Leaving a Trail: Personal Papers and Public Archives Part One – The Donor’s Story

  • Betsy Hearne

Abstract

Archives reveal multiple ways in which a person or institution’s path intersects with public interest. New generations can gain insight from the legacies of others’ ideas, actions, and influences, studying the past to affect the future. What those generations conclude will depend on the footprints left for them to follow. In this collaboration, an emeritus professor of storytelling, folklore, and children’s literature joins with an archivist for faculty papers to preserve the evidence of the former’s lifetime work. Although they approach their tasks differently, both narrators draw on long-term research experience to inform and describe the process with which each is involved. The importance of their interaction emerges through mutual references in their respective articles, as does the extent to which their personal stories affect the nature of their work and self-reflective approach. This connectivity allows them to portray what archiving means for a particular donor (Part One) and what working with a donor means for a particular archivist (Part Two). Their intent is to think in a visionary way about why and how donors and archivists do what they do, engaging readers to connect personally as well as intellectually along the way. This is the first article in a two-part sequence in this issue.

 

RÉSUMÉ
Les archives révèlent de multiples façons dont le parcours d’une personne ou d’une institution rencontre l’intérêt public. De nouvelles générations peuvent en apprendre beaucoup des idées, des actions et de l’influence de personnes, en étudiant le passé pour influer sur l’avenir. Ce que ces générations concluront dépendra des pistes à suivre qu’on leur aura laissées. Dans cette collaboration, un professeur émérite en narration de contes, en folklore et en littérature jeunesse s’est joint à un archiviste responsable des documents d’archives universitaires pour préserver les preuves de l’oeuvre de sa vie. Bien qu’ils aient approché leur tâche de façons différentes, les deux narrateurs s’inspirent de leur expérience de recherche de longue haleine pour façonner et décrire le processus dans lequel chacune des parties est engagée. L’importance de leur échange ressort dans les références mutuelles que les auteurs font dans leurs articles respectifs, tout comme l’importance de leurs récits personnels ont un effet sur la nature de leur travail et sur leur approche d’autoréflexion. Ce lien leur permet de présenter ce que l’action d’archiver signifie pour un donateur en particulier (première partie) et ce que le travail avec un donateur signifie pour un archiviste en particulier (deuxième partie). Leur intention est de repenser de façon visionnaire pourquoi et comment les donateurs et les archivistes font ce qu’ils font, tout en invitant leurs lecteurs à se joindre à eux sur le plan personnel et intellectuel en cours de route. Ceci est la première partie d’un article en deux temps paru dans ce numéro.

Author Biography

Betsy Hearne

Betsy Hearne is former Director of the Center for Children’s Books and Professor Emerita in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has received national awards for scholarship and teaching in the areas of folklore, storytelling, and children’s literature. Her books include Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale and Choosing Books for Children: A Commonsense Guide. With Roberta Seelinger Trites, she co-edited A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women’s Lives. Among her more than 50 essays and articles are, most recently, “Ida Waters Turns Off the Lights: The Inside & Outside of Knowledge” (in Beyond Methods: Lessons from the Arts to Qualitative Research, 2015) and “‘Your One Wild and Precious Life’: A Tale of Divergent Patterns in Narrative and Musical Development” (in Bulletin of the Council on Research in Music Education, 2016–17). Hearne is also the author of fiction, poetry, and picture books for children, among them Seven Brave Women, which won the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award. In addition to several decades’ experience reviewing and editing for book review journals, she has worked with children in both library and school settings. Her website is at https://ehearne.web.ischool.illinois.edu/index.html.

Published
2018-11-26
How to Cite
Hearne, Betsy. 2018. “Leaving a Trail: Personal Papers and Public Archives Part One – The Donor’s Story”. Archivaria 86 (November), 68-89. https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13644.
Section
Articles