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Halted by the Archive: The Impact of Excessive Archival Restrictions on Scholars
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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Halted by the Archive: The Impact of Excessive Archival Restrictions on Scholars Ruth Panofsky and Michael Moir The Scholar In 1999, I was awarded a Professional Writer’s Grant by the Canada Council for the Arts to support a study of the novelist Adele Wiseman.1 The project I proposed would rely extensively on the Wiseman fonds held at York University. By 1999, I already had used Wiseman’s papers in conjunction with two book projects, Adele Wiseman: An Annotated Bibliography, and Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman, co-edited with John Lennox.2 For the first project, Wiseman herself had given me full access to her private papers while they remained in her possession. On numerous visits to her Toronto flat in 1989 and 1990, I worked with material that she later deposited at York in 1991 as the first accession of the Wiseman fonds. On those visits, Wiseman offered up a seemingly chaotic arrangement of countless boxes from which I culled invaluable documents. The details of a life, from the minutiae of shopping lists to the original typescripts of her various works, remained intact in that remarkable collection of boxes. In an effort to develop a comprehensive bibliography, I worked furiously to record and annotate items that Wiseman had saved 16 9 17 0 r u t h Pa n o F s K Y a n d M i c h a e L M o i r over the years. By the time of her death in June 1992, having been mentored by the woman whose writing I had so long admired and whose archive I had studied in the privacy of her home, I felt compelled to honour her with a special Wiseman issue of the literary journal Room of One’s Own, which appeared in September 1993 under my guest editorship.3 Before her death, Wiseman granted me and John Lennox permission to use her side of the correspondence in preparing Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman. For that project, when the first accession of her papers was not yet catalogued and stored in an archival vault of the Scott Library, Wiseman gave me ready access to the same cache of boxes I had consulted in her flat. Although she did not live to celebrate the publication of our work, a testimony to her forty-year friendship with Laurence, Wiseman sanctioned our editorial project by giving us unrestricted access to her archive. Following her mother’s death, Tamara Stone, Wiseman’s daughter and literary executor, showed a similar generosity by renewing permission to publish the letters we had been editing. In 1996, four years after her mother’s death, Stone deposited the second accession of the Wiseman fonds at York University. At the time, however, since she did not sign over the deposit of papers to York, the second accession was inaccessible to researchers. The first accession remained open for scholarly use, but permission to photocopy and cite from unpublished archival material had to be provided by Wiseman’s literary executor. In 1998, one year after the appearance of Selected Letters, I submitted an application to the Canada Council. The project I envisaged, a biographical study that would also attend to the writer’s literary career, grew naturally out of my previous work on Wiseman. In March 1999, when I learned that my application had been successful, I planned a period of sustained research and was optimistic that my career-long devotion to Wiseman studies would result in a monograph. Since my relations with Tamara Stone remained cordial and open, I assumed she would continue to grant me access to the Wiseman fonds. The luxury of that access, however, was soon denied. Barbara Craig, one-time archivist of York University and Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, acknowledges that the fundamental reality of archival “work is the record: its physical nature, its creation, its uses and its relationship to the values of our society” (140). She argues, however, that “[t]he document is not a stifling prison for data; the context and form of the document give additional meaning to the information contained within.” Moreover, “[d]ocumentary information is unlike any other kind of data; access to it and use of it make a unique contribution to society.” In fact, this “provides the ultimate [54.224.124.217] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:51 GMT) h a Lt e d B Y t...