Lost Lives and Pieces of Paper
Original Order
Archives wield power in another way as well. In addition to being able to selecting which documentary records will be preserved and which will not, archivists also preserve and rearrange (when necessary) the collections they acquire.As of summer of 2017, Alan Lew’s papers are currently rehoused, but not yet fully processed. In archivist-speak, that means that an archivist has taken the materials and placed them in acid-free folders and boxes but not altered the original order. Keeping original order is important to archivists (and the scholars who use an archives materials) – as much as possible, archivists strive to limit their influence on a collection. Preserving original order allows researchers to encounter sources in whatever arrangement the person creating the sources left them. Ideally, then, original order would allow a researcher to think about how a source’s creator was organizing the papers he or she left behind. This is important because of how researchers physically encounter archival material.
