Read on Twitter
. @AmyHildrethChen is emphasizing that archivists should not just be acknowledged but ~cited~ for their intellectual labor and that "corporate authorship" takes away their bylines for their work at institutions
. @AmyHildrethChen not knowing bylines, we do not know the names of these experts and how their perspectives may have shaped the collection's processing
. @AmyHildrethChen notes that a tax change prompted more people to sell rather than donate their papers (this is fascinating)
. @AmyHildrethChen is discussing the challenges of getting information about who didn't sell their papers or find an archive; how would we even come up with a dataset of the papers that were never placed? or who sold for a price they were unhappy with?
. @AmyHildrethChen @hchesner are now talking about what does the scholarly landscape look like if we're limiting spec coll to only uni staff due to covid; points out equity issues will be exacerbated
. @AmyHildrethChen @bibliowitz is asking about building local, teaching collections rather than flashier research collections; answer emphasizes that collections are best when they are rooted in the author's community
. @AmyHildrethChen is discussing the politics of placing papers for marginalized writers; in some ways, placing a collection in a place like Harvard claims centrality and canonicity for writers as much as their popularity or critical reception (also they cld deserve the $$)
. @AmyHildrethChen discusses that some spec coll are commercializing their collections by selling prints, postcards, etc. to help recoup the cost of collections; @aehdeschaine notes that appraisers consider this when valuing
. @AmyHildrethChen and @mkirschenbaum are discussing the "born digital" papers; can you have a "unique original" of a digital document? how do appraisers consider digital papers? will all writers' laptops end up in our archives?
there is a lot of really interesting info about US taxes and write-offs in the chat; this really plays a role in why people sell vs. donate. also we've emphasized that many more famous authors consider their papers their retirement fund
. @AmyHildrethChen discusses the casualization of archival and cataloguer work which means that writers' papers end up on the shelf rather than catalogued and accessible to researchers
. @AmyHildrethChen @mckinniburgh are discussing that the literary archives market is a "prestige" market with a few majors plays, and we have a "productive fear" about how to proceed; how do we avoid a homogenized Norton Anthology version of our archives?
. @AmyHildrethChen emphasizes that curators and dealers working outside the canon have an impact on changing this market
so much of what keeps coming through is that relationships matter: university and curator relationships with authors and dealers. building these relationships helps us build a stronger and more representative landscape for literary archives
. @AmyHildrethChen returns to a central point in her book, which is that the people with the most tend to keep getting the most. community-focused archives are one way of addressing this. another is that donors and money continue to drive this and they tend to go for shiny names
. @AmyHildrethChen notes that US institutions buying collections with deep pockets is capitalist colonialism; she gets into some of this in Placing Papers but wants to do more in future work
. @AmyHildrethChen notes that families often change tactics more than authors; they might want to control the narrative more and therefore change the archive after it goes to a repository (Joyce is an example)
