I’ve been dealing with soooo many law type things at NARA these past two weeks. Lots of dockets. Bankruptcies. Depositions. Civil cases from the district court at Chicago. So much legal-ness.
Last week we worked on bankruptcy cases. I went through bankruptcy dockets (giant books, well, kind of like glorified binders actually, containing bankruptcy cases) and looked for cases dealing with large steel manufacturing companies. Doug, my supervisor and the Director of Archival Operations at NARA Chicago, also asked me to keep track of farming cases (to my surprise, I found only two). In looking at the steel cases, my job was to aim at highlighting the variety of jobs in the steel/metals/manufacturing industry, specifically for Republic Steel Company, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, and Jones & Laughlin. These were all dockets from the district court at Cleveland, Ohio.
My lovely cart of dockets
One of the things I’m learning at the National Archives is that government agencies and different branches/departments of the same agencies don’t really talk to each other very well. Like, at all. A few of the archivists at NARA had been creating lists of important and historically significant cases throughout the previous week in preparation for pulling everything on Wednesday (June 12). Well, the FRC (Federal Records Center), to which NARA Chicago is attached, received different orders: the bankruptcy case files needed to be pulled on Tuesday June 11 and disposed of (destroyed, gone, splabap, boom, bang, kerplunk, donezo, never to be seen or heard from again-if you can actually HEAR archives? I dunno, we’ll discuss that at a later date). So we in the archives go into crunch mode and start pulling bankruptcy cases that we had identified before they can be shipped off for disposal (see previous sentence for the disposal list). Needless to say, our plan of having everything identified to pull on Tuesday and then doing all the pulling on Wednesday had a major wrench thrown into it. While the FRC has to stay on schedule, they were super awesome in letting us know that they had received orders to get rid of the bankruptcy cases, so we at least got to save the important cases.
The next day, I reboxed and filled in the database for the East St. Louis bankruptcy files that had been pulled the day before. Eventually, the cases will need to be refoldered, but the database is of key importance currently in terms of accessioning reasons. I’m sure another intern will get to complete the refoldering aspect of holdings maintenance on those files. I also spent some time talking with Martin, an Archivist Technician, about archival appraising. The problem with archival appraising is that they don’t always know what the archives actually has, since records are only kept for a certain amount of time before they are destroyed (which we saw all too well the previous day), and records of records, unsurprisingly, aren’t always kept that well. If the archivists don’t have time to go through the databases and boxes to pull the folders, important records will be destroyed with everything else and lost forever. Determining what to keep, or what has “historical importance”, is a very grey area. We were going through deposition dockets as an example of this and came across some REALLY cool pages:
Hoochie Coochie Man, anyone? (I swear that’s a song title)
That’s right, two GIANTS of the blues sued record labels for compensation for the money made from their songs. Make a mental note of the labels they sued and there you go, you can now contribute to a blues trivia night with your friends. You’re welcome.
Late in the afternoon that day, I started refoldering (taking out of binders and putting into archival folders) civil dockets from the district court of Chicago. There were 34 boxes of civil cases from the year 1986, with 3 giant binders in each box. I got through the first two boxes last Wednesday and developed a quick system of performing holdings maintenance on the documents. This week, Jonathan and I went pedal to the metal and finished all the boxes. That’s right. ALL of them. All 20+ linear feet. DONE.
I don’t think my fingers will ever be the same again. So much dust. So many paper cuts. But it is done, and that is good.
7358 S Pulaski 