Last week we asked Jeff Watts, the BHS Archives director, what his fondest wish is for the archives room. He described it set up like a small classroom from the Broadway High School era, with access to the room's contents in the way that students would have used them back in their day.
This made me think of the Interference Archive in Brooklyn, a space that practices open stacks with its holdings so that visitors "can explore the relationship between cultural production and social movements." When you walk into the Interference Archive, you see the usual preservation boxes and files that house the materials in addition to a wide variety of materials on open shelves. The archives' intention is that visitors touch and interact with the ephemera, even at the risk of potential wear.
We consider the use of our collection to be a way of preserving and honoring histories and material culture that is often marginalized in mainstream institutions.
Such is our intention with the Whims and Sealths that are a significant part of the BHS collection. We are fortunate to have enough copies of most issues to be able to preserve some in perpetuity (preservation copies) while having some out for general use (access copies). While we hope that the collection will one day be digitized, handling an original allows the researcher to employ all the senses to understand the document: the smell of the ink, the brittle edges of aging newsprint, the embossed textures of the older issues, and more. As the piece crumbles away over time, it also allows us to respect the ephemeral nature of these objects and their destiny to be consumed and enjoyed in the moment.