#basement archives

[isheeee]

Febuwhump day 4 nightmares!

Can't believe silver wrote a Afo point of view of today's chapter! Afo losing a bit of confidence at the thought of losing Izuku! Yess❤️✨

Accompanying piece for Basement Archives! These artworks are meant to be enjoyed with the fic!

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[archivyrep]

"The Ghost and Molly McGee" employs archives stereotypes with basement archive [Part 1]

Entering the archives which is…behind a heavy steel door, of course

Recently, I was watching one of my favorite animated series, The Ghost and Molly McGee. When I saw the two protagonists, Molly McGee and Scratch, go to the local library to learn the truth behind a town legend, it seemed like standard fare in animated series. Usually, the story goes like this: characters to go a library or archives to learn about something, they find the answers somehow, and ta-da, problem resolves itself. This episode appeared to follow that same pattern, reminding me a little of The Simpsons episode "Lisa the Iconoclast," which Sam Cross analyzed on her blog. However, I was intrigued when I saw Libby, Molly's friend, hilariously dressed in a trench coat, tells Molly and Scratch that "you have no idea how deep this rabbit hole goes. You need to visit...the archives." Warning that there will be some spoilers for this episode ("Monumental Disaster") discussed in this post so I can analyze it here.

Reprinted from my Wading Through the Cultural Stacks WordPress blog. Originally published on Nov. 18, 2021.

My concern grew when it was clear that in the episode, the archives clearly has a lot of mystique around it. For one, it is only accessible when Libby pulled out a book of a shelf aptly named Secret Levers 4 Secret Doors, causing a huge metal door to open. In the archives itself, it is portrayed as spooky, dusty, and dirty, with cobwebs on the ground, even with eerie music playing. This portrayal is not unique, although some shows have archives above-ground, not in a "dank dungeon of a basement surrounded by cobwebs and dust. For example, in an episode of Phineas & Ferb, another Disney show, Heinz Doofenshmirtz travels to the secret vault, in the basement of city hall, filled with documents, lit by torches, and having cobweb, to find the deed he is looking for. In Amphibia, also a Disney series, Anne Boonchuy and the Plantars travel to the town archives, happens to also be underground and is described by one character as "dustier than Dusty's dustbin."

Like the basement archives in Phineas & Ferb and Amphibia, no archivist is seen and archives almost seem abandoned. On the other hand, the archives appears to be well-organized, despite some papers strewn on the ground, almost like the basement newspaper archives in a few episodes of Stretch Armstrong and the Flex Fighters, one of the first series I wrote about on this blog in August of last year. It is implied that some people may care for the archives as Libby mentions, earlier in the episode, that the archives is sponsored by the Brighton Women's Historical Society which believes history should be "no mystery."

Despite these negatives, Molly does get the information she looking for, with Libby dramatically opening a box which has the "answers" she seeks. Molly pulls out a book entitled The True History of Brighton. Libby plays a vinyl recording of the book being read/sung. As a result, Molly, is like Lisa Simpson in the previously mentioned episode of The Simpsons, realizing that the town legend is wrong, with the heroine of the town being Sally Tugbottom, rather than her brother, Ezekiel "Tug" Tugbottom. Molly then recognizes that Tug, who the legend is centered around, wrote the history (almost akin to Buddy Buddwick in Steven Universe) which everyone accepts. As a result, she vows to right this injustice. Ultimately, she is successful, as Tug's attempts to cause destruction cause him to destroy a statue made in his honor.

© 2022 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

[isheeee]

Ok. So I’ve been reading basement archives by silver and your art ties each chapter together. It has a certain uneasy aura I relish in (don’t look at me ik I’m crazy) and it’s possibly the most chilling thing ever I love them. Serial killer afo has a certain horror factor that I just enjoy to much for izuku not to suffer. Sorry broccoli boy; we really do like hurting him huh :)

Please. I FEEL YOU OP!!!! YOU REALLY JUST SAID WHAT I CAN'T EXPRESS BY WORDS AND HAVE TO DO IT BY ART!!!

Also the fact that you said that my art ties the chapter together. Op I need you to know that your words mean a lot to me! I really look up to Silver a lot and it's such an honour to work with her but I felt that my art is just never enough to express the greatness of her words. It means a lot, that people actually love it!

I've shared your thoughts with the rest of the Vault and they agree so much! Thanks for sharing your thoughts!!

[archivyrep]

"The Ghost and Molly McGee" employs archives stereotypes with basement archive [Part 4]

Continued from part 3

A basement archive in and of itself is not a stereotype, but it is the fact it paired with other aspects, like having a library unkept, dirty, disorganized, and dusty. As some pointed out in response to this post on /r/Archivist, some smaller archives and historical societies (archives-lite) have archives in their basements. I don't, personally, have an issue with that, my issue with how that is portrayed in popular media.

Reprinted from my Wading Through the Cultural Stacks WordPress blog. Originally published on Nov. 18, 2021.

If there was a well-organized archive in a basement, then that wouldn't be a bad thing, but I haven't seen that in any media, not even in Stretch Armstrong with its basement newspaper archive.

While The Ghost and Molly McGee is obviously an animated fantasy series, it can still contain realism in how archives and archivists actually operate, and be integrated with the show's existing stories and plots. I believe that an animated series could do that, without compromising their plot, characters, or any other aspect of the show.

It is depressing to come across show after show which gets archives wrong, whether confusing archives with libraries, even in the series entitled the Mystic Archives of Dantalian, or having archivists play into stereotypes. I would further hope those working on animated shows, whether creators, animators, storyboarders, artists, or whatnot, reach out to those in the archives profession, to make sure archives, and archivists, are portrayed positively in a way that doesn't perpetuate stereotypes.

In the meantime, I'll continue wading through the cultural stacks!

© 2022 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

[archivyrep]

"The Ghost and Molly McGee" employs archives stereotypes with basement archive [Part 3]

Continued from part 2

Photo of Ricky Roxburgh from Central Coast Writers Conference in Sept. 2020, where he is described as a "Emmy winning writer of animated film and television"

Speaking of Tangled, there are four episodes in that animated series which have archivy themes: "Keeper of the Spire," "Rapunzel and the Great Tree," "Islands Apart," and "Race to the Spire." It turns out, according his IMDB page, that Ricky Roxburgh was a staff writer for all of these episodes, the same ones which had no archivist, archivy themes, and scrolls stuck in a tree, as I referenced earlier in this post.

Reprinted from my Wading Through the Cultural Stacks WordPress blog. Originally published on Nov. 18, 2021.

As such, episode of The Ghost and Molly McGee was not the first time, he had, sadly, contributed to perpetuation of archives stereotypes. Roxburgh has a degree from SUNY Albany, according to his IMDB bio, and is well-educated, making this even more unfortunate. Chang, on the hand, seems to be a new writer, as his only credits on IMDB are seven episodes of The Ghost and Molly McGee.

Sometimes it feels like series like The Ghost and Molly McGee are stuck back in time. The National Archives and Record Administration (NARA)'s Archives II location, where I worked for a short time, has multiple levels of stacks of records, ranging five to seven floors, which can be accessed by employees. However, before 1934, when NARA was founded, national documents were stored "essentially at random," with no plan for preserving the Constitution, and was stuffed in a storage space, even spending time in the basement of the State Department for over forty years! There was, before 1934, a pattern of "astonishingly haphazard record-keeping" which each federal department having its own archive, with many records either not accessible, or lost.

Since 1934, there have been efforts to ensure that records can be accurately cataloged, organized, arranged, and so on. While one could easily, and rightly, point to the backlog in processing NARA's records, or the fact that only 1.2% of the records in NARA's holdings have been digitized, there is no doubt that it is better to have national records organized together under one agency than have them haphazardly organized across many departments.

This is something that the episode is missing. It is also, by saying that the archives is dusty, little-used, and dirty, devaluing the work of archivists themselves. If an archives was realistically in that shape, such an archivist would undoubtedly be violating codes of ethics, whether from state-specific professional organizations or nationally from organizations like the Society of American Archivists. It would also run afoul of records laws on a state level as well.

Andrew Raymond and James O'Toole pointed this out in 1978, arguing that in some respects, archives was seen as a branch of academic history, with the importance of archives depending on the importance of history. They went onto say that "the archivist is therefore consigned to life in the basement. He is forced into a stereotype that is dark, dusty, unpleasant, and most of all irrelevant," only providing services to genealogists and scholar-historians, leading to less funding and regard from others, like administrators and various public officials. [3]

People think all archives look like the above stock image, a photograph of an archive in Sicily, apparently.

Episodes like the The Ghost and Molly McGee episode described in this article feed into those determinations and have real-world effects on public opinion and the lives of archivists themselves.

© 2022 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Notes

[3] Raymond, Andrew, and James M. O’Toole. “Up from the Basement: Archives, History and Public Administration.” Georgia Archive 6, no. 2 (January 1978): 20–21, 28–30. I used Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition (Full note) here. This article seems to assume that the default is a male archivist, even though the most recent A*Census (a new one is in the works) noted that the archives field is female-majority, meaning that for every 10 archivists, six or seven are female, as shown on page 21 of "Part 3. A*CENSUS: A Closer Look." More about that census, with various analyses of the information provided, is available here. A new A*Census, A*Census II, is currently in the works and will be released some time next year.