This post is part of the Intergenerational Conversations series.

Review of William Maher, “Archives, Archivists, and Society,” American Archivist 61, no. 2 (Fall 1998): 252–65, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.61.2.f1555w1738v134n2.

By Samantha Cross, POP Archives [PDF Full Text] | [PDF Article + Full Text]

The saying goes, “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” and there is a massive amount of déjà vu that comes with reading William J. Maher’s 1997 and 1998 presidential addresses to the Society of American Archivists (SAA). Nearly thirty years later, there is nothing in the content of his addresses that has dramatically altered other than the technological boom of the early 2000s. It’s hard not to feel a sense of stagnation when looking back. Archives and archivists are still underfunded, understaffed, and under constant scrutiny by institutions and the public, all of them ready to justify cutbacks and demand greater sacrifices if they sense an opportunity to cut costs or fulfill an agenda. Bolstering those internal and external forces is the greater umbrella of popular culture and how media old and new influences public perception of the archival profession.

Pop culture may seem like a trivial thing to focus on, maybe too niche to some, but there is a very real correlation between professional visibility in the media and public sentiment toward that profession. Pop culture is heavily ingrained in our society. It is not a modern phenomenon either, but rather an ever-present byproduct of creativity and the very human desire to form community around shared experiences. We define decades and eras by their most prominent pop culture features and aesthetics from Victorian Gothic to 90s Grunge.

I’ve spent the better part of a decade writing or talking about pop culture, first as a comic book and movie reviewer, then as a freelance writer for several iterations of my own website. I even dabbled in having a podcast—like everyone else in the early 2010s. What has emerged, time and time again, in my reviews and rants, is the juggernaut that is pop culture and the longevity of its influence.

Maher understands the influence of pop culture on public perception, to a degree. In his 1997 incoming presidential address, “Society and Archives,” Maher praises previous SAA President David B. Gracy’s campaign to increase archival resources by “directing attention to archivists’ need for greater recognition from society for the value of what they do” (p. 252). According to Maher, Gracy’s mandates were successful because they pushed archivists to “reassess themselves in terms of public relations,” which worked toward bettering archival programs (p. 252). Unfortunately, visibility and awareness do not guarantee understanding.

Maher’s 1997 speech is a time capsule in and of itself as he addresses the benefits and pitfalls of the emerging information age and its effect on archives. The most concerning to Maher amongst the advent of electronic records, the internet’s meteoric rise, and institutional and public policies outside of archival control is the inappropriate or incorrect use of the word archives. This is the crux of Maher’s first address. The internet and the media in general had altered the linguistic nature of archives, turning it into a word that can represent professional institutions but also an “Internet junkie’s personal backfiles of top forty tunes, Baywatch stars’ vital statistics, or logs of government conspiracies” (p. 254). Each case of misuse or misappropriation of archival terminology leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of what is and isn’t an archives, what is and isn’t archiving, and who is and isn’t an archivist.

From there we see the greater issue at hand: loss of control over our own profession and how it is perceived by the public, the reverberations of which are still being felt today. As Maher states,

Instead of archives not being understood and valued, we have rather the opposite problem—archives are seen as something so desirable that many people believe they understand them quite readily. (p. 254)

He continues:

Call it paranoia, but I always have the sense that when we see “archive” used as a verb, or the word “archives” used in a bastardized way to describe what is a singular, idiosyncratic, and synthetic gathering of documents, we are being confronted with a challenge to our position as professional archivists. (p. 254)

It’s wild to read Maher’s words given the amount I’ve written about pop culture properties that do exactly what Maher has laid out. The lasting impact of pop culture’s misunderstanding of the archival profession has led to the continued synonymization of archives with libraries,[1] offered a false sense of the time needed to create a collection and the skills required to do so,[2] and, in the most egregious cases, eliminated the archivist from the narrative entirely.[3] I’ve said this before in the SAA Reviews Portal, but the Indiana Jones franchise continues to haunt the profession because one push-out shot of a warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark became the equivalent of archival storage[4]—that, and the fact that archivist and archaeologist sound similar, I guess.

Now, does this mean popular culture and the media are ultimately responsible for the public’s perception and opinion of archivists? No, not entirely, but it certainly contributes to the continuing confusion over what makes our profession distinct from libraries and museums. Maher further expounds on the deficit of control archivists have over such preconceived notions in his 1998 presidential address, “Lost in a Disneyfied World: Archivists and Society in Late-Twentieth-Century America,” in which he applauds the educational potential of historically-based entertainment while lambasting the sinister and superficial level of understanding it offers to the public.

Maher’s primary targets—or target, depending on how you look at it—is his so-called “seven-headed beast” ravaging the anti-archives entertainment kingdom: Disney, Universal Studios, Busch Gardens, MGM Studios, Oliver Stone, Ken Burns, and Norman Rockwell (p. 260). This is an eclectic grouping of corporations and individuals, but at the time Maher delivered the speech, they were the greatest examples of the ways in which history was and continues to be commercialized and sanitized for the public.

Disney’s Main Street, USA is the most obvious example of Maher’s particular gripes with the “beast.” The main hub and centralizing location of the Disney Parks, Main Street, USA is Walt Disney’s childhood nostalgia made manifest. It encapsulates the superficiality of commercialized history that presents a very specific and exclusionary vision of the past that seeps into and supersedes the public’s collective understanding of The Past. Similarly, Rockwell’s paintings of a wholesome, bygone era are often weaponized as an example of “simpler times” when people didn’t want to engage with the ongoing systemic issues that have plagued the country since its inception. And then there are the movie studios and documentarians, typically the ones presenting edu-tainment to a demanding populace looking for escapism. It’s no easy feat to create a period piece, let alone one that thoughtfully provokes its audience while still educating them, but in cutting corners for entertainment’s sake there is so much context lost. And the truth of the matter is that most people in the audience will prefer the movie’s condensed narrative over the historical record.

Maher isn’t shy about his conflicted feelings toward commercialized history and its relationship with archives:

The more optimistic among us believe that by working with those responsible for so much of the marketing of history, we can thereby advance archives and authenticity by applying archival knowledge and theory directly in service to the commercial projects. Some of us more passively try to emphasize the value of archives to society by pointing to all of the occasions in which our collections are passingly used in such large projects as Ken Burns’s “Civil War” or “Baseball.” . . . The more pessimistic among us see examples of Disney’s “Pocahontas” or Oliver Stone’s “JFK.” The truly pessimistic look further and see instead the Enola Gay problem, in which leading independent public cultural institutions find themselves fully unable to manage presentation of well-researched alternate perspectives on the past if that presentation contains images that conflict with the public’s hazy perceptions of the past or if the presentation raises thought-provoking questions and doubts about key events in our evolution as a people. (pp. 260–61)

My apologies for the long quote, but to me, it fully encapsulates the precarious position archivists find themselves in when engaging with matters of edu-tainment and public sentiment. To be an archivist is to be in a constant state of reaction, especially when we have other more critical and time-consuming obligations that take priority such as the day-to-day operations of our institutions, serving our users, justifying our existence and usefulness to whoever holds the money purse, and having some kind of life outside the job. Embracing popular sentiments, like acknowledging fandom-assigned archivists[5] or utilizing IndianaJones in conference presentations or work-based training, may seem like the path of least resistance when it comes to educating the public about the archival profession, but it also offers more opportunities for course correction than any other tactic.

Maher’s solution is for archivists to be more proactive where they can, whether by collaborating with edu-tainment properties, informing SAA about institutional or state policies that directly affect the archival profession, or preserving the archival identity and demonstrating its distinctiveness by focusing on the profession’s core functions—namely, authoritative establishment and administration of programs, authentication of documents, appraisal, arrangement, description, preservation, and use. As always, the onus is on archivists to “perform” for their institution or the public while still pushing back against stereotypes that are deeply embedded in popular perceptions of the archival profession. But it’s through this performance that archivists continue to show their value while demonstrating the level of skill necessary to preserve the authentic historical record.

While Maher staunchly believes that archivists should be proactive in promoting ourselves within our institutions and to the public, I don’t think he goes far enough in examining the umbrella that is popular culture and its impact on so many facets of daily life, historical whitewashing and misappropriation of terminology notwithstanding. The path between how a piece of media treats archives and archivists—whether it’s as a footnote to a documentary or a character in a piece of film or television—and how archivists are treated by the public or those in charge of our institutions is a straight line.

Arlene Schmuland’s 1999 article, “The Archival Image in Fiction: An Analysis and Annotated Bibliography,” is a partial response to the 1984 Levy-Robles report, The Image of Archivists: Resource Allocators’ Perceptions, commissioned by SAA to make “archivists aware of the negative stereotypes or perceptions surrounding the profession and thereby be able to combat those stereotypes and build better relationships with the people directly responsible for archival budgets.”[6] Even in 1984 there was a concern that prevailing misconceptions about the archives influenced how they were prioritized by their institutions. But Schmuland is concerned with how resource allocators were influenced by those negative stereotypes and perceptions and where they originated. And while she limits her focus to fiction novels, she acknowledges the nature of newspapers, movies, books, theater, and television to disseminate information on a broad scale, which likely contributed to the preconceived notions of resource allocators in the Levy-Robles report.[7]

Jump ahead two decades and the influence of popular culture on public sentiment toward a profession is still relevant. A 2020 survey conducted by ZenBusiness showed that “58% of respondents said their career had been at least slightly inspired by a book, TV show, movie, podcast, or video game.”[8] In their 2022 article “Representation of Professions in Entertainment Media: Insights into Frequency and Sentiment Trends through Computational Text Analysis,” authors Sabyasachee Baruah, Krishna Somandepalli, and Shrikanth Narayanan assert that the recurrence of a profession in popular media combined with a negative or positive portrayal influences not only the professional makeup of society but the prevailing attitude directed at that profession.[9] If we don’t examine the archival identity through the lens of pop culture, then we’re blatantly ignoring a profoundly influential force of our society.

Maher’s addresses are from outside the entertainment industry looking in. Archivists are meant to be reacting to the use of history and how we might engage with that usage after the fact, but what about when the escapist piece of fiction features an archives or an archivist or, heaven forbid, both? Of even more concern, what happens if an archives or an archivist isn’t featured in a piece of media where they might have been in the real world? What are the implications of that as the public becomes more reliant on escapist media? I’m not saying Maher should have derailed his entire speech to make note of the pop culture landscape, but it’s odd to me that he doesn’t make any comment on media that features an archivist or an archival setting. There are a number of television shows and movies prior to 1997 he might have referenced as examples of how the role of the archivist has changed within visual media. From John Steed and Emma Peel encountering a university archivist in The Avengers episode “A Sense of History” (1966) to Oswald Cobblepot’s, aka The Penguin’s, research in Gotham City’s Hall of Records in Batman Returns (1992), there are references available but never employed.

When it comes to engaging with pop culture depictions of archives and archivists, the archival literature is sparse. Articles that critically examine the image of the archivist are few and far between. The most substantive articles available from peer-reviewed archival journals are Arlene Schmuland’s previously mentioned “The Archival Image in Fiction: An Analysis and Annotated Bibliography” (1999); Karen Buckley’s “‘The Truth is in the Red Files’: An Overview of Archives in Popular Culture” (2008);[10] and Tania Aldred, Gordon Burr, and Eun Park’s “Crossing a Librarian with a Historian: The Image of Reel Archivists” (2008).[11] In the case of the former, Schmuland’s American Archivist article is an extensive look at how novels create and fall back on stereotypical depictions of the archival profession, while the latter two are featured articles from Archivaria focusing primarily on archives and archivists shown in films. But Schmuland’s article was published in 1999 and the Archivaria articles in 2008 in the same issue, which leaves the profession without any critical engagement with new media or the myriad properties that have emerged since 2008. That’s nearly two decades without updated scholarship and only the occasional article emerging when a pop culture event happens to be associated, however distantly, with archives or historical records. I’m looking at you, Hamilton: An American Musical.[12]

That doesn’t mean archivists aren’t doing the work to branch out and interact with pop culture as a means of effective outreach. I’ve been writing articles for my website, POP Archives, for a few years, but there are also websites from writers like Burkely Hermann[13] and Jennifer Snoek-Brown[14] who bring their own perspectives about archives and libraries, and where they clash with the prevailing depictions in media, while also trying to educate and course correct popular misconceptions surrounding both professions. One of the most popular articles for Contingent Magazine is Sarah Calise’s “Why Do Archivists Get Rid Of Things (And Enjoy It)?” that explains the necessity of deaccessioning and why the public shouldn’t be so quick to judge a function of the archival profession they don’t fully understand.[15] (I mean, she says it in a nicer way than I described it, but the meaning is there.) All of us, however, are operating outside of any official sanctioning by a professional organization. We write what we write because we’re passionate about where popular culture meets the archives and how it influences public sentiment.

I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t hurt that SAA appears to have no interest in this facet of critique and analysis. In the same way that Maher ignored or chose not to engage with pop culture and its depiction of the archival profession, SAA is happy enough to send people off to Leith Johnson’s Archives in the Movies after hours event during the annual conference but will reject panels about pop culture and the archives because it isn’t “on theme” for that year. Obviously, I’m speaking from personal experience, which includes the most recent rejection for the 2024 SAA Annual Meeting in Chicago. My personal vendetta notwithstanding, Schmuland’s previously mentioned article includes a footnote about using material from a panel discussion about the archival image in contemporary fiction from the 1998 SAA Annual Meeting in Orlando, the same meeting where Maher gave his “Lost in a Disneyfied World” speech. And in the thirteen years I’ve been attending SAA conferences, I can recall only one other panel that looked at how Stephen King used archives in his novels.[16] Again, the focus of these panels and events is limited to particular types of media and separated by years in which scholarship, and popular culture, has changed. 

That’s the problem when a professional association has a myopic view of itself. It imposes limitations on what is and isn’t professional scholarship and falls into the same trappings as those outside the archival community. Eira Tansey exposes this brilliantly in her latest American Archivist article about the “academic enclosure” of the journal’s preference for pieces concerning academic archives and the resonating impact of those choices on the archival profession.[17] The image that archivists project about ourselves is just as necessary to examine, and pop culture provides an effective lens through which we can analyze the state of our profession on a much broader scale.

People are constantly influenced by pop culture; some even choose their job based on the media they consume. Doctors, lawyers, and law enforcement have all experienced the advantage of professional recruitment by having well-received television shows on constant rotation on cable or streaming services.[18] So, when archivists are shunted to the background or are entirely invisible to the narrative, the ripple effect is inevitable. Yes, we like to laugh at how wrong Hollywood and the media gets the depiction of archives and archivists, but that seven-headed beast Maher refers to has just as many, if not more, arms, and its reach casts a long shadow.

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[1] Samantha Cross, “POP Archives Deep Thoughts: The Problem with the Cobalt Soul,” POP Archives, August 30, 2021, https://www.pop-archives.com/post/pop-archives-deep-thoughts-the-problem-with-the-cobalt-soul.

[2] Samantha Cross, “Archives on TV: Hacks,” POP Archives, January 4, 2022, https://www.pop-archives.com/post/archives-on-tv-hacks.

[3] Samantha Cross, “Archives in the Movies: The Avengers (1998),” POP Archives, May 2, 2020, https://www.pop-archives.com/post/archives-in-the-movies-the-avengers-1998.

[4] Samantha Cross, “They’re Digging in the Wrong Place: The Influence of Indiana Jones on the Archives,” The American Archivist Reviews Portal, December 19, 2018, https://reviews.americanarchivist.org/2018/12/19/theyre-digging-in-the-wrong-place-the-influence-of-indiana-jones-on-the-archives/.

[5] Samantha Cross, “Are They an Archivist?: Ianto Jones,” POP Archives, July 5, 2023, https://www.pop-archives.com/post/are-they-an-archivist-ianto-jones.

[6] Arlene Schmuland, “The Archival Image in Fiction: An Analysis and Annotated Bibliography,” American Archivist 62, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 24–73, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.62.1.v767822474626637.

[7] Ibid., 26.

[8] “Influence of Media on Careers,” ZenBusiness, February 3, 2020, https://www.zenbusiness.com/blog/influence-of-media-on-careers/.

[9] Sabyasachee Baruah, Krishna Somandepalli, Shrikanth Narayanan, “Representation of Professions in Entertainment Media: Insights into Frequency and Sentiment Trends through Computational Text Analysis,” PLoS One, May 18, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267812.

[10] Karen Buckley, “The Truth is in the Red Files: An Overview of Archives in Popular Culture,” Archivaria 66, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 95–123, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13187.

[11] Tania Aldred, Gordon Burr, Eun Park, “Crossing a Librarian with a Historian: The Image of Reel Archivists,” Archivaria 66, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 57–93, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13189.

[12] Katherine S. Madison, “‘Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story’: The Use and Representation of Records in Hamilton: An American Musical,” American Archivist 80, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2017): 53–81, https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.80.1.53.

[13] Burkely Hermann, Wading through the Cultural Stacks, WordPress, https://archivyrep.wordpress.com/.

[14] Jennifer Snoek-Brown, “Reel Librarians,” https://reel-librarians.com/.

[15] Sarah Calise, “Why Do Archivists Get Rid of Things (and Enjoy It)?,” Contingent, November 12, 2022, https://contingentmagazine.org/2022/11/11/why-do-archivists-get-rid-of-things-and-enjoy-it/.

[16] Caryn Radick, “You’ve Always Been the Caretaker: Archives as a Destructive Force in Stephen King’s ‘The Shining’” (presentation, Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting, Cleveland, Ohio, August 22, 2015).

[17] Eira Tansey, “The Academic Enclosure of American Archivist,” American Archivist 86, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2023): 117–40, https://doi.org/10.17723/2327-9702-86.1.117.

[18] Roya Rafei, “How Television Influences Career Paths,” Rutgers Today, April 29, 2016, https://www.rutgers.edu/news/how-television-influences-careers-paths; Aphrodite Papadatou, “Netflix Generation Choose Jobs Based on Favorite TV Shows,” HR Review, December 19, 2018, https://hrreview.co.uk/hr-news/netflix-generation-choose-jobs-based-on-favourite-tv-shows/114005; Caitlin Mullen, “TV Plays a Big Part in Helping Us Choose a Career,” BizWomen, February 21, 2020, https://www.bizjournals.com/bizwomen/news/latest-news/2020/02/tv-plays-a-big-part-in-helping-us-choose-a-career.html?page=all.