Literary and Artistic Archives: the blog of the Section on Literary and Artistic Archives of the International Council on Archives

Amy Hildreth Chen: Placing papers; the American literary archives market. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, [2020].

This is a book about literary archives in the USA, which may have been less noticed because it was published during the COVID pandemic.

Publishers’ blurb: “The sale of authors’ papers to archives has become big news, with collections from James Baldwin and Arthur Miller fetching record-breaking sums in recent years. Amy Hildreth Chen offers the history of how this multimillion dollar business developed from the mid-twentieth century onward and considers what impact authors, literary executors, agents, and rare book dealers have had on this burgeoning economy. The market for contemporary authors’ archives began when research libraries needed to cheaply provide primary sources for the swelling number of students and faculty following World War II. Demand soon grew, and while writers and their families found new opportunities to make money, so too did book dealers and literary agents with the foresight to pivot their businesses to serve living authors. Public interest surrounding celebrity writers had exploded by the late twentieth century, and as Placing Papers illustrates, even the best funded institutions were forced to contend with the facts that acquiring contemporary literary archives had become cost prohibitive and increasingly competitive”.

A new manuscripts catalogue covering materials held in both the Bodleian Library and Oxford college libraries was launched in October 2023. It is known as MARCO.

Funded by The Mellon Foundation, this new service – Manuscripts and Archives at Oxford University – aims to create a connected and adaptable digital environment for the University of Oxford’s manuscripts and archives.

It is now possible to search over 200,000 items from 11 online catalogues, including archives, early modern and medieval manuscripts, Hebrew manuscripts, and manuscripts from Western, Central and Southern Asia, from 400 BC to the present day, all in one place.

This new discovery service showcases newly discoverable content in the fields of mediaeval and early modern charters, South Asian manuscripts, and archival collections, including many outstanding collections of literary archives.

The new search tool, which also includes manuscripts held in a number of Oxford colleges, makes it easier to find material from across Oxford’s unique and diverse special collections, and enables searching across internal collection boundaries.

MARCO can be found at: https://marco.ox.ac.uk.

Morning session venue (before lunch):

Finnish Literature Society (SKS)
Hallituskatu 1, Helsinki
Accessible entrance is via the front door on the Mariankatu side of the SKS building.

Afternoon session (after lunch) venue:

National Library of Finland
Unioninkatu 36, Helsinki
Accessible entrance is via the inner courtyard at Yliopistokatu 1. The inner courtyard also has disabled parking.

Schedule:
9.00 – 9.15 Opening words

9.15 – 9.30 “Making of the national narrative – how about the minority voices” Eija Stark, Finnish Literature Society

9.30 – 10.00 “The challenges of diasporic literary archives” David C. Sutton, University of Reading

10.00 – 10.15 Discussion

10.15 – 10.45 “Archival Babel? Immigrant archive as an attempted multilingual harmonious chorus”, Daniel Necas, Immigration History Research Center Archives, University of Minnesota

10.45 – 11.00 Discussion

11.00 – 11.15 “Whose History is Migrant History? A Key Question for Heritage Preservation” Migration Institute of Finland, Samira Saramo

11.15 – 13.00 Lunch, and short walk to National Library of Finland

13.00 – 13.30 “Multilingual Materials at National Library of Finland” Tuula Pääkkönen, National Library of Finland

13.30 – 14.30 Workshop 1

14.30 – 14.45 Coffee (complimentary)

14.45 – 16.00 Workshop 2

16.00 – 17.00 Panel Discussion

• Kirsti Salmi-Niklander (University of Helsinki) Samira Saramo (Migration Institute of Finland
• Daniel Necas (Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota) Johanna Lilja (National Library of Finland)
• Joanna Chopp (Finnish American Heritage Center)
  
  The workshop is organized by two projects funded by the Kone foundation “The connections between Finnish poetry and the rekilaulu singing culture: forms, meanings and trans-nationalism” and “T-Bone Slim and the transnational poetics of the migrant left in North America”, and ARNE (archive research network).

The event is funded by Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH).

Description

La base Palme signale plus de 120 000 documents conservés dans 430 institutions aussi diverses que bibliothèques municipales, archives, mais aussi musées et centres de recherche publics ou privés. Les notices sont succinctes et visent surtout à signaler l’ensemble des documents manuscrits auteur par auteur.

La base Palme a été rétroconvertie en EAD à partir de notices en provenance de l’ancien catalogue Opaline de la BnF. Les notices concernant l’Enseignement supérieur lui ont été versées. A terme, cette base a vocation à fusionner avec le Catalogue général des manuscrits (CGM), qu’elle recoupe partiellement.

Palme est présentée sous la forme de deux fichiers d’archives :

• un fichier pour les données des bibliothèques publiques, contenant 408 inventaires en XML EAD et la DTD correspondante (3,09 Mo compressé / 76,6 Mo décompressé),
• un fichier pour les données de la BnF, contenant 14 inventaires en XML EAD et la DTD correspondante (1,35 Mo compressé / 35,5 Mo décompressé).

Chaque fichier est nommé de la manière suivante :

• Un préfixe : palme,
• Le n° RCR de l’institution de conservation, constitué de 9 chiffres (les 2 premiers chiffres correspondent au numéro du département, les 3 suivants au code INSEE de la commune dans laquelle est situé l’équipement, les 2 suivants au type de bibliothèque, et les 2 derniers au numéro séquentiel),
• un complément lorsque l’inventaire d’un établissement est séparé en plusieurs fichiers.

Le Répertoire du CCFr permet de retrouver un n° RCR ou l’établissement correspondant.

En savoir plus :

• sur l’EAD : https://www.bnf.fr/fr/ead-encoded-archival-description
• sur le Répertoire du CCFr : https://www.bnf.fr/fr/le-repertoire-du-ccfr
  
• contact : manuscritsccfr@bnf.fr

Exhibition, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris

Two weeks before his death in April 1986, Jean Genet gave his lawyer Roland Dumas two suitcases of manuscripts. What did they contain that was so precious? His entire life. At first glance, a jumble of letters, hotel bills, notes on everything and nothing, on prison, writing, homosexuality and cinema. But they also held the vivid traces of a sixteen-year association with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians.

They also revealed another story: the story of a writer who, at the age of 50, gave up on literature. What did he do with his life after then? What does a writer who no longer writes write?

The suitcases provide an answer to this question: despite himself, despite his vow of silence and his “sealed lips”, Genet wrote. He wrote on everything that came into his hands, on envelopes, hotel stationery and torn-up pieces of newspaper… Everywhere, he scribbled his life.

And, one day, mysteriously, from these thousands of scattered notes, emerged the manuscript of a book combining literature and politics, and connecting the great adventure of the Black Panthers and the Palestinian feddayeen with the story of the life of a child of welfare services.

One month after Jean Genet died, his Prisoner of Love was published, arguably the most important book written by a Western artist about the Palestinians’ struggle – reflecting Genet’s first-hand experience of the massacres of Palestinian civilians in the camps of Sabra and Shatila.

Genet’s two suitcases now belong to the IMEC in Caen, and are on display in central Paris at present within an exhibition dedicated to the contribution of Palestinians to the cultural and social heritage of the world.

Ce que la Palestine apporte au monde, exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Quai Saint-Bernard, opposite the Pont de Sully in Paris – continues until 19 November 2023.

SLA’s long-time partners, the Diasporic Literary Archives Network (DLAN), has launched a new website in 2023.

This follows a decision by the University of Reading to bring DLAN in-house as one of its ongoing research projects.

The new web-address is: https://research.reading.ac.uk/diasporicarchives/

Please amend your bookmarks to the new web-address.

The new website is still under construction, but the listing of diasporic literary collections around the world, which was a major feature of the previous site, can already be found here.

From the website: In November 2013, the network became an approved project of the International Council on Archives, by decision of ICA’s Programme Commission. The Network’s ongoing value and impact is recognised by the University of Reading, and the University will support its continuation into the decade of the 2020s.  Visit the News page to read more about work since 2014 on archives in danger / documentary heritage at risk (work with UNESCO and swisspeace); on Caribbean archives (notably with partners in Grenada and Trinidad & Tobago); and on literary, musical and artistic archives in Africa (Namibia, Malawi, Cape Verde, Cameroon and other countries).