A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.
-Marcus Garvey
-Marcus Garvey
In the Uniparty government of Georgia, history itself is under a historic attack. In late September Secretary of State Brian Kemp announced he would take the across-the-board 3% budget cut imposed by Uniparty Governor Nathan Deal, and limit the board it would cut across to one division of his Department: the Georgia State Archive.
The $733,000 cut reduced the once-storied archives staff to three, including the maintenance man, and ended all public access hours, leaving researchers only able to see documents by appointment and only see those already catalogued. There's no funding to deal with anything new coming in.
Kemp applied his entire budget cut to the Archives- once considered one of the best in the nation- to make sure he has plenty of funds to enforce the Georgia Uniparty's War On Imaginary Immigrant Hordes and other voter suppression election laws.
It's hard, when hypocrisy is practiced so uniformly, and piled so high, to declare a winner between Governor Deal- who issued a proclamation declaring Georgia Archives Month as he announced the decimating cuts- or Secretary of State Kemp, who took credit for maintaining present service levels.
"Georgia's Archives are a showcase of our state's rich history and a source of great pride," Deal declared last week. "Georgians can continue to come to Morrow to study and view the important artifacts there."
“There’s nobody who would like to have the archives open more than me,
but we were directed to take a $733,000 budget cut and this was,
unfortunately, the fallout from that,” Kemp told Clayton News Daily on Wednesday. “It’s not a decision I wanted to make, but I had to.” He blamed it on cuts he's had to take over the last five years amounting to 28%, which, if nothing else, suggests he's not a very effective advocate for his department.
So now the governor has announced he will restore $125,000 of the $733,000 cut to keep the Archives open to the public through next June 30. Visitors will not need to make appointments.
Kemp crowed, "the current level of public access will be maintained." Trouble is, over the past year the Archives was only able to be open to the public 17 hours a week, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.That leaves the Archives offering the lowest public access in the nation. Kemp added, ""From the beginning of this budget process, I have stated that it was
my hope that current access to the Archives could
be maintained," Kemp said. "I greatly appreciate Governor Deal’s
leadership and recognize the difficult decisions
that had to be made in order to identify this funding. He has proposed a
plan that supports Archives not just this year, but
for years to come."
Kemp's plan for restoring service hours to the previously reduced level claims it meets 97% of the need, based on average monthly patronage levels and length of stay.
However, archivists interviewed by The Huffington Post "complained that no serious research could be conducted during two-hour periods. The archive contains 260 million documents, 1.5 million land grants and plats, and 100,000 photographs. Archives backers also lamented that people wouldn't be able to easily leaf through important documents such as the 1798 Georgia State constitution- kept in a green bound volume in a secure, climate-controlled room- or Georgia's Royal Charter."
Governor Deal also wants to transfer control- and budgeting- of the Archives to the University of Georgia System. Having presided over its near-ruin, Deal gushed that the move "will begin a rebirth of this valuable and critical state resource."
Friends of Georgia Archives & History president Dianne Cannestra points out that simply restoring the latest cuts goes almost nowhere:
After reading the October 18, 2012 press release from Governor Deal’s
office, the FOGAH Legislative Affairs
Committee had a conference call with our
Legislative Affairs consultant. It is unclear how the latest news will
impact
on the termination of the seven employees. The
consultant will attempt to get more information on that question as soon
as possible. He shares our opinion that all seven
employees are essential to the Archives operation. It was also
not clearly stated that the Archives will remain in
Morrow, and we are seeking clarification on that as well.
We are very appreciative of the Governor’s intervention and are especially excited about the move to the University System. Please write letters to the Governor thanking him for his intervention as soon as possible.
Our fight for
restoration
of the budget is not over. The $125,000 is
obviously not nearly enough. No matter where the Archives resides
organizationally,
we need to convince our senators and
representatives that the Archives needs at least $5.4 million to get
back to the model
Archives it once was and be open five days a week.
The blog Georgia Archive Matters lays out what will still be lost under the Uniparty's "rescue":
They have been called “the Magnificent Seven.” They are the employees
whose tenure at the Georgia Archives, barring a change of heart or
successful intervention, will come to end on Nov. 1.
Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp announced last week that, not
only would the Archives be closed to the public, but that seven of the
remaining 10 employees would lose their jobs. As of Nov. 1, there will
be only three employees. Just in the last 10 years the staff has been
cut from 54 to three. Since 1982 the staff has been cut by almost 90
percent.
This is not to say that other lay-offs have not deprived Georgia
citizens of considerable talent and experience, but this round is
especially painful.
Their jobs range from caring for records to working with the public
to managing the scanning projects and Web site to receiving, indexing
and storing records from government agencies to writing grant
applications for private funding.
The seven have a combined 113 years of experience at the Georgia
Archives and 144 years overall, including a total of 50 years of
management experience. Three are former presidents of the Society of
Georgia Archivists.
The seven are five professionals and two paraprofessionals; all of the professionals have advanced library and archival degrees.
Archives Director Chris Davidson will have a tough job deciding how
to deal with all the tasks with only three employees (including himself,
one archivist and the building superintendent).
Following is a glimpse into just a few of the jobs of the staffers who will be lost:
- Helping the public, including agencies and local governments, with reference requests, both at the Archives and through “Ask an Archivist.”
- Coordinating outreach activities such as Lunch and Learn and teaching and making presentations to workshops, records management training sessions, the Georgia Archives Institute and college classes.
- Coordinating Web site updates.
- Building and maintaining online collections: digitizing materials, developing metadata, indexing and uploading to the Virtual Vault.
- Maintaining the records management system for inventory control.
- Maintaining the Georgia Archives portion of the GALILEO Interconnected Libraries Catalog.
- Coordinating the transfer of permanent records from state agencies to the Archives and advising agency records managers on retention schedules, procedures for transfer and appropriate descriptions.
- Arranging, describing, rehousing when appropriate and cataloging state records, county records, manuscript collections, photographs, books and serials.
- Writing proposals for outside funding (R. J. Taylor, Jr., Foundation for scanning, the National Endowment for the Humanities funding for a project designed to reduce future utilities costs and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to help fund Historical Records Advisory Board activities).
- Carrying out the preservation program including cleaning and rehousing records and preparing them for scanning, as well as book and document repair.
- Supervising volunteers, interns and staff involved in the scanning program.
- Maintaining specialized equipment for scanning and public access, working with vendors and maintenance contracts.
- Monitoring the building environment to ensure safety of the records.
- Developing an Archives disaster plan, working with the Georgia Emergency Management Agency and storing plans from other institutions in a disaster plan “bank.”
- Advising and assisting local governments and other state and local institutions on the recovery of records in case of disaster.
Why this matters is that it's not just Georgia's fight. The Huffington Post article reports "the number of workers at state archives has declined 20 percent since 2004 as the volume of processed paper records has increased from 2.4 million to 3.4 million linear square feet over the same period."
One archivist has written:
Mississippi offers public access to their Archives six days a week;
the South Carolina Archives is open five days a week; the Alabama
Archives is open four days a week, and every second Saturday.
These states are not in better financial condition than Georgia. They
simply know the value of what these institutions offer. They value
their history.
Or do they?
Vicki Walch, executive director of The Council of State Archivists, says, "To have this happen has just sent a shock wave through the community because if it can happen in Georgia, what's going to happen someplace else?"
One "someplace else" is just to Georgia's north. As The New York Times reported, South Carolina's archive, which contains documents back to 1671, has dropped from 125 employees in the 1980s to 28, and has no funds for conservation of records at all. Governor Nikki Haley and her administration have picked up her mentor Sarah Palin's penchant for doing business on private email accounts to try and evade public records retention and access requirements, and she has proposed defunding all arts and museum programs in the state on the grounds that they are not part of her pornography-like "I know it when I see it" Core Functions of Government.
Haley argued that the state could solicit money from state businesses.
"Have
them go and start picking up where we need to with libraries," she
said. "This is what we need in our libraries. We need your help. And
they would step up."
Remember how Mobil used to splash around vast sums for the arts? That came to a grinding halt when Exxon acquired them. Texaco was The Metropolitan Opera's radio broadcast sole sponsor for 63 years, until, as ChevronTexaco, the spigot was cut off.
Neither company has exactly been starving:
 |
| First quarter, 2011 |
Last year ExxonMobil's arts funding in the US amounted to $3.5 million.
That's the risk of business funding: the owners change. West Publishing Company had a large law-related art collection when it was a privately-held company, and lashed out fortunes in support of law librarian and legal publication editor education programs. When West's owners sold out to Thomson Reuters, the art went on the block and the professional support ended. Portland, Oregon enjoyed a long tradition of corporate philanthropy as a city with many home-based corporate headquarters. But as they were, each in their turn snapped up (Meier & Frank, by The May Co.); stripped bare (Evans Products, by asset stripper Victor Posner), or moved (Georgia- Pacific, which decamped to Atlanta), that diminished to a trickle.
Just business, the corporate masters shrugged.
And that's how the ideologues of the Uniparty like it. They preach the superiority of the private sector and tiny government. Next, they argue, transfer stuff government does to that private sector. If, late, the private sector tires of being asap for Mitt Romney's 47% and stops supporting, say, South Carolina libraries (buy your own books, plebs), well, that's life. That's the free market.
If the market doesn't need it, the people must not. If they know no history, nor anything of their past, it is easier for the market to tell them what they need.
And that's why the story of the Georgia State Archives is important.
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