What drew my attention the most from this week’s reading was the inclusion of how in both quantitative and qualitative methods of reading the history of the archive in for use in book history there are difficulties in accessing information and records.
In the quantitative method of “reading the archive,” historians would collect information about “the records of publishers and allied trades; bibliographies and library
catalogues; and information created by legislative and governing bodies in
managing the book trade.” (Bode and Osborne 225). Researchers look for information that will allow them to understand the work and culture that surrounds the production of a book in order to comprehend how different eras of history affected the production and reading of books. However the quantitative method will not answer all questions, many times records are in poor quality, with “historical data often ‘patchy,'” and are also biased, with, “historical data… inflected by the perspectives and intentions of the individuals and institutions that create and curate them.” (228). In the qualitative method there are faults as well, when reading from and accessing information from an archive one must remember that the archive, although it may be expansive, is “[n]either complete or fully revealing,” as “Individuals make decisions about what documents they want to keep or discard.” which invited the bias of the archivist to affect the “completeness,” or a collection or grouping of works (Bode and Osborne 224).
In both methods bias affects the collection of work, the perspective and values of the archivist, or the organization they collect for, will frequently be the deciding factor between what is included or disregarded in a collection. The archive, which I previously believed to be a place of equality, where books and information are all kept safe to the best of the archivist’s ability for reader’s access and reference, does not view all books, and therefore information, equally. Archivists must make careful and difficult choices to decide which items deserve to be in an archive and why, knowing that the decision to preserve one book or artifact of information might mean to loose another one. It is interesting that while book historians may read books from within an archive to disseminate how certain perspectives, politics, and cultures would have affected the production of a book, the same archive that they are reading from would have be affected by those same subjects.
Hi Nina. I was also interested in how the archives can be studied through quantitative and qualitative measures as that is something we have no discussed despite all our time spent in Special Collections. Of the two, I found the quantitative measures particularly fascinating as tracing the history of where a work has gone or how it was produced brings light to it as a living history. By looking at this information, it reinforces the idea that the creation of books specifically are not linear as they pass through many hands in production. When observing these archives, it is impossible to avoid bias, however, it provides a more complete understanding to acknowledge these biases and understand why they are present.