The DIY Archive

My phone buzzes in my pocket. The screen tells me that the call is coming into the Rainbow History Project’s (RHP) phone number. I’m at my day job, but I pick it up anyway. We have no office space, no physical location, so all calls have to be routed to an RHP board member, and I am the nominee.

A woman’s voice, throaty and enthusiastic, is on the other end. She tells me she is a former president of the Washington, DC, chapter of PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). She has also done a lot of work through a local hospital on the subject of gender nonconforming children. She will shortly be moving to a new house, downsizing. She does not know what PFLAG and related materials she has on hand, and she won’t know until she starts to pack. But she would like to donate the materials to an organization that can archive them and make them available. Would RHP appreciate this donation?

Even before she has finished talking, the wheels of my mind are cranked and turning. Other than a couple of oral histories, and a few papers related to a DC gay youth group, RHP has little material about the LGBT youth experience in and around Washington. PFLAG is a historically important organization, and its papers would help us flesh out the story of local LGBT history, rendering visible a constituent group now underserved in our archive. From these perspectives, of course we’d love the materials.

Our storage unit, though, is full to bursting, and she doesn’t know how many papers she has to donate. Can we fit them into a corner in storage? If not, is there a board member’s house or apartment where we could store the files temporarily? Furthermore, who is going to help the donor sort through her materials and pick them up at her home? After all, she lives in the outer suburbs, and most RHP board members don’t have cars. I am busy replying to researcher requests and digitizing our oral histories and researching to take an oral history and preparing a conference talk—this camel’s back is about to break. But is anyone else from the board available? Could a volunteer who isn’t on the board handle this task? Do any of us even have the background in the topics of LGBT youth and gender nonconforming youth, such that we would understand how best to sort, archive, and present these materials? We have an archival partnership with the Historical Society of Washington, but they’re understaffed and underfunded as well. How long would it take us to organize the PFLAG materials in order to post information to our website and potentially create a finding aid before handing the materials over to the historical society? And is our deed of gift form even up-to-date? We haven’t taken a donation in a while.

Such are the difficulties of the DIY archive, the perils of existing as a website and a storage unit but little else that is tangible. An all-volunteer organization since its inception, the Rainbow History Project was founded in 2000 by a man looking for information about the history of Washington, DC’s drag community. Not only was this history not recorded or archived, but neither was Washington’s LGBT history more generally. As it says on our website, RHP is dedicated to “collecting, preserving, and promoting an active knowledge of the history, arts, and culture relevant to sexually diverse communities in metropolitan Washington, DC.” This is a lofty and worthy goal, but reaching it has mostly been undertaken by people with little or no formal training in archiving, cataloging, records management, web development, grant-writing, or historic preservation. Although we are now fortunate to have the presence of two professional librarians on our board of directors, members of the group have traditionally lacked formal expertise, relying instead on learning as we go along. (Perhaps this process mirrors the way that LGBT people must generally find their way in the world. Lacking preformed...