#iaw2020

Archival evidence and truth may seem as simple as what is written on the page. Discovering the connections between truths to provide the whole story is more difficult. May Show artist Phyllis Seltzer used three different names throughout her career, a fact only recently discovered by leveraging four different and unassociated archival resources. When verified, the names were brought together to tell the full story of the artist’s contributions in our May Show database. The museum continues to identify the artist only by her ‘preferred’ name of Seltzer. The truth is less evident in this context.  #IAW2020

The global pandemic, with its enforced isolation, has separated archivists from analog collections. In this moment, our work relies on access to digital records to satisfy the needs of our users. The importance of access to both digitized analog records and born digital records is heightened at the same time that the creation of digital content is exploding. The museum’s Home is Where the Art Is video series is an example of content that we must hold in trust for future researchers. We must be up to the task of ensuring that our digital legacy is preserved and accessible.  

An archive is the repository of memory. Archivists are the guardians of legacy. Do you collect and preserve baseball cards or teaspoons or albums? Are you the keeper of your family photographs and christening gowns? These are archives, the tellers of stories. They can remain personal or become part of larger collections that tell the stories of individuals and communities. 

International Archives week was inaugurated by the International Council on Archives (ICA) as International Archives Day, June 9, 2004. This year’s theme is Archives Empowering Knowledge Societies, a UNESCO initiative. This global goal is to increase access to, and preservation and sharing of information. Knowledge societies are built on four pillars: freedom of expression, universal access to information and knowledge, respect for cultural and linguistic diversity, and quality education. The museum archives contributes to this initiative in the work we do on a daily basis by providing open access to our collections, digitizing materials of high importance to our users and the larger community, assisting researchers in their quest for knowledge and understanding of the arts, and serving as the institutional memory of the Cleveland Museum of Art. We are also celebrating archives accessibility by adding CMA to the global map of archives and records institutions sponsored by the ICA.