Seattle Post-Intelligencer archives tossed? and other bad news in the world of local history

March 24, 10:51 PMSeattle History ExaminerBenjamin Lukoff

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Photo by Flickr user Marc Smith, some rights reserved

My latest piece at Crosscut.com is on how, according to a story in the last print edition of the Seattle P-I, "documents and sacred records that took years to accumulate were pulled from filing cabinets and discarded into dumpsters, gone in a matter of minutes." Was there no archival plan? One commenter pointed out that neither MOHAI nor the UW Libraries is flush with cash right now, but that shouldn't preclude preservation of the records in the most basic sense until the economy rights itself. (I should point out that the P-I's photo archives were long ago given to MOHAI, and I can't imagine everything was thrown out... but, as I write at Crosscut, that sentence above certainly stopped me in my tracks.)

These are indeed hard times all around, but especially in the nonprofit world, and especially when it comes to local history. I mentioned the proposed merger of the Washington State History Museum and Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in January, and now I read at Crosscut that the Oregon Historical Society recently laid off nearly its entire staff of librarians and archivists. (The museum is on much sounder footing, but it's the librarians and archivists that serve the community's research needs.)

Meanwhile, local government is finding it too difficult to index their public information and seeking exemptions to the public-disclosure laws on that basis. The state archivist has taken to traveling across Washington (not a bad idea in itself) to teach local officials how to comply, but now Seattle is proposing that it "not [be] required to maintain a current index of public records due to findings of the City Council that the requirement is unduly burdensome and would interfere with City operations and such a list is nearly impossible to create and/or maintain." Now, of course essential services must come first. But all the information in the world is no good without organization, so a lack of a good index will inconvenience everyone, not just those who might want to research, a few years down the line, what the city has been up to. As a former indexer myself, I'd just like to remind everyone that the profession exists, though if budgets for libraries, universities, museums, and other institutions of culture keep getting cut, and the publishing world gets ever more fragmented, it may not exist for too much longer.

Readers of this blog needn't be reminded of the great importance of history. We've all heard the saying that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, but if that's not your speed, here's a more recent take on why history is important. To marketers, of all people! From Seth Godin:

My question to marketers with a huge idea, something that will change everything, is, "tell me about how someone has done this before."... If all you've got is a lot of confidence and nothing to point to in the past, forgive me for being a bit skeptical. Hopeful, sure, but skeptical.