation, Exhibition, and their Significant Properties” (2019), http://jhir.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/62117.

[12] Spy Dénommé-Welch, Jean Becker, and Cecilia Garcia Vega, “Moving Toward Land-Based Sound Archiving and Composition: Reflecting on Field Research From the Project Sonic Coordinates: Decolonizing Through Land-Based Composition,” Collections 18, no. 1 (2022): 72–83.

[13] Meg Sweet “The Internationalisation of EAD (Encoded Archival Description),” Journal of the Society of Archivists 22, no. 1 (2001): 33.

[14] Daniel V. Pitti, “Encoded Archival Description: an introduction and overview,” New Review of Information Networking 5, no. 1 (1999): 61–69, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13614579909516936.

[15] Alex H. Poole, “Social Tagging and Commenting in Participatory Archives: A Critical Literature Review,” in Participatory Archives: Theory and Practice, ed. Edward Benoit III and Alexandra Eveleigh (American Library Association: 2019), 15–31.

[16] Ana Margarida Dias da Silva, “Folksonomies in Archives: Controlled Collaboration for Specific Documents,” Ariadne 77 (2017), https://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/77/margaridadiasdasilva/.

[17] Caitlin Patterson, “Perceptions and Understandings of Archives in the Digital Age,” American Archivist 79, no. 2 (2016): 340, https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-79.2.339.

[18] See Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).