Thesis/Capstone – Public History at UMass Boston

July 28, 2022Rebecca M Beit-Aharon 1 Comment

The People’s Congressman: Joe Moakley’s Mission for Peace and Justice in El Salvador

By Laura Kintz

My name is Laura Kintz, and I designed an Omeka site, THE PEOPLE’S CONGRESSMAN: JOE MOAKLEY’S MISSION FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE IN EL SALVADOR, as my capstone project for the Archives Track of UMass Boston’s History MA program.

The goal of my site is to display and contextualize archival materials that document Congressman John Joseph Moakley’s important work related to issues in El Salvador during that country’s civil war from 1979 to 1992, especially his career-defining leadership of the “Moakley Commission:” a congressional task force that investigated the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter. This project reflects my interests in both 20^th century American history and issues of archival access.

Congressman Moakley (1927-2001) was a Democratic South Boston politician whose career spanned the second half of the twentieth century. His papers are at Suffolk University in Boston, which is both my alma mater (BS in History, 2006) and Moakley’s (JD, 1956). The John Joseph Moakley Archive and Institute (JJMAI) at Suffolk University has digitized thousands of Moakley Papers documents, including hundreds relating to El Salvador, for use by off-site researchers; these are accessible via their online catalog. Fifteen years after his death, though, Moakley’s work related to El Salvador remains largely unknown. With one exception (Moakley’s biographer, Mark Schneider), historians have largely ignored Moakley and his career as historical subjects. The wealth of materials available in the Moakley Papers begs for further research, and thus far, no one has mined these materials and presented them digitally in a cohesive way. My goal in creating a digital exhibit is to change that. The site allows historical researchers and members of the general public to learn about a politician who worked tirelessly to help the victims of Salvadoran injustice.

This site includes a short sketch of Congressman Moakley’s life and career, as well as a timeline of El Salvador’s history, with a focus on the years of the civil war. The “Archival Materials” section comprises the bulk of the exhibit; it features correspondence, memoranda, press releases, government documents, reports, photographs, and other pieces of evidence that chronicle Moakley’s introduction to El Salvador; immigration reform; the 1989 Jesuit Murders and the Moakley Commission; the end of the civil war; and Moakley’s legacy. An “Oral History” section includes transcripts of interviews with Moakley’s family, friends, colleagues, and even with Moakley himself. A final section includes a bibliography and notes on copyright.

In crafting my site, I had nearly 500 digitized archival documents at my disposal. These represent only a small portion of the total number of documents in the Moakley Papers, but nonetheless provide significant insight into Moakley’s career. I selected documents that best support the overall narrative of Moakley’s work and then divided them into categories that reflect the general trajectory of this work. The narrative contextualizes the documents, but the documents also speak for themselves. Each document has its own accompanying identifying information, or metadata, that provides further details, including a general description of the document. In some instances, for presentation purposes, I have divided multi-page documents into separate PDFs; I have noted these instances in the metadata for the relevant files.

My work on the site aligns with my main goal as an archivist, which is to uncover history by providing access to primary sources.The complicated nature of Moakley’s work and of El Salvador’s history in general made this process challenging at times. Given these complexities and my desire to present the material in a succinct and readable way, there are certain aspects of Moakley’s work and El Salvador’s history that this site does not cover. The primary source documents that I have contextualized nonetheless illuminate the unceasing efforts of a United States congressman whose commitment to human rights in El Salvador defined his career and is an example to citizens of today’s world, politicians and civilians alike.

I would like to the staff, past and present, of the Moakley Archive and Institute for all the wonderful work they have done to digitize Congressman Moakley’s papers. This project would not exist without their commitment to providing access to their materials. I would especially like to thank archivist Julia Howington, whose advice and assistance were invaluable as I worked on this digital exhibit.

I would also like to give very special thanks to my advisor and mentor, UMass Boston Archives Program Director, Dr. Marilyn Morgan. Without Dr. Morgan’s encouragement, I may not have realized that archives are my true calling. Dr. Morgan’s support not only helped me create this exhibit, but also helped me learn how to be an archivist, and for that, I am immensely grateful.

Finally, I would like to thank my family, friends, and fellow students for all of their support during my graduate career. I would like to dedicate this exhibit to my husband, Rob Kintz, without whom I never would have been able to start, let alone finish, graduate school. He has always believed in me, and for that, I cannot thank him enough.

July 28, 2022Rebecca M Beit-Aharon 1 Comment

A Curatorial Tagging Case Study of the Blackwell Family Papers Digital Collection; Or, Making the Case For Archival Performance Transparency

By Katie Fortier

My capstone project uses the Blackwell Family Papers Digital Collection (BFPDC) as a lens through which to examine issues of archival performance transparency or pertinent contextual information that could enhance access points to digital collections.

Archivists have traditionally viewed themselves and their institutions as objective and impartial presenters of documents. In more recent decades, some have debated the agency and mediation that they practice in their profession, in terms of appraising, arranging, and describing archival records. Some have pushed the debate further, arguing that archival users should be more involved in these processes, particularly by generating descriptive metadata, as a complement or alternative to traditional taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, which some archivists have more recently scrutinized.

Philosophical discussions revolving around archival transparency address several issues; for instance, what are the means by which archivists explicitly outline their archival decisions and intentions? What role do archives play in constructing cultural memory and power? Can providing additional contextual information about archival methodologies prove useful to researchers? Can including additional context prove beneficial to archivists themselves by serving as an administrative tool? Lastly, and perhaps most difficult to assess, when instituting new practices, like tagging digital collections to enhance transparency and accessibility, is it possible for an archivist to consciously document his or her own biases?

In 2012, Schlesinger Library initiated a tagging project to enhance access and create new pathways between records in the extensive collection that had been fully digitized in 2014. The process and challenges encountered in tagging the BFPDC—inconsistency, the lack of objectivity, and the uneven distribution of curatorial tagging—provide insight into social experiments in archival description. Creating and applying tags to provide contextual information aptly highlights issues related to descriptive practices in general. My capstone outlines the type of information that the project generated and attempts to evaluate its usefulness. It also highlights the anxieties of tagging in this fashion in light of postmodern theory and its application to archival theory, particularly archival description. It argues for the transparency of descriptive practices as a means of communicating to users important contextual information about the custodial history of archival records, including trying to articulate the combinations of different methodologies with which archivists applied curatorial tags. It finally produces several decision-making documents that one might feature on their digital online collections, to aid researchers in understanding the way in which they are seeing digital materials.

Within the past 20 years, several archivists have made calls for contextual documentation of manuscript collections but a nomenclature for this action has yet to be standardized. My capstone uses the term archival performance transparency to describe a document or a set of documents that relay, explicitly, information outlining one, some, or all of these processes: custodial history of records; appraisal, processing, and descriptive decision-making (of the archivist and/or the repository); documentation strategies; archival methodologies; and personal or institutional biases. Archival performance transparency derives from the work of Terry Cook and Joan M. Schwartz who insist that “the archivist is an actor, not a guardian; a performer, not a custodian.” Archival performance transparency entails providing contextual information related to collections; it does not relate to discussions regarding the transparency of organizations and citizens’ abilities to access records.

My capstone builds upon the work of Michelle Light and Tom Hyry who, in 2002, appropriated the term colophon for the field of archives. The finding aid colophon, serving as an addition tacked onto a finding aid, translates into words the inevitable subjectivity of the archivist’s choices when making appraisal and processing decisions. At present, few, if any, archives or repositories have put the idea of a finding aid colophon into practice. My capstone proposes a reimagining of the colophon for the digital collections environment; an environment where digital records often suffer from lack of context. Using the Blackwell Family Papers Digital Collections as a case study, my project argues that the transmission of records from its original finding aid to its representation in an online digital collection environment necessitates the creation of a series of digital collection essays. Digital collection essays can be defined as archival performance transparency tools to be applied to an online digital collection that describe the transmission and representation of digital archival records. These essays integrate archival performance transparency as well as educational and navigational information to breathe new life into the archival colophon.

September 21, 2017Heidi Gengenbach No Comments

Surrounded by Sound: Processing Pop Culture

by Connor Anderson, MA (Archives program ’17)

I was in the unique position to work with and create a finding aid for an unprocessed archival collection for my Capstone Project during my final semester at UMass Boston. For those who are unfamiliar with a Capstone, it offers an equivalent alternative to writing a traditional thesis in the History MA program. Personally, a Capstone was a better fit for my career aspirations as an archivist—the inventory and finding aid I created, along with the collection I processed, are both tangible objects.

I chose to work with the Allan D. MacDougall Popular Culture Collection which represents the lifework of its namesake.

Stamp of MacDougall’s signature.

MacDougall, known affectionately as “Rocco,” taught at Newton North High School in Newton, MA. He dedicated his life to collecting items that he felt documented popular culture in the US. MacDougall used items from his vast collection as integral part of his teaching to instill a love of music and pop cultural history for decades. His massive collection was donated by his wife, JoEllen Hillyer, to the Center for the Study of Humanities, Culture, and Society (CHCS) at UMass Boston in the spring of 2015.

A musician and lover of music, MacDougall collected all genres and styles of recorded music, from the eclectic and obscure to popular hits that topped 20th-century American music charts. The collection also hosts the various formats on which music was created and stored over time, including impressive quantities of CDs, vinyl records, audio tape cassettes, and phonograph cylinders. First used by Thomas Edison, inventor of the phonograph, to successfully record and reproduce sounds, phonograph cylinders were small grooved cylinders made of ceresin, beeswax, and stearic wax. The sound recording format was popular in the late 19th through the early 20th centuries.

Phonograph cylinder produced by the Thomas Edison Phonograph Company in 1911 (left) with a case of late 19th- and early 20th- century wax cylinder sound recordings collected by MacDougall.

In addition to music recordings, MacDougall acquired extensive runs of British and American magazines, numerous trade journals and collectors’ guides. Titles included mainstream publications, such as Rolling Stone, Uncut, Word, and Billboard, as well as journals that are difficult to find and even more difficult for researchers to access. The collection boasts hundreds of issues of local Boston and New England regional publications, such as Broadside of Boston. Especially noteworthy is the breadth of magazines, journals, and newspapers devoted to jazz, blues, and folk music, as well as band and concert guides spanning the latter half of the 20th century. Included among the magazines is small but notable assortment of magazines about Elvis, Buck Owens, John F. Kennedy, and the Beatles.

In addition to providing a wide range of music materials, the archive also houses more than 2,000 comic books and a wide range of popular culture ephemera, including hundreds of newspaper and magazine clippings organized by topic, ranging from individual musicians to major corporations, from cultural phenomena to social problems.

Cover of DC Comic’s Romance Comic, Secret Hearts, 1970.

The comic-book collection includes an impressive selection of mainstream comic books from the 1960s and 1970s, many of them superhero comics. But it also includes dozens of “humor” comics, such as Little Lulu, Casper, and Walt Disney comics. Perhaps the most distinguished feature of the comics collection is the remarkable number of “romance” comics, of which there are more than 200 from a variety of publishers.

There are a notable number of books, VHS tapes, and DVDs as well. The sheer size of the collection combined with the small space it resides it proved overwhelming to me at first.

The Allan D. MacDougall Popular Culture Archive as it appeared before processing began — The Allan D. MacDougall Popular Culture Collection as it appeared before processing began.

Luckily, I received help from two alumni of the American Studies Graduate Program during the semester, Andre Diehl and Scott Harris.

Scott provided the muscle—consolidating the collections and creating much needed “breathing room” in our location. Even though he worked with the archive for a short period, he played a pivotal role in my project. Andre knows the collection back and forth, up and down. He may have forgotten more about the collection than I’ll ever know.

Connor, ensconced in the processing area of the MacDougall Collection, creating an inventory of thousands of AV materials.

Andre and others before him did an amazing job cataloging much of the magazines, journals, and comic books, as well as digitizing all the CDs in the archive.

Here are some numbers for you—as of spring 2017—that we have cataloged EXACTLY:

8,960 vinyl records—including sizes of 7”, 10”, 12”, and rare 16”
3,145 CDs
836 tape cassettes and another 500+ student-made mix-tapes
33 rare phonograph cylinders
A combination of 4,035 magazines, journals, and newspapers
2,277 comic books
110 VHS Tapes
180 DVDs
1,990 books

If you are interested in learning more about the collection, reach out to CHCS!

Note: A few weeks after graduation, Connor Anderson became the new Public Records Access Officer/Archivist of the Town of Plymouth. Congratulations, Connor!