Making Money from Archival Material
Bill Rueter Jr.
Bill Rueter Jr.
INFO 560 – October 20, 2009
Literature Review
An Invitation to a Garage Sale
With the thawing of winter and the advent of spring, those of us in Northern climates clean our drawers and closets of sweaters and corduroy pants in favor of polo shirts and shorts. It is a reappraisal of sorts, a deaccessioning of a closet. We sift through the winter clothes and assign them to one of three categories: keep, donate, or sell. Most items will be kept, and those things are carefully packed away into boxes with mothballs, and sent to attics where they will stay until they are needed in autumn. Other items will be donated, either to family or friends, to Goodwill, or to charities like the Salvation Army. Still other items will be sold – to friends, at a garage sale, or through online auctions like eBay. Often the reappraisal for the two latter categories requires difficult decisions. We hold sweaters up in front of a mirror, and try on pants and coats. We find that some things are now too small and that other things were always too big. Some of the clothes were gifts from loved ones and have been with us for many years, and the memories they evoke can make getting rid of them plain painful.
Despite the fact, or perhaps because of the fact that there is not an economic return, donating items can be easier. We can take satisfaction not only in making a generous act, but also in knowing that the collection of cardigan sweaters with the embroidered birds of all kinds, custom knitted for us by an aunt or grandmother, will find its way to someone who will appreciate it more. Deciding to sell an item can be more difficult, because there is a sense of guilt attached to selling something that was given to us. In really tough economic times, however, it is necessary to make difficult decisions. Sometimes we can bring ourselves to sell, and other times we cannot. If we cannot, we must find other ways to make money, because “Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.”[1]
Archive administrators face similar issues when they consider an attempt to make money from their holdings. At the 2003 annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists, President Peter Hirtle remarked that
In short, archives and manuscript repositories control and manage assets worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars. And yet archives are traditionally underfunded. Many archives have become ‘land poor’: we have millions in capital assets, but lack money to hire staff, maintain the facility, or pay the utility bills. Given the need for funds and the understandable (and applaudable) reluctance to sell assets, it is not surprising that many archives are seeking to derive revenues from their control over archival records.[2]
Hirtle’s use of the phrase “applaudable reluctance” reflects the still taboo nature of an archive seeking to generate money from its collections through deaccessioning. Instead of selling original archival material, Hirtle argues that although archivists “are aware that even the most significant scrap of paper in our archives is likely to bring something on eBay if we were to sell it…many of us are hoping that through digitization we might be able to convert our fixed capital assets into liquid cash.”[3]
What is exciting for archives is that generating revenue through digitization and generating revenue through deaccessioning are not mutually exclusive concepts. In the face of a national recession and shrinking budgets, both of these ideas should be utilized, and indeed can be utilized. Instead of relying on donations, or, like Blanche DuBois, “on the kindness of strangers,”[4] archives should be pro-active in seeking income. “By generating their own financial resources,” Michael Doylen argues, “all archives have the chance to develop more effective programs and rise in the estimation of administrators.”[5] Doylen’s idea for archives to use eBay to sell items that have been deaccessioned is ideal, because online auctions can be managed by the normal archive staff and without the assistance of outside personnel or outside resources. The strategy for archives to generate revenue internally should thus be threefold: 1) to make responsible reappraisal and deaccessioning, as Mark Greene describes, “as normal a part of standard archives administration as cataloging and reference”[6] 2) to use online auctions to sell the deaccessioned items as described by Michael Doylen and 3) to employ innovative digitization technologies in an ongoing way to both generate revenue and to increase the public’s access to their collections.
Greene’s view on reappraisal and deaccessioning is that of an “unrepentant reappraiser.” He argues for them to be standard operating procedures, which contrasts with others archivists who feel “that reappraisal is a necessary evil, necessary only in emergencies when space has literally run out in a repository.”[7] The “necessary evil” theory “is based on the premise that original appraisal decisions are more valid than any reconsideration of those decisions, and that without such a premise archival holdings would fluctuate wildly in a rush to reflect whatever was the latest historiographic trend or cultural obsession.”[8] The risk that repositories will become fickle and alter their collections based on cultural whims is real; however, ultimately we must trust the education and experience of archivists to make responsible decisions. Rejecting deaccessioning in an archive is like child-proofing a house: it intimates that the archivist cannot be trusted to open the cabinets without hurting himself and his repository. Greene paraphrases Gerald Ham in summarizing his argument: “[T]here is no reason to believe that original appraisal decisions were perfect or complete, and thus no reason not to reevaluate them.”[9] Likewise, a closet that is not reappraised is stuffed with tacky cardigans that are never worn.
Once the decision is made to remove holdings from an archive’s collection, “on-line auction sites now provide a flexible, expedient, and cost-effective means by which archives can sell this material themselves.”[10] It is important to note that selling deaccessioned materials should not be the first option of a responsible reappraisal. “For items with research value falling outside the scope of the institution’s collecting guidelines, transfer to a more suitable repository is an ethical priority . . . The transferring institution gains more space, the receiving institution gets the collection, and the public has the satisfaction of knowing that the records are still accessible.”[11] But for materials that lack significant research value, but that have financial value, especially to collectors and hobbyists, selling “allows archives not only to refocus their holdings and increase shelf space, but also potentially allows them to escape from the ‘cycle of poverty’ in which most institutions find themselves.”[12] Archivist sellers can take solace in that collectors who purchase deaccessioned materials are clearly doing so out of a genuine and enthusiastic interest in the subject and the items, or at least with an interest in the item’s safekeeping. Online auctions reach a worldwide audience to which an institution can market the items. The fees that the sites charge are minimal and thus allow the archive to keep the majority of the profits. Since the time Doylen wrote “Experiments in Deaccessioning” in 2001, some archives have taken to eliminating the online auction site altogether, and selling deaccessioned materials directly from their own website using simple e-commerce systems that, for example, an undergraduate web design student could create with the benefit of only a few classes. The Archives and Collections Society (A&C Society) of Picton, Ontario, Canada, is one such repository. By having their own website, the A&C Society gains the added benefit of being able to trade deaccessioned material for items that may be of greater research value to its users. Consider the language its administrators use in offering their collections:
The following book titles are surplus to our needs, and are available for disposal by the Friends of the Archives. Historians and private collectors may purchase from the list, however preference will be given, in accordance with our statutes, to other charitable and non-profit libraries and museums. Exchange for similar value documents is preferred to outright sale. Please contact the Friends of the Archives for details of exact edition, printing, condition and value.[13]
The process of preparing the records for either an online auction or for direct sale from a website requires legitimate archival appraisal work. “In preparing to place an auction on eBay, Archives staff wrote a brief description of each item to be sold, calling attention to its physical condition and features that are likely to interest collectors: signatures, graphics, and the item’s age or historical importance.”[14] Additionally, the same type of rewarding stories that are written everyday in archives can result from selling deaccessioned material. Doylen remembers finding a home for “two postcards featuring a Milwaukee taxidermist shop from the early-1900s. The individual collected only postcards featuring taxidermy, and the Archives was won over by his enthusiasm for the subject!”[15]
“Selling is for the ‘risk-takers’ among archivists.”[16] Despite the fact that the press has not been nearly as harsh on deaccessioned sales as was expected[17], it takes guts to sell something that has been in an institution’s possession for many decades, just as it is difficult to part with a piece of clothing that was given to us as a gift. If an archive does not have the stomach for selling deaccessioned items, or if it simply does not have deaccessioned material, it can still be pro-active in seeking to generate revenue from its holdings by “exploit[ing] the material in a fashion consistent with its mission.”[18] Hirtle suggests that archives achieve greater financial freedom by embracing digitization of their holdings by selling reproductions of public domain material. Archives can take the lead from an unlikely source, the pornography industry, which adds value to images through “slick interfaces, good performance because of their substantial investment in infrastructure, and easily accessible metadata tied to user needs.”[19] Archives can also offer a “guarantee of authenticity,”[20] which is very important to collectors and buyers.
Archivists elicit tremendous pride from performing a vital and virtuous public service, and much has been written concerning the romantic potential and cultural contributions of the profession. In the literature, one can sense the hesitance to mix business with history, as though doing so would somehow smudge the purity of the profession and leave streaks on our windows into the past. But if we wholeheartedly believe in the importance of archives, we must do everything we can to ensure their survival by thinking creatively and pro-actively about being financially viable. So raise your copying charges (to what the market will bear) and let us toast to garage sales everywhere.
[1]Woody Allen.
[2]Hirtle, Peter B. “Archives or Assets?” The American Archivist, Volume 66, Fall/Winter 2003. pp. 235-247 at 236.
[3] Hirtle at 236.
[4] Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947.
[5] Doylen, Michael. “Experiments in Deaccessioning: Archives and On-Line Auctions.” The American Archivist, Volume 64, Fall/Winter 2001. pp. 350-362 at 354.
[6] Greene, Mark. “I’ve Deaccessioned and Lived to Tell About It: Confessions of an Unrepentant Reappraiser.” Archival Issues, Volume 30, No. 1, 2006. pp. 7-22 at 7.
[7] Greene at 9.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Greene at 9.
[10] Doylen at 350.
[11] Doylen at 353.
[12] Doylen at 354.
[13] The Archives and Collections Society website. Visited on October 17, 2009.
[14] Doylen at 359.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Doylen at 354.
[17] Doylen quotes Doug Mattox, a coin and stamp dealer who specializes in helping archives sell collectibles: “no institution has received any bad press” in the twenty years he has provided his service. Doylen at 354.
[18] Hirtle at 238.
[19] Hirtle at 246.
[20] Ibid.