A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL ARCHIVES: CHALLENGES TO DEVELOPMENT AND PRESERVATION
Open Access
- Author:
- Sun, Yu
- Graduate Program:
- Higher Education
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 30, 2020
- Committee Members:
- David S Guthrie, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
David S Guthrie, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
David Post, Committee Member
Karly Sarita Ford, Committee Member
Alan M Sica, Outside Member
Leticia Oseguera, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Archive
American Sociological Association
History
Partnership
Collaboration
Archives
University Partnership - Abstract:
- This dissertation, using the case of the historical establishment of the American Sociological Association archives, argues that a lack of collaboration across institutions and among people contributed to difficulties in establishing the significance of the ASA archives as a social science project in America after World War II. The ASA makes an ideal case study because its archival history illustrates how sociologists struggled to build collective endeavors of archive advocates and partnerships between universities and the ASA. By incorporating the research methods of political history, case study, and archive study, this research analyzes relevant historical materials, such as letters, newsletters, reports, proceedings, and meeting records, to reconstruct a brief history of the ASA archives. This historical study identifies six main events in the development of the ASA archives. The chronology begins with a prologue documenting the weak and unofficial call and need for an organizational archive in the 1950s-1960s. Because of the lack of archival awareness, opportunities in this rich era of the ASA was missed by archive advocates. The first official proposal for the archive was submitted in 1969 by Hinkle and Cahnman. The proposal was denied for three possible reasons: the conflict between insufficient budget and ambitious scope of archiving, the conflict between the academic need of scholars and the informational need by officers, and the concern for privacy. The second event was the appointment of the Page committee on archives in 1969 and its report in 1972. The Page committee was restricted by no financial support, understaffed activities, and failure to adopt previous archive advocates. The third event was the collaboration with the Library of Congress from 1974 to 1992. The cooperation could have been more successful if the ASA was not delayed by institutional inertia: it didn’t begin transmitting records until nine years later. The fourth event was Barber’s donation for a centralized archive for American sociology in 1990. The fifth event was the change of repository to the Pennsylvania State University after the Library of Congress decided to deaccess the ASA archives in 1992. Lastly, from 2012 to 2017, current archive advocates in the ASA successfully reversed a crisis of confidential materials into an initiative for the digitalization of past archives. The struggling of the ASA organizational records implied the absence of a qualitative database in the quantification of academic research. The final success was achieved by the collaboration of sociologists. By and large, the history of the ASA archives demonstrated the difficult circumstances of a qualitative database during the trend of quantification. Four resources that mitigated against the establishment of the ASA archives are identified: 1. insufficient funding for social sciences, 2. the transformation towards a scientific orientation in sociology, 3. the absence of efficient institutional arrangements, and 4. the absence of a collective endeavor of archival advocates. The third and fourth factors were the most significant because they occurred in all of the events mentioned above. The combination of university partnership, well-designed organizational arrangement, and manpower collaboration would illuminate success, while the lack of cooperation consistently failed the archivization. Today, the technology of digitization provides opportunities for the potential prosperity of qualitative archives. In the new era, social researchers should work together to build up a collective memory and endeavor to preserve the history of social science.