The Creation of History

Delete.

To destroy, annihilate, abolish, eradicate, do away with.

This is what I was asked to do on the first day of my internship.

My internship is in the Digital Projects lab in the library of my university. To most this library is a place to hang out in between classes and Starbucks drinks. It is a place to chat with friends while having a laptop or a book open on the table. It is a place to be social.

For me, the library is a place full of a collected history. It is where many books full of stories live on the shelves where I have free reign to pick them up and read on just about anything. It is a place where we keep the written history of human connection and emotion. It is the place where I learned about the importance of preservation.

I spend at least part of my day every day in the library. I work there. I study there. I eat there. I occasionally nap there. It fuels me.

This is why the idea of deletion has persisted in my mind. I was being asked to delete a part -- a very small part -- of the place that fueled me.

For my internship, I work with the digitalized side of special collections. This is where we post what seems most relevant for study from a physical collection to a digital collection page on the library’s website. I am to gather data about each piece in the Margaret Martin Brock collection to make it searchable and standardized. I am to decide what is relevant.

Me, a twenty-two-year-old person, is supposed to decide what stays public and what stays hidden in the archive. I am supposed to delete both copies of the item that I feel are irreleva

nt, so similar they could be copies, or items that seem too private. I am to be the judge. That's a lot of pressure.

I have been told that we keep the original, physical copies of the things I have been asked to delete, but it still makes my mind wander to the question of what do we not keep?

What do we not keep as a university? As a state? As a nation? As a collective human body?

It is impossible to preserve and save every single piece of paper written on, every picture taken, every physical item held. I understand this. I understand that we cannot remember every human and story to ever exist. It does not work that way. Especially since we have decided that time is homogeneous and empty. It must be standardized along a specific narrative timeline where what does not fit, gets thrown out or just forgotten.

History is changed by people who want to present the best version for review. Communities value historical events that give them a purpose. Thanksgiving has not always been the American way. It only came after our independence that we started to link our imagined history to events from before the signing of the declaration. Thanksgiving and the North American connection to the pilgrims only came during President Lincoln’s term.

It is up to the archivists of the world to sift through the created history and decide the story. This, however, will never be a perfect process. Archivists are people living in the present. They do not know the future and were not there for the past. They each bring in their own experience and bias to their work. The only tool they have to use is their ability to look at their past and the collective human past from the present to determine what to preserve for the future. History then is not a full view of the past. It is only how each individual person interprets the past from their present time.

I am being asked on a very small level to write the history of Margaret Martin Brock. I do not think I am prepared enough for this responsibility, but I am up to the challenge.