In the “Historian’s Workshop” seminar at the University of Richmond, our class has been working this semester to process boxes from the papers of Watkins Moorman Abbitt. Abbitt was a 1931 graduate of the University of Richmond law school who served in the U.S. Congress from 1948 to 1973. The collection consists of nearly 130 boxes and remains unprocessed, meaning no other archivists have gone through and organized or preserved the contents of each box. My fellow classmates and I, most of who are history majors, put our historian’s hats down and simultaneously picked up our archivist ones. In this experience, we learned about the importance of archivists, the challenges they face, the work of maintaining objectivity, and ultimately the importance of choosing and displaying the most important documents to the public.

One important aspect of an archivist is to preserve the integrity of the documents, regardless of one’s own view of the people who wrote them. Typical of Southern Democrats in the mid-twentieth century, Abbitt was a firm supporter of school segregation and believed that white people were superior to black people. These views are exemplified in a majority of his documents, especially in my box, as he wrote continuously, responding to his constituents and fellow Virginians about the need to keep Virginia’s public schools segregated. Even though today this is regarded in a different light, it is critical for an archivist to take a neutral stance, and release information to the public free of one’s own opinion. The British archivist Hilary Jenkinson wrote in 1948 that an archivist’s “aim is to provide without prejudice or after-thought, for all who wish to know the Means of Knowledge.” Even if an archivist disagrees with the subject matter, he or she has the duty to preserve and organize fairly all documents.

After preserving both the integrity of the collection and the documents themselves, our class then selected the most important documents to include in a digital collection. It is literally impossible to digitize everything. Daniel Cohen argues that the reality historians now grapple with is the abundance of digitized documents, rather than scarcity, as each new day “we are confronted with digital historical resources of almost unimaginable size.” Understanding this, each of us examined our box’s contents, went through them again, and chose the most interesting, intriguing and revealing documents to digitize.

Understanding that this digitation may affect how the public views Abbitt, our seminar took into consideration our audiences and what stories we wanted to convey. These documents reveal personal characteristics about his political style and beliefs, his career, and his personality. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig have argued that historians working in archives “need a comprehensive vision” of what they are trying to accomplish. In this, our class decided on subjects that frequently reemerged frequently in Abbitt’s papers. Some boxes had a theme running throughout, while others ranged widely in subject matter. With this, our class chose on reappearing subjects that were common in the boxes. Among them were communism, school segregation, NAACP and Civil Rights to name just a few.

The final aspect of our work, perhaps most important, was publishing the information for the public to solidify the past. We used Omeka, an online digital publishing software, that organized digital documents around a Dublin Core. Omeka enabled us to upload each of our chosen documents, write abstracts about them, and ultimately make them digitally accessible to the local Richmond community and beyond. “Archival records often provide a means for holding public leaders accountable and for documenting significant societal events.” Archivist Randall Jimerson observes, “Control over records documenting the past often provides power over current and future events.” Through this, the digitization and dissemination of Abbitt’s papers dually uncovers what happened and paves the way for future research. Instead of being packed away and forgotten, these documents are readily accessible to anyone with interest in them.

Overall, this seminar showed us how an archivist’s laborious, occasionally tedious yet vital, work reveals information that may have been overlooked, forgotten, or never even known. Without archivists, the past, present and future would be in jeopardy. As George Orwell simply put it, “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”