brooklyn historical society and the new york state historical documents inventory, 1985–2007

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Brooklyn Historical Society andthe New York State HistoricalDocuments Inventory,1985–2007Marilyn H. PettitPublished online: 22 Jan 2009.

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Brooklyn Historical Societyand the New York State HistoricalDocuments Inventory, 1985–2007

Marilyn H. Pettit

ABSTRACT. This article summarizes the New York State HistoricalDocuments Inventory as experienced at Brooklyn Historical Society. Thearchives and manuscripts, dating from the seventeenth century and surveyedby the Historical Documents Inventory in the 1980s, were cataloged asHistorical Documents Inventory/Research Libraries Information Networkrecords but failed to become incorporated into in-house electronic records,which affected access. Physical and intellectual control of the archives andmanuscripts was reestablished, 2004–2007, following the reopening of thesociety’s 1881 Brooklyn Heights building in 2003. The library reopened toresearchers in 2007. In this article, the author offers suggestions about estab-lishing universal access to materials housed in the libraries of underfundedinstitutions subjected to building renovations and decisions by executiveresource allocators as well as access to a rich array of unsurveyed and, thus,uncataloged, materials held in historic houses and museums.

KEYWORDS. New York State Historical Documents Inventory, HDI,Brooklyn Historical Society, Long Island Historical Society, St. FrancisCollege, survey, nonprofit, library, archives, manuscripts, RLIN, AMC field541

Marilyn H. Pettit, PhD, is a consulting archivist and public historian.A version of this article was presented at the New York State Archives Confer-

ence, Potsdam, NY, May, 2008.Address correspondence to: Marilyn H. Pettit, 241 Van Brunt St., Brooklyn,

NY 11231 (E-mail: [email protected]).

Journal of Archival Organization, Vol. 6(3), 2008Available online at http://www.haworthpress.comC© 2008 by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved.

doi: 10.1080/15332740802421907 169

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170 JOURNAL OF ARCHIVAL ORGANIZATION

Included in New York State’s mid-1980s survey of archival materi-als was the library of the Long Island Historical Society, which alteredits name to “Brooklyn Historical Society” at about the same time thatthe survey completed work, 1986–1987. The New York State Histori-cal Documents Inventory (HDI) of 1984–1987 was an elaborate, multi-year project to catalog collections in all recognized repositories in NewYork State. The surveyed collections were then cataloged into New YorkState’s library catalog and then into RLG’s (Research Library Group) Re-search Libraries Information Network (RLIN), which in the mid-1980soffered a de facto national online bibliographic utility for primary sources.New York State’s project became a component of this effort toward stan-dardized cataloging and democratized—if not universal—access, and thecataloged records also appeared in hard copy as brief, collection-leveldescriptions. Brooklyn/Kings County records were published as three vol-umes, with Brooklyn Historical Society’s 854 collections described in onevolume.1

Each ensuing decade of the post–World War II period saw a new andcloser cataloging of archival materials as federal, state, and private fundinggradually emerged to support the democratization of access to library re-search materials, accompanied by the natural impulse toward standardizedcataloging. RLIN’s Archives and Manuscript Control (AMC), promul-gated a short twenty-five years ago as a new standard and generouslyfunded throughout its life by public resources, was the focus around whichbooks were published, professional reputations were made, Archives, Per-sonal Papers and Manuscripts (APPM) 1 and 2 were generated to sup-ply elements missing from Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Secondedition (AACR2), archival education was critiqued, and finding aid for-mats were standardized. Library cataloging standards became the normin the United States for a broad range of archival repositories, culminat-ing a movement begun in the 1950s with the National Union Catalog ofManuscript Collections (NUCMC). RLIN/AMC became somewhat side-lined in the mid-1990s as the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) madean end-run around both it and little DOS (disk operating system) and FTP(file transfer protocol) based Gopher programs, succeeding in establishinga near-universal need, if not ability, to post finding aids on the Internet.But RLIN/AMC quickly became very nearly irrelevant at Brooklyn His-torical Society (BHS), founded in 1863 and located in an 1881 BrooklynHeights building with a landmarked library interior on its second and thirdfloors.

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Marilyn H. Pettit 171

The HDI records at BHS replaced four earlier guides to collections, asfollows:

1. Catalogue of the Library of the Long Island Historical Society,1863–1893, compiled by Temple Prime, the Reverend Richard SalterStorrs, DD, LLD, Bryan H. Smith, and John Jay Pierrepont; printedfor the Society, Brooklyn, NY 1893. Books and manuscripts cata-loged together in alphabetical order. Researchers still occasionallyrequest collections by citing this catalog.

2. The Century Book of the Long Island Historical Society, 1964, pri-vately published. This book consisted of chatty essays on researchdimensions of the collections; it was not a catalog and lacked anindex.

3. Guide to Brooklyn Manuscripts in the Long Island Historical Society,1977, Brooklyn Rediscovery (Brooklyn Educational & Cultural Al-liance). This pre-computer-age compilation contained brief descrip-tions of papers, programs, institutional archival materials, speeches,broadsides, wills, and land papers. It indicated that the Brooklyncollections numbered 598 as they were then calculated (some stillin “bundles”) and that all had been given accession numbers by thecompilers.

4. The Long Island Historical Society Calendar of Manuscripts,1763–1783. Compiled by Karen N. Mango, [New York]: The So-ciety, c1980.

The New York State HDI survey teams of the mid-1980s proceeded todescribe and code via MARC:AMC tags collections on Brooklyn, LongIsland, and New York history dating from the seventeenth, eighteenth,nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, producing 854 catalog records. A sub-stantial number of the described materials were not collections at all,but consisted of a single item, a single volume, or a small file of per-sonal papers. The surveying teams recorded what they found—chiefly anineteenth-century cataloging system that had been the basis for the 1977guide plus staff memories, with no other automated control whatever—andimproved on it.2

The HDI/RLIN records became questionably useful almost immediatelybecause one important element was entirely omitted from both electronicand print versions of the RLIN records: the local identifier, which at BHSwas the 1977 accession number, which had been dutifully recorded on the

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paper survey sheets. The MARC:AMC field 541 was used to record thislocal identifying number so that an RLIN record would coincide with thelocal number of the institutional record, whether automated or on paper.But, as was said in the 1990s, “it didn’t happen.” Users of archives andmanuscripts at Brooklyn Historical Society continued to request collec-tions by its 1893 or 1980 name or by its 1977 accession number or, lessfrequently, by its RLIN description, the consequence of which was thatlibrary staff, always minimal, became the interface for translating one setof descriptive numbers into the other. Gradually a print version of theBHS HDI survey became annotated copiously in pencil as a means to lo-cate materials, constituting yet another version of archives and manuscriptholdings. Staff memory and the annotations became institutional locatornotes, the very antithesis of the purpose for which the survey was designed.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE MISSING 541 FIELD

The HDI/RLIN records of the mid-1980s are now, and have been since1988, the sole means by which external patrons could locate archivesand manuscript materials in electronic form. From 1986 on, however, justas the HDI was completing its work, the Long Island Historical Societychanged its name to Brooklyn Historical Society and inaugurated a newera of museum exhibitions and education programs that required heavy useof library resources. Funding for the library and its new responsibilitiesdid not keep pace with flashier and timelier exhibitions and programming.BHS continued to function with a modestly sized library staff, and thoughlater library professionals possessed the needed credentials and serviced abroad population of users, the archives and manuscripts did not receive thebenefits of in-house automation. A grant funded the cataloging of 10,000bound volumes on local history around 1996 in an off-line minimalistprogram, but HDI/RLIN remained the only automated resource for archivesand manuscripts, making researchers dependent, as a hundred years prior,on the memories of published guides, unpaid volunteers, and overworkedprofessionals, few of whom were dedicated to the archives and manuscriptsalone, none continuing as long-term employees.

One consequence of neglect of an automation imperative was that RLINrecord numbers were not utilized as identifiers in any emergent internaldatabase or locator system within BHS: not in the card catalog, not infinding aids, not in various inchoate databases prepared in the 1990s thatcontinued to use the 1977 accession numbers as unique identifiers. The

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electronic and print HDI/RLIN descriptions that failed to include the insti-tution’s local identifier records was a staggering omission, though basedon the premise that BHS would inevitably control its collections via thein-house automation that was becoming normative for research institu-tions. In addition, the HDI had cataloged single items as well as largercollections with RLIN numbers, a decided anomaly given the goal of theUSMARC:AMC format, which was designed to catalog the elements of afinding aid, not single items nor manuscripts. BHS, for its part, did not thenor afterward catalog archives and manuscripts using RLIN’s catalog num-bers. Single items recorded by BHS were particularly vulnerable, beingafterward used in exhibits, and a fair number were misfiled or misplacedor reboxed in unnumbered, unlabeled boxes and cabinet drawers.

The three anomalous forms of access continued into the new millenniumwhile exhibits and programs utilized archives and manuscripts but recordedtheir transfers out of the collection somewhat idiosyncratically, and thesystem did not encourage or monitor refiling items after use.

The setting in 2004:

1. Index cards in the card catalog did not contain the 1977 accessionnumbers nor the actual date of accession; this information residesin file folders on another floor or in printed Proceedings volumes.The cards may contain obsolete and misleading location informationused between 1863 and 1998, including obsolete nineteenth-centuryindexing terms, for example:

Madison, JamesD. S.Washington, July 18, 1803Circular addressed to the Hon. Christopher Ellery, Newport1 p. 8◦p. 53 in Book 2

This item was not indexed in the 1893 Catalogue of the Libraryof Brooklyn Historical Society, not indexed in the 1977 BrooklynRediscovery guide, not accounted for in the 1987 RLIN records,and was not in the cursory c.1996 archives and manuscripts (ArMs)database.3

2. RLIN online records bear no repository local identifiers (the 1977accession numbers) and often refer to a single item or a single file;many collections with RLIN records have no finding aids, while thosecollections with finding aids utilized 1977 accession numbers but notRLIN catalog numbers.

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3. Example from printed volume of HDI/RLIN records: (NIC)NYKI590-940-0305

Ellis Island history, 1947, 2 items. Summary: Department ofJustice report, “History of Ellis Island, New York,” 1947. Hand-written lecture on history of island by descendant of SamuelEllis. Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn, NY.

Online RLIN version of the same record:Title: Ellis Island history, 1947.Description: 2 items.Notes: Department of Justice report, “History of Ellis

Island, New York,” 1947.Handwritten lecture on history of island bydescendant of Samuel Ellis.

Subjects: Ellis, Samuel.United States. Dept. of Justice.United States—Emigration and Immigration.Ellis Island (N.Y.)—History.

Location: Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn, NY.Control No.: NYHV85-A9264

4. Finding aids: most did not exist; some were cursory and typewrit-ten, some were essay-type finding aids created prior to automationrequirements and the AMC format that standardized the finding aidtemplate for many institutions, and some were word-processed inthe 1980s but not migrated into successive software programs or up-grades. The older finding aids were, as of 2004, being OCRed (OpticalCharacter Recognition) or keyboarded, updated, and corrected, andaccession numbers and RLIN numbers added (see Figure 1). Find-ing aids and manuscript inventories must be created for many singleitems and small collections, and must also contain accession controlnumbers and RLIN catalog record numbers. All of this work must oc-cur prior to any further work creating EAD finding aids for the Web.The card catalog will ultimately, and thankfully, become a keepsake.

To say that the lack of a single numbering system and location systempresented difficulties is to suggest that Mt. Vesuvius annoyed Pompeii andHerculaneum. Let me summarize:

1. A present-day researcher using RLIN/NUCMC (and now OCLCWorldCat) can request the material by its RLIN record number, which

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FIGURE 1. Title Page of 2006 Finding Aid that Combined SeveralCollections

Accessions: 1973.191, 1974.123, 1977.099, 1977.329, 1981.00510 Boxes: 5 MB (boxes # 1–5, at 4C-6.1.E); 2 Artifact Boxes (# 6 and 9,

at 4C-6.4.A); and 3 OversizedBoxes (#7, 8, and 10, at 4C-6.5.A)Volume: 2.5 LF + Oversized and Artifact Boxes (appx 4.5 ft total)

RLIN #s: NYKI590-940-0092;NYKI590-940-0754;NYKI590-940-0779

Brooklyn, NY, U.S. Civil War Relief Associations Collectionincluding “Women’s Sanitary Fair"1846–1964 (bulk 1858–1871)

Brooklyn Historical SocietyOthmer Library128 Pierrepont StreetBrooklyn, NY 11201

Tel. 718.222.4111 FAX 718.222.3794

[email protected]

Deena M. SchwimmerNovember, 2005Supervisors: Marilyn H. Pettit; Leilani DawsonMay, 2006

By permission of the Othmer Library, Brooklyn Historical Society.

is incorrect for a substantial number of important collections, besideswhich the researcher may not be aware that important collections,once housed at other institutions, now reside at BHS.

2. BHS staff cannot identify any collection by its RLIN number aloneand must use the 1977 accession number, formerly consulted in itsprinted format.

3. Since 2006, the 1977 accession number is located either in the textfile version of the BHS RLIN records, or, thankfully, in the masterlocator system, which is an internal Microsoft Access database under

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revision, emendation, and augmentation. This database states thephysical location of the item or collection/box number, which hadto be corrected following the return of materials from warehouse toon-site storage, and also contains the room/shelf number, created in2004 for renovated storage space in the 1881 building.

4. Then staff must search for a finding aid in electronic format or amongthe hard copies—perhaps created on a typewriter or created in anearlier word-processing format and not yet scanned and edited inMicrosoft Word.

5. Staff must also occasionally consult the card catalog.6. Staff must also account for items such as images that were separated

to the image collection that may or may not have been digitizedwith others in a mid-1990s digitizing project, items deaccessioned ormissing, and items borrowed by exhibit planners and afterward notrefiled but placed in unlabeled boxes and shelved haphazardly, or arestill, unaccountably, missing.

7. In addition, accessions since 1987 and valuable archival items fromthe “Museum Collection” can be located only via the master locatordatabase, which now contains limited subject access via a “memo”field plus a field for geographic locations; BV = Brooklyn Village(1638–1831), BC = City of Brooklyn (1832–1898), FB = Flatbush,LIN = Long Island–Nassau County, Q = Queens, NYC = New YorkCity, etc.

A partnered grant project with an educational institution supplied aproject archivist (Leilani Dawson) as of 2005, and she and the authordiscovered in September 2006, upon obtaining a master copy of the RLINrecords as text files prior to revising them, that the local identifier wasincluded, mirabile dictu, in the not-previously viewed text version of theHDI/RLIN records. This cheering discovery enabled the placement of thosenumbers into our master database, which, of course, enhanced referenceusage in a number of ways.

Those of us associated with the first great RLIN retrospective conversionof 1982–1984 acquired firsthand knowledge of the need to first have goodfinding aids in order to create good AMC catalog records, and the timeneeded to create both if no finding aids existed previously. That veryproject at the New York University Archives produced a standardizedfinding aid form with a dozen or so variable field MARC tags that provedhighly adaptable to the timely creation of an AMC catalog record, and thisfinding aid format has since been endlessly perpetuated in our respective

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repositories and in the workplaces of the many archival program graduatesand educators-in-training whom we taught at New York University, theUniversity of Maryland at College Park, Rutgers University, St. John’sUniversity, Columbia University, Pratt Institute, and points in between. Welearned how long it takes—how many hours, with what level of training—tobring a collection to minimal intellectual control in order to create a viableAMC record, a sometimes daunting but necessary process.

Many of the BHS RLIN records had been created by trained archivistswho lacked, however, intimate knowledge of the collections, which in turngenerally possessed no finding aids; that is, the surveyors used the 1977manuscript survey descriptions but also actually viewed the collections tocreate 854 catalog records from the collections described in 1977 as 598collections. Between 1987 and 1996, access became more complicatedby the Brooklyn Historical Society’s increasing emphasis on exhibitions,which selected some ArMs materials for a “museum” collection. The ar-tificial division turned out, of course, not to be a useful one for librarypurposes, and greatly muddied the normal processes of accessioning, cat-aloging, and tracking location and conservation activities.

THE LIBRARY’S SEVEN-YEAR EXILE, 1998–2007

Following the HDI survey of the 1980s, its goal to promote access toresearch materials, access to archives and manuscripts became a mistymemory for researchers from 1998 through January 2007 as the society,having acquired a substantial legacy gift, moved the whole of the libraryinto warehouse storage in order to renovate its 1881 building on PierrepontStreet in Brooklyn Heights. The building renovation itself lasted through2003 and the author began to move the materials back into the building inlate 2004, having first to hire a library staff. The library had not been staffedor supervised for those seven years, with the exception of a library assis-tant who supplied researchers with copies or scans of images. However,several important collections cataloged at BHS by the HDI had becomecombined into discrete collections in the late 1990s, for which finding aidsemerged via support from the NHPRC (National Historical Publicationsand Records Commisssion):

1. Pierrepont Family Papers: eleven collections with eleven records inHDI/RLIN became a single collection with a single finding aid, which

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was marked up in EAD as of 1999 and posted on the institution’sWeb site. RLIN catalog records were not altered.

2. Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims/Henry Ward Beecher Papers: fourrecords in HDI/RLIN, plus additional items afterward added to thecollection, became a single collection with a single finding aid, whichwas also marked up in EAD and posted on the institution’s Web site.RLIN catalog records were not altered.

3. Brooklyn Firefighting Collection, a portion of which was held at St.Francis College with other Brooklyn materials known as the KellyCollection, came to BHS in 1991; RLIN records were not altered ateither institution to reflect the change in custody.

A single team of NHPRC–funded archivists labored for fifteen monthsto update and convert to EAD the finding aids for these large, im-portant collections, which, however, were not actually available to re-searchers during that seven-year period; the finding aids can be viewedat www.brooklynhistory.org/library/electronic.html, but only as PDF files.The three collections were marked up in EAD in 1998–1999 for postingon the BHS Web site, along with Civitas Club records (described in theHDI/RLIN survey as “175 items” and in the 1977 Guide as “ca. 175 items/1linear foot) and the Brooklyn Council of Churches records (described inHDI/RLIN as twelve cubic feet for a half dozen different constituent in-stitutions and their records: Brooklyn City Bible Society, Brooklyn CityMission and Tract Society, etc.) The several HDI/RLIN records, however,remained unchanged, a decided anomaly given NHPRC’s support of thecataloging project.

Meanwhile, exhibit planners and educational staff continued during thewarehoused period to use materials from the warehoused collections, andBHS also received a number of donations, gifts, and loans that were rarelyaccessioned and irregularly tracked, which produced a glut of unidentifiedmaterials as of 2004.

THE “KELLY COLLECTION” AT ST. FRANCIS COLLEGE

Far more dramatic were the problems associated with a 1991 transfer ofrecords from St. Francis College on Remsen Street in Brooklyn Heights.The original records of Brooklyn as a colonial hamlet, 1816 village, and1832 chartered city had been discarded in the 1950s and fondly reclaimedfrom dumpster status by James A. Kelly, Deputy County Clerk of King’s

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County from 1944–1971. These records came to reside in the Kelly Insti-tute for Local Historical Studies at St. Francis College, just up the streetfrom Brooklyn Borough Hall and three blocks from Long Island HistoricalSociety. Kelly was designated the first official historian of the boroughof Brooklyn at that time, and the Kelly Institute materials were accord-ingly surveyed by the New York State HDI Project in 1986–1987, whichidentified 900 cubic feet of Brooklyn’s history, including:

City Surveyor’s Street Opening Maps, 1750–1920 (100 cubic feet)King’s County and City of Brooklyn Records, 1787–1923 (11 cubic feet)King’s County Clerk Mortgage foreclosures, 1857–1897 (6 volumes)King’s County old town records, 1645–1920, 12 cubic feet (and on micro-

film)King’s County profile maps, 1892–1895King’s County estate documents, 1790–1869 (43.5 cubic feet)King’s County office of the corporation counselPhotographs, c. 1930–1949 (33 cubic feet)

Other collections included thirty-seven volumes of city and village recordsfor Williamsburg, a separate entity prior to its merger with Brooklyn in1855; Brooklyn-Queens transit line unification materials from 1939 (2volumes); and 53 cubic feet of the marvelous Brooklyn fire departmentrecords, 1825–1940, described previously. These important fire departmentrecords included firehouse rosters, relief associations ledgers, and othercogent materials that recorded the gradual change to a professional servicefrom local brigades of volunteers from varying social ranks who competedby racing to fires, engaging in fights with fists and clubs over access to waterresources—the term “run-in” comes from this activity—then by speedingbreakneck back to their firehouses by placing the wheeled wagons andpumpers on downhill horsecar rails.5

The firefighting materials from the Kelly Collection had been initiallysurveyed by Brooklyn Rediscovery in the 1970s, but anyone who wishedto use them at St. Francis College, as the author did in the 1980s, wasforced to do so under very discouraging conditions, guarded as they wereby an intensely proprietary custodian. These same firefighting records weretransferred to Brooklyn Historical Society in 1989 and inventoried in 1991with support from the NHPRC, then afterward reinventoried and markedup in EAD for the Web site presentation in 1998–1999, also funded by theNHPRC. The bulk of the Kelly Collection was, however, transferred to theBrooklyn College Library and to the Municipal Archives of the City of

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New York. The HDI/RLIN records have not been changed as of the currentdate to reflect the altered custodial arrangements, and researchers who findthe records in HDI or RLIN/NUCMC/WorldCat and then go to St. FrancisCollege Library to use these important records encounter blank looks. Thenet effect on Brooklyn historical narrative is troubling.

A number of interesting collections surveyed by the HDI in the 1980slater came into the custody of BHS, including records of the BrooklynSunday School Union (reportedly 124 cubic feet), formerly in the officesof the Brooklyn Sunday School Union in Fort Greene and acquired in 1988.Other collections surveyed in situ are now in temporary collegial custodyon BHS shelves, including partially inventoried Weeksville Society recordscomprising fifteen or so HDI/RLIN records of about 100 cubic feet. Weestimated that about half of the HDI/RLIN records for Brooklyn HistoricalSociety are currently incorrect, some grossly so, and despite heroic findingaid production from staff, volunteers, and archival interns since 2004, morethan half of the collections that do possess RLIN records have no findingaids, though most of the collections can now be located through a databaselocator system created in 2004 by the author and the project archivist.

FINDING AIDS FOR ACCESS

Finding aids since the mid-1980s HDI survey have vastly changed;they have been written and rewritten, new accessions have been addedto previously described collections, collections have been transferred fromtheir original repositories to BHS, and, of course, many HDI/RLIN recordsdescribed a single document, a “series,” or one portion of a collectionof personal papers as an analogized “series,” all of which speaks to thestatic quality of the survey while the national electronic matrix for libraryresources became ever more fluid.

Finding aids began to be produced at a snapping pace after the collectionsreturned to the building in late 2004 as library interns, junior and seniorlibrary staff members, and volunteers wrote some, edited others, mergedstill others, and OCRed those that existed on paper only.6 Even so, hundredsof labor-intensive hours will be required to reconcile 2,000 cubic feet ofpersonal papers and institutional records to the 854 extant HDI/RLINrecords as well as to create HDI catalog records or adapt RLIN/AMCrecords for inclusion in BobCat, our host OPAC with partner New YorkUniversity Libraries as of 2006, and afterward create EAD documents forthe larger collections. In the meantime, all relevant identification numbers

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were being inserted into the database and finding aids, but staff continuedto rely on a variety of resources to locate materials as described previously.

THE 1986 SURVEY’S PROBLEMS IN 2007

Additional materials were received by BHS in the years between 1987and 2004, including more than 75 cubic feet of records of the First Uni-tarian Universalist Church, founded in 1843 and an important centerof nineteenth-century religious, social, and intellectual life in BrooklynHeights. Few of these collections had been surveyed or processed andnone, of course, cataloged in HDI/RLIN. A further example is the Lef-ferts Family collection, found in the basement of a house in Belleport,Long Island, in 1987 and conveyed to BHS by gift. Lefferts was thename of often-distinguished members of a prominent Dutch family fromBrooklyn’s colonial period whose properties and family relationships andimpact on Brooklyn endured to the present age, one such being a colonialfarmhouse that resides in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, one of twenty-threeproperties governed by the Historic House Trust. Many substantial Brook-lyn families spent their summers on Eastern Long Island, and the housein which the materials were found was a Lefferts summer house, and thematerials dated from 1671. Included in the collection were rare and un-usual materials, including a photograph of the home of Gertrude LeffertsVanderbilt, author of A Social History of Flatbush (1854), and husbandJohn Vanderbilt; documents from the 1811 Jamaica & Flatbush TurnpikeCompany; Lott, Remsen, Cortelyou, and Wyckoff family documents; andeighteenth-century slave bills of sale.

An unknown volume of researchers never used HDI/RLIN at all. Somemade use of the ancient 1893 catalog, some the 1980 version, some eventhe essay-type 1964 “Century Book,” but most then and now state theirresearch needs as questions or topics into which the previous steps mustbe performed as their questions are translated into the evolving matrixof indexes. There is very limited subject access to two thousand feet ofarchives and manuscripts, and a “Googling” public very much wants andexpects that access, often under the impression that BHS is the source of allthings “Brooklyn,” including very recent history. It became necessary tocreate subject access to selected records of extraordinary historical value,initially those relating to Dutch colonial families, those linked to the CivilWar era, and those relating to slave bills of sale and other slavery docu-ments. These subject guides, chiefly created by Project Archivist Leilani

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Dawson, are being created from the master inventory and locator list, and,being ongoing, exist chiefly as in-house documents, but are also being usedby the Development Department for grant applications and by Exhibits andEducation staff for their needs.

SUMMARY: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE

The New York State Historical Documents Inventory and RLIN/AMCrecords invested through staff and funding in an inventory of resourcesthat took the Work Progress Administration (WPA)–funded surveys of the1930s as a model with its goal of providing listings of all accessible pri-mary sources in the state. A substantial portion of funding for the projectcame from public sources and produced the first online access to archivalresources in recognized repositories all over New York State, searchableand indexable at a time when the New York State Library and RLG wereopening remote access to end users. But this access came to be epiphe-nomenal more rapidly than the archival community ever imagined, becausevaluable and cogent historical resources that resided in repositories offer-ing no public access, such as historic house museums and county clerks’vaults, were not surveyed at all. HDI/RLIN usage remained frustratinglyperipheral for many institutions, not all of them small. Many institutionslacked, and still do lack, professional staff to address such cataloging prob-lems, including some larger repositories that have not corrected their RLINrecords in ensuing years.

The New York State HDI office staff remained available to assistinstitutions in correcting records, but, being the cataloging source andthus the only entity that can amend or correct the RLIN records that itcreated, the New York State HDI office can alone interact directly withRLG to make changes in HDI–created RLIN records. A lengthy e-mailcorrespondence with friendly and helpful state library professionals in2006 elicited this illuminating information, which, translated, means thatit falls to the BHS Library staff to correct all problems with the 854catalog records created two decades prior. It became necessary to createanew a locator system and to revise or write new finding aids.

HDI was a welcome, innovative program and managed, against mag-nificent odds, to survey all recognized repositories in New York State,its surveying teams doubtless coming up against all the anomalies thatour profession is heir to: unprocessed and un-integrated collections, cur-sory finding aids on paper, unlabeled boxes, single folders of documents,

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and single documents. Brooklyn Historical Society exhibited all of thoseproblems and more, never having systematically addressed modern accessissues. But the HDI was not funded to perpetuate the survey and lackedthe ability to enforce adherence to cataloging standards beyond the surveyitself. The HDI’s goodwill continues and its helpful staff can alter RLINrecords, but the initiative must come from the institutions themselves, andthey are not required by either the New York State Libraries or RLG todo so.

The 1986–1987 HDI/RLIN records for Brooklyn Historical Society andother institutional repositories remained static in ensuing decades, andfunding failed to emerge at either state or local levels for the cataloging ofnew records and emendations of the old. Planners may well have assumedthat the impetus toward automated control would institutionalize itselfin individual repositories, so that each repository would use the latesttechnology to maintain records not only of the sum of the holdings and newacquisitions but equally to track their locations internally. But BrooklynHistorical Society failed to establish automated intellectual control for itsuniquely valuable collections of archives and manuscripts.

In any case, the true cost of cataloging in what used to be HDI/RLIN isnow passed on to the same institutions that could not afford online access inthe first place, all of which must now revise and emend records on their own,using the friendly support of a single professional staff member at the HDIoffice in Albany. The discontinuities at the Brooklyn Historical SocietyLibrary offer a dispiriting example of a nonprofit institution’s library thatfell, unnoticed by trustees and administrators, further and further behindthe technology curve, and must now seek the very considerable resourcesand professional staff that can provide accurate and predictable access torecords surveyed by hand, once in the 1970s, again in the 1980s, and noware being surveyed again for automated control before they can be adaptedfor extensible markup language (EAD/XML) display. A commitment toprofessional standards, automated and otherwise, requires that BHS andother institutions provide the access inherent in the promise of HDI/RLINand take steps to perpetuate that access into succeeding generations ofautomated control. A determined three years of labor at BHS has focusedon transferring knowledge of and about holdings from inchoate databases,accession registers, anecdotal information, the actual hard-copy notes ofthe 1980s HDI surveyors, and annotated lists into automated intellectualcontrol that can survive changes of venue, changes of staff, ecologicaland environment disaster, obsolescence, and evolution of technologicalinitiatives and standards.

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HIDDEN COSTS OF THE HDI SURVEY

The New York State Library and Archives lacks the authority to enforcecommon goals and professional standards among the repositories that ben-efited from the initial HDI survey, and funding did not emerge to supportreviewing, updating, and revisiting the survey. The ideation was there; thefunding was not. Federal and private funders, for their part, became heavilyinvested, as with RLIN/AMC in the 1980s, in EAD for finding aids, itslabor-intensive and costly requirements a decided contrast to its democra-tizing impetus and appearance. The consequence is that the HDI survey inNew York State, while certainly not a failure, contained flaws that func-tionally disabled the lasting access that was expected because it did not,or could not, perpetuate itself. An initiative by the HDI to encourage up-dating old records and creating new ones, this time for RLIN-in-NUCMC,available via the Library of Congress Web site, would be welcome andtimely.

Each new generation of finding-aid specific library technology has as-sumed that it is the last one that will be needed, but contains the seedsof its own dissolution by not planning for cost-effective migration acrossplatforms and by not planning for use by both large and small institu-tions. EAD/XML, a worthy successor to an honorable series of attemptsat universal access, tacitly speaks to class issues in professional life and ininstitutional life, and silently encourages large, wealthy repositories anduniversities to make use of preferential funding that offers generous accessto self-selected collections but posits new technological apparatus with-out solving the problems of the preceding generations of technology. NewYork State’s Historical Documents Inventory of similar impulse, rife witherrors for a single Brooklyn repository, offers a commentary on the ideationand delivery of a great program, and time will tell if EAD/XML will winuniversal access, not least of which would be evidence that finding aids sooffered are indeed being sought, located, and utilized by researchers.

Documents and photographs constitute the cultural property of a sharedcommon heritage, as we consider the holdings of larger institutions, butmany remain largely inaccessible to researchers. Administrators of historichouses and small museums exhibit the same disquiet that is being expressedin this article, that the labor of caring for historical documents and materi-als and also making them accessible to researchers is a daunting financialmorass that is not being articulated clearly and steadily, even though uni-versal access via EAD/XML is being promulgated as the national standardfor access.

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One solution would be the creation of an online survey sponsored bySociety of American Archivists, the American Association of Museums,and the American Association for State and Local History, among oth-ers, using the NUCMC reporting form for collection-level descriptions.7

The professional associations could recommend the voluntary reporting ofholdings in a format that can readily be uploaded to the master Library ofCongress cataloging system, and could even enforce reporting by linkingit to membership and grant funding, and requiring once-a-year updateswhen membership is renewed. Resources needed would be minimal andavailable for managing and maintaining such a survey, which could thenbecome the first truly national, comprehensive, union database for primarysources in the United States, usable through the Web site of our generouslyfunded, de facto national library, the Library of Congress.

NOTES

1. Guide to Historical Resources in Kings County (Brooklyn) New York Reposito-ries. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1987–1988), 3 v.

2. Surveyors: Julie Miller, Janice Quinter, Daniel Soyer, Richard Steele.3. Project Archivist Leilani Dawson located this item in 2007.4. This folder was located in 2006 for a patient researcher during the course of a

folder by folder inventory of the collections.5. Marilyn B. H. Pettit, “The Brooklyn Volunteer Fire Department, 1836–1870,”

unpublished article, 1981.6. See Marily H. Pettit, “Brooklyn Historical Society’s Othmer Library Reopens,”

Metropolitan Archivist 12, no. 2 (Summer 2007), 9–10.7. Available at http://www.loc.gov/coll/nucmc/lcforms.

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