What Is an Archive?

Have you ever held a faded letter from a family member or looked at an old photograph and wondered about where it came from and how to keep it safe?

If you answered yes, you might have the makings of an archivist.

Getty has a team of archivists who are on the receiving end of papers, letters, photographs, and sometimes oddities that once belonged to artists and collectors. Their job includes organizing and caring for these materials and ensuring they are protected and accessible for future generations.

“Archives contain so many interesting things,” says Getty Research Institute archivist Sara McGillivray. “Our duty is to make sure that they are safe and that they are accessible for future research.”

For Ask an Archivist Day we asked them a few questions about their work, their passion, and some of the surprising things they've come across.

What is an archive?

The standard definition according to the Society of American Archivists is that an archive consists of the documents created or received and accumulated by a person, a family, or an institution during the conduct of affairs, and preserved because of their continuing value. —Renee Tabizon

What sparked your interest in archives?

During my undergraduate studies, when I was researching Indigenous, Black, and female resistance during the Spanish conquest of Latin America, I initially had access only to first-person accounts within published documents. However, a professor told me about the existence of the original letters stored in archives in various institutions. All I needed to do was follow the bibliographies to locate these invaluable documents. —Renee Tabizon

What’s something surprising about Getty’s archives?

Perhaps not surprising, but interesting: Getty creates and generates its own archive that is managed by Institutional Archives. The Getty Research Institute also acquires either through purchases or donations the papers of artists, architects, photographers, art historians, and curators, and the records of art galleries, as well as sketchbooks and prints dating from the 15th century on. We have broad collecting areas from architecture and design to the early history of photography. So, an archivist could be working on the records of an art gallery from the 20th century and describing a print dating from the 16th century in the same week. —Emmabeth Nanol

What are ways Getty’s archives get used?

The bulk of our users are scholars who consult archives for their research, but archives are also used by designers and architects, by artists, for the writing of movies and novels, for teaching classes, and for researching art restitution cases. We know that Getty’s archives are consulted remotely. In part thanks to a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, portions of the records of M. Knoedler & Co. were digitized (about 200,000 digital images), which allows researchers to access portions of the archive from all over the world. So, provenance research on this archive can be done in part from Berlin for instance. —Karen Meyer-Roux

What is the most challenging part of being an archivist?

Archives contain so many interesting things, and as archivists, we don’t always have the time to indulge our curiosity. We have millions of letters, photographs, objects, etc. and our duty is to make sure that they are safe and that they are accessible for future research. More material means we get less time with each individual item and oftentimes we have to leave the fun discoveries to researchers. —Sara McGillivray

What is Getty’s biggest archive?

There are different ways of measuring the size of archives, such as counting the space taken up on the shelves, and the number of items, boxes, or megabytes for digital files. Some of Getty’s largest archives include the Harald Szeemann papers, the records of M. Knoedler & Co., the Frank O. Gehry papers, and the Johnson Publishing Company archive which is owned jointly with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. For instance, the JPC archive contains more items than any other archive acquired by Getty (4.5 million prints and negatives) but architectural drawings from the Gehry archive take up more space in the vaults. —Sara McGillivray

What’s the smallest thing you have archived?

This object is from the Allan Sekula papers. Sekula collected plastic action figures and sometimes cultural figures, especially from the Cold War era. It is likely that these objects were considered for his exhibition Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum during the last three years of his life, from 2011 to 2013. This object is about 1 ½ inches tall, made of plastic, and represents a couple dressed in, probably, traditional Polish clothing. —Emmabeth Nanol

Most random archived object?

Beard growth cuttings of 19-year-old Allan Sekula in his archive, which the GRI acquired in 2016. It came to us in a box with his yearbooks and personal photographs and I was glad to have worn gloves that day unpacking.—Emmabeth Nanol

Do you ever have to decide not to keep something?

The decision to deaccession an item is a process. Registrars and curators are involved in the conversation. In our efforts, we prioritize the removal of duplicates whenever possible. For example, if we happen to possess ten identical, unannotated publications within an archive, our objective is to streamline this number down to just three copies. —Renee Tabizon

What’s your best organizational tip?

Look at the larger picture first to set your goals, then break things down into smaller portions you can tackle piece by piece. Don’t be afraid to reassess along the way. —Sara McGillivray