Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: Archives do start conversations, make connections across time, and deserve universal recognition because of their uniqueness and enduring value.(Brinati 3) Historically, the primary means to an archive and its holdings is an in-person visit.Over the last two and half years, we have travelled to the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading, England, the British Library in London, as well as to Smith College and Indiana University, which are sites of the two biggest archives of Sylvia Plath material, to highlight the thrill of the archival hunt.In the process, we have made archival discoveries that still seem somewhat improbable given the amount of attention and research given to Plath over the last few decades.Shortly after we published "These Ghostly Archives, Redux" in Plath Profiles 3, the idea for this paper took shape as several "new" archival finds presented themselves. 1 "New" finds is an awkward phrase both to the archivist and the researcher, especially in collections that have been housed and cataloged for years.Archivists know their collections through processing and experience.The materials are located either through the older card catalog systems or more recently through online catalogs and finding aids.The latter may be accessed from almost anywhere using the Internet, and as a result archival collections take on a new life when combined with powerful search "engines" such as Google, which can "chuff" browsers, far and wide, to disparate sections of the virtual world in a matter of seconds.In this sense, archives take on another layer of ghostliness, as they exist in that curious virtual space that somehow manages to be both there and not there at the same time.In the absence of digital representations of Plath's papers, in which original documents are scanned at a high resolution and presented via a web site, photocopies, scans, in-person handling must serve to satisfy our archival demands.Initially, the goal of our project this time was to handle and relate our archival finds purely via distance requests: by using Google, online catalogs, and finding aids for materials and then requesting photocopies or digital surrogates.
Authors: Gail Crowther, Peter K. Steinberg
Institution: Lancaster University
Language: English
Subfield: Conservation
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1527606502