This post is part of the Intergenerational Conversations series.

Review of Helen Willa Samuels, “Who Controls the Past,” American Archivist 49, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 109–24, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.49.2.t76m2130txw40746; and Anke Voss-Hubbard, “‘No Documents—No History’: Mary Ritter Beard and the Early History of Women’s Archives,” American Archivist 58, no. 1 (1995): 16–30, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.58.1.hr300127g3142157.

By Melissa Smith, Church History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints [PDF Full Text] | [PDF Articles + Full Text]

“[A]rchivists are by and large scared silly of appraisal and most of them really don’t want to do it,” observed Frank Boles in 2004.[1] Quoting Boles in his 2010 article, “MPLP: It’s Not Just for Processing Anymore,” Mark A. Greene suggests that this aversion to the act of selection arises from a fear of making mistakes—primarily, of missing something of historical significance.[2] Selection and appraisal affect all the downstream activities pertaining to records—processing, collection management, and, crucially, the making of history and the shaping of collective memory. These are weighty matters that would make any archivist shake in their boots.

The angst of appraisal is very real. But reflecting on Helen Willa Samuels’s 1986 article “Who Controls the Past” and Anke Voss-Hubbard’s 1995 article “‘No Documents—No History’: Mary Ritter Beard and the Early History of Women’s Archives” reminded me that engaging in the selection process can be exciting as well, expanding horizons for archivists, archives, and archival practices. Samuels’s publication was seminal in defining the “documentation strategy” of selection, a response to a modern milieu in which records are created by complex and interrelated institutions and individuals as well as multiple technologies, all capable of producing more records than ever before (Samuels, p. 111). Moreover, concerns had arisen in the 1970s that some “social movements, minority issues, popular concerns, and other topics [. . .] were not well-represented in most archival and historical records repositories.”[3] The documentation strategy that Samuels outlines is a collaborative response in which archivists, records creators and users, and experts from multiple institutions formulate and execute “a plan . . . to assure the documentation of an ongoing issue, activity, or geographic area” (Samuels, p. 115). The vision entails the active creation or collection of records based on a determination of what “should exist” to adequately document a phenomenon, and the records themselves could be housed across multiple repositories (Samuels, p. 120).

This is, of course, Samuels’s initial formulation of an approach that would be modified and revised over the years through contact with concepts like functional analysis.[4] But when even major archives and special collections still lack collection development policies, it’s no wonder the fragmented view of human activity and record-keeping that Samuels sought to address continues to drive selection. The appraiser’s fear feeds on that tunnel vision. And so, to fresh eyes, Samuels’s idea still feels like a timely anxiolytic. It’s collaborative and proactive. Rather than a single archivist or institution being the lone arbiter of documentary fate, collaborators with a 360-degree view may realize that the needed documentation isn’t only (or even) archival, or that “adequacy” can be reached in many cases without adding to the backlog (Samuels, p. 121). Rather than hunting for what we’ve missed, we create what we need.

However, that fear of missing something has expanded in today’s archival landscape to a certainty of having missed many things. In this light, it’s interesting to reexamine Voss-Hubbard’s analysis of Mary Ritter Beard’s efforts to document women’s history. Despite the growth of archives and special collections in the 1930s and 1940s, Beard, a historian, saw that primary materials on women’s history were not being preserved. Driven by the belief that, with an expanded documentary record of women’s activities, she could disrupt the prevailing argument that women had been “subjugated throughout history,” she set out to “establish a center for the preservation and study of primary source material about women” (Voss-Hubbard, p. 18). She hoped this material could be used to educate women on the crucial contributions to societal development they had made throughout history.

Beard’s World Center for Women’s Archives (WCWA) resembled the discipline-based history centers Samuels used as her model for the basis of documentation strategy, with its focus on gathering relevant materials, supporting research, and promoting women’s history. The WCWA also had a multidisciplinary set of advisors comprising well-connected (and mostly non-archivist) women, as a documentary strategy might. Perhaps because of this, the archives struggled to define its scope, an activity that Samuels admits involves asking “hard questions” about “what will and what will not be documented” (Samuels, p. 120). As a result, the scope stretched beyond its initial focus, but not enough to include Black women. Unable to raise the funds needed to “meet its far-reaching goals” and riven by “disagreements among its leadership about racial issues,” the center became defunct in 1940 (Voss-Hubbard, p. 21).

The WCWA may offer, on the one hand, a view of the realities of implementing a Samuelsian documentation strategy, particularly regarding the power dynamics of who and what gets to be documented. In fact, although the first words in Samuels’s paper are the famous George Orwell quote, “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past,” she does not address issues of power at all (George Orwell, 1984, quoted in Samuels, p. 110). She describes activities to be carried out, but human individuality is subsumed in theoretical roles. Beard, in contrast, forthrightly observed that “[T]here has been no systematic effort to get the story of women together in any Archive center” because “Men preside over most libraries” (Voss-Hubbard, p. 30). Today’s archivists, preoccupied by issues of power, might point out that bias is likely to touch every stage of Samuels’s process—the selection and scoping of a topic, the selection of advisors, and the review of the existing documentation—before the selection of documentation even begins. Indeed, though she may have been less aware of it than the overt gender bias she experienced, the fact that Beard had a specific thesis to prove almost certainly would have drawn certain collaborators and materials into her orbit.

On the other hand, the documentation strategy is more flexible than what Beard sought to implement. Her focus on books and manuscripts, for example, limited support for her thesis from alternative documentation, such as that produced by countless undereducated and illiterate women that historians of material culture have been able to give voice to.[5] In the end, since bias is inevitable in human decision making, an approach that offers the flexibility and built-in checks and balances of the documentation strategy answers the needs of the moment. Archivists are still arguing that “the only way that we can work towards preserving records that are properly representative of the whole of society is through joined-up, co-operative acquisition programmes at local, national and international levels.”[6] But one of the most important directions given to Samuels’s ideas is the more inclusive, and even more human, understanding of what it means to document “the whole of society.” Archivists are increasingly seeking to address collection gaps, inequities, and the processes of epistemicide that have left many people and accomplishments undocumented. In doing so, they embrace many aspects of the original documentation strategy, including its collaborative and proactive nature, user/creator and subject focus, expansive definition of documentation, and decentralized custody of records. 

How, for example, do archivists rectify the colonial, sexist, and racist practices that have led to harmful representations and silences in the historical record? The Protocols for Native American Archival Materials emphasize collaboration and consultation.[7] The documentary record benefits from the presentation of a community’s records in a way that reflects that community’s epistemology, values, and relationships, and collaboration and consultation are increasingly acknowledged as the appropriate way to achieve this. In Utah, where I work, the Northwestern Band of Shoshone Nation Tribal Library Digital Collection at Utah State University (USU) “is the product of a twenty-year effort to collect and digitize materials found in archives across the state” and make them available to Shoshone community members.[8] The tribal library created, gathered, and selected materials; the Church History Library of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provided a grant and shared digital assets; and USU provided server space and a digital archivist to put the collection online.[9] The Nation’s chair, Darren Parry, explains, “‘As a kid, I could only find whatever was written in the history books. But those history books are not accurate and come largely from a colonialism perspective. With this archive, all perspectives are able to be looked at and we can get our view out there.’”[10]

As the documentation of human activity explodes in volume and diversity, archivists, as Samuels showed us, don’t have to work alone. They can adopt the collaborative approach to assist, guide, or recruit communities to document themselves. They can even themselves to be incited to share in “the vision and toil of nonarchivists” like Mary Beard (Voss-Hubbard, p. 30). In doing so, they allow records creators and community insiders to “bring unique information about what records exist, where they are located, the context of their creation and use, and their value,”[11] contributing to a more complete historical record less warped by power.

With consultation from archivists, community archives are even finding ways to preserve and share their records without depositing them with heritage institutions. This is what Activist Archivists, who consulted the Occupy movement, helped movement participants to do, and it is what allows the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation Tribal Library to retain custody of its materials while sharing their records and others with its geographically dispersed tribal members.[12] This post-custodial model carries the documentation strategy beyond Samuels’s proposal of decentralized custody to its ultimate conclusion. In a realm where custody is totally dispersed may lie a regime scarier to some archivists than the current obligation to perform selection—one in which they do not do the selecting at all.

It’s exciting to think what can be discovered and made accessible through adaptations of documentary strategies, what new voices we’ll hear. For all its affordances, though, a documentary strategy is focused on “adequacy.” What does Samuels mean by adequate documentation? Does she mean “minimal”? Or at the point of data saturation? The implication of the standard of adequacy is that there is a possibility of having too much. This is usually not the concern when seeking materials on underrepresented events or groups, like Beard did when she set out to provide a documentary basis for the study of women. Over the years, however, shelves and backlogs have been filled by the fragmentary approach to selection and the fear of “too little.” Can a documentary strategy work in reverse? Deaccessioning and reappraisal have been gradually destigmatized since the 1980s, and surveying existing collections is already one of the activities of the documentation strategy. Could deselection be triggered by a consensus that what exists is beyond adequate?

This might be too much to commit to for many institutions. The alternative, though, is that the past controls the future by crowding out the present: even the perception of available institutional capacity for new acquisitions may influence the judgment of what is “adequate” to document new phenomena. If a post-custodial model is part of the solution to this, the profession should proactively engage in shaping that future to reflect its standards, ethics, and values.

Mary Beard’s story did not end with the folding of the WCWA. Without an institution of her own, she found a new strategy, seeking alliances with archivists at educational institutions, most successfully Smith College. She distributed papers planned for deposit in the WCWA to at least eight institutions named by Voss-Hubbard. Her evangelizing also ignited interest in women’s materials in librarians at other institutions. When asked by one librarian what level of documentation was adequate—5,000 books, perhaps?—she replied, “That would make a good start” (Voss-Hubbard, p. 23). At a period in history when records production was, like today, increasing exponentially, she found ways—through collaboration, dispersed custody, and belief in the value of her work—to find space for records that matter. We can too.

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[1] Frank Boles, untitled paper, Session 32, Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting, Boston, 2004, quoted in Mark A. Greene, “MPLP: It’s Not Just for Processing Anymore,” American Archivist 73, no. 1 (2010): 177, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.73.1.m577353w31675348.

[2] Greene, “MPLP,” 177–78.

[3] Richard J. Cox, American Archival Analysis: The Recent Development of the Archival Profession in the United States (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1990), 20.

[4] See Terry Cook, “Documentation Strategy,” Archivaria 34 (1992): 181–91, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/11849.

[5] For a recent example, see Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (New York: Random House, 2021).

[6] John Erde, “Constructing Archives of the Occupy Movement,” Archives and Records 35, no. 2 (2014): 87, https://doi.org/10.1080/23257962.2014.943168.

[7] First Archivist Circle,“Protocols for Native American Archival Materials,”accessed August 12, 2025, https://www2.nau.edu/libnap-p/protocols.html.

[8] Utah State University Libraries, Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation Digital Collection, accessed August 13, 2025, https://libraryusu.access.preservica.com/index.php/list-of-collections/the-northwestern-band-of-the-shoshone-nation-tribal-library/.

[9] Erick Graham Wood, “Shoshone Nation Collaborates with USU Archives to Host Digital Historical Collection,” The Utah Statesman, March 26, 2019, https://usustatesman.com/shoshone-nation-collaborates-with-usu-archives-to-host-digital-historical-collection/; and conversation with Scott Christensen, Church History Library. Shoshone affiliation with the Church dates to 1873.

[10] Wood, “Shoshone Nation.”

[11] Erde, “Constructing Archives,” 87.

[12] Erde, “Constructing Archives,” 85.