Name: David McAllister
Title: Student
Institution: Drexel University
Title of Influential American Archivist Article: “Dear Mary Jane: Some Reflections on Being an Archivist”
Author(s) of Article: John A. Fleckner
Volume and Date: 54:1 (Winter 1991)
How has this article influenced you as an archivist?
“Dear Mary Jane: Some Reflections on Being an Archivist” was one of the first pieces I read in my endeavor to reinvent myself as an archivist. It immediately put me at ease, reinforced that my choice to go back to school again was a smart one, an important one. Like Fleckner, I went the graduate-school-in-history route, and have been teaching history courses as an adjunct for too many years. With limited prospects for a tenure-track position and not sure anymore I really wanted to be a full-time academic historian, I started school again and, like the fictional Mary Jane Appel, “met” John Fleckner.
There is something soothingly personal about a letter, something that comes through even when you are reading a digitized copy of a journal article that contained three letters that weren’t even addressed to you. This is a tribute to Fleckner of course; to take the format of a letter required him to open up to reveal part of himself, and he understood this and used it to great effect. He admitted mistakes, admitted infallibility in his decisions he made and continues to make as an archivist. It is intimidating to start again, to open oneself up to criticism in the classroom (especially for one used to giving the criticism), and to admit that you do not know something. “Don’t worry,” Fleckner is saying here to young colleagues; you will make mistakes, but we all do; learn from them and move on.
For me, the real key of these letters comes in the third with his discussion about the social importance of archives. “The archival record,” Fleckner writes, “is a bastion of a just society;” it “assures our rights. . .to our ownership of our history;” it enables “individuals and groups neglected or maligned by the dominant culture” a chance to recreate a “sense of their historical peoplehood too frequently denied to them in the past.” An archivist is more than a records keeper, she is in the broadest sense a keeper of history, a keeper of democracy.
If this is true, and I believe it is, it represented for me a place to start rethinking about what archives are and how they should function in society. In a few sentences, Fleckner suggests that the archival profession is not passive but active; that its power is not simply in accumulating the papers passed down from the state, but in assembling an archival record that represents a representative history of the people. It includes the history of groups and individuals with little power and influence and those who often courageously challenge state power. In thinking about and digesting Fleckner’s piece as an archivist to be, it is enlivening to think that I will be a part of this important societal task. I understand that Fleckner is stepping back here and taking a big-picture approach and that the day-to-day tasks of an archivist can be mundane and far removed from the lofty goals of preserving democratic institutions. But Fleckner gives me something to strive for: to make a career that is focused on actively assembling that real history of the people.