How I Work: The Archives

Off to the document mines! (Public domain screenshot of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.)

“Well, I’m off to the archives.” “Well, off to the document mines.”

I’ve said that enough in public and to family members over the last five years that a number of them finally started asking, “what are ‘the archives’ and how do you ‘work’ in them?”

In the last four years, I’ve spent a few hundred hours in five different archives. Most of what I’ve learned about doing archival research has come from my own trial-and-error experience.

As a historian, one of the best ways to do new research is to find a thread and pull on it. Someone gets mentioned in a talk, book, or paper, and you wonder who s/he was, or about their connections to someone or something else. Has anyone written on their ideas? Background? A general google or wikipedia search will tell you what exists. But it’s also useful to google for “person’s name papers collection.” That will turn up if their papers/books/writings got donated to an archive somewhere.

On the archive’s webpage (e.g. here’s BYU’s Special Collections), you can search for the person, or a related topic. And then you get into that person’s collection. It might be small— maybe one box with a few folders— or massive. I’ve dealt with one collection with almost 200 boxes, each with 20 or more folders. How do you find your needles in that haystack?

Often there will be a Finding Aid, which provides varying levels of detail into what’s in each box, and sometimes folder. So then, you either request digitization of the items you want (often $$$) or yo u go to the archive and request to see it. Archives differ in their approach; some require permission to take pictures, others don’t, only allowing notes.  Some collections or boxes might be off limits for a certain number of years after the person’s death, or you might have to submit a form arguing why you need to see them.

Now, my actual approach in an archive is fast and indiscriminate. That is, I have limited time to travel and research on-site. So, I get a box, and a folder. I scan each page for a few seconds, looking for key terms, names, etc. If it looks interesting or relevant, I scan it (more below) and move on quickly to the next. This allows me to maximize the utility of my time in the archive itself. The University of Utah’s Marriott special collections, for example, is only open 10-4 M-Thursday, by appointment, so I don’t have time there to read leisurely.

This approach also means that I generate huge numbers of scans I have to go through later to really know what I have. And at this point, I think I have 10-20k pages of scanned material… which is a lot to keep track of. In fact, when I go home at the end of the day and my wife says “so what’dya find today?” sometimes I can’t even remember. So I tend to keep an open document on my laptop “Research notes date” where I jot down short notes about obviously relevant finds, e.g. “Great letter from Joseph Fielding Smith to Clark on interpretation!”

The mechanics of my research look like this.

My laptop is plugged in, and I keep open the finding aid (so when I get a particular box, I can be reminded of what exactly is in that box/folder I thought was relevant.) I switch between the finding aid and my Research Notes for the day

I have my iPhone on an adjustable mount with a light (Amazon affiliate link). It collapses for easy transport in my backpack and really simplifies my scanning. I turn off the “sleep” function on my phone, so it stays on, and plug it into my laptop for power.

And so, the box folder goes to the left of my chair. I skim a document, and if I want it scanned, I simply slide it under my iPhone, which scans automatically in about 2 seconds, and it’s on to the next page.

In terms of software, I use Evernote extensively (as does my wife, also a PhD.) My daily “Research Notes” is in Evernote, and I also use it to scan. There’s an automatic scanning mode—just slide the document under and it recognizes the edges and scans it—  AND Evernote will automatically OCR anything scanned, including handwritten documents (with limits on accuracy).

I create a new note for each box, at least, and sometimes for folders. And then those notes get tagged by me when reviewing them later. So I might have a note named “Sidney Sperry box 3, folders 1-4” and it will get tagged with different terms depending on what’s in it. The date created and modified also get automatically written in.

All of that means that my Evernote notes are entirely text-searchable, and with various other ways, e.g. “I remember some document from last summer, it had Scopes trial commentary…” and so I can search for notes 1)in my Archive notebook, 2) created in summer of 2020, and 3) containing text (and/or tag) “Scopes.”

Now, I’m a big fan and critic of Evernote. It’s free to use, with limits. I’m a long-time subscriber, since some of the features I use are for paying customers only, at a particular tier. (Were it not for the OCR function, I might have moved to Notion.) I don’t like their recently rebuilt desktop version (limits the available fonts, did away with tabs, built on Electron instead of Mac-specific, etc.) and am using the Evernote Legacy build on my MacBook. But in the meantime, Evernote has enough strengths that it is where almost my research goes, and it mostly works really well, most of the time, enough so that I keep paying them money.

Evernote also syncs nicely between my all my devices and stores data in the cloud as well as on my desktop, and allows me to export my entire database for further backup. I’m a bit paranoid about losing my data, so between Evernote and Dropbox (longtime user, before it even went public), I also have four external hard-drives, including this hardened portable SSD. (My others are more traditional, slow hard drives; this SSD is fast, copies 10 Gig in a minute.)

Jesus saves, people, and so should you (goes the joke) or risk losing your precious research data gathered over years.

So, that’s how I’ve spent many days and weekends, gathering documents from the archives, and then reprocessing them at home, reading slowly, tagging, making notes on them, etc. It’s the raw data of history-writing , and what my dissertation and a number of forthcoming papers are built on. And, democratically, they are open to anyone.

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