Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Why do you need Archives?

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

On May 16, 2022, at 7:33 PM, Moose Thompson <markithompson [at] gmail.com> 
wrote:
> 
> Sharon, thanks for starting this thread.  History is a tricky thing. Here
> we are in our 30's, but few care about setting a start date, yet alone
> year.  Do we use the first house built date, 1986?  The first incorporation
> date, 1989?,  The final incorporation date, 1992?  These are only
> approximate dates as I didn't look them up.

When I set up the minutes archives, I started with the minutes of the very 
first meeting public are "you interested meeting" and we still have all the 
email lists and all the messages from the week after that meeting when an group 
list was set up to tell people when the second meeting would be. 

The emails on the oldest list had been transferred to 3 different hosts before 
they were transferred to Groups.io a few years ago. Groups.io counts “topics” 
instead of messages so we have 58,328 messages on the main list.  It’s like 
having all your kids letters from camp to look back on. The night the elevator 
pit was filled with water and we had 24/7 bucket brigades emptying it so 
something on the bottom of the elevator wasn’t ruined — would have been tens of 
thousands of dollars of damage.

Email messages and minutes from 1998 can be very quaint. And also useful. I do 
use them for research.

> We currently have two of the founding members left living here.  Shortly
> before I moved here 7 years ago we quit celebrating Founder's Day.  Until
> the pandemic we would have a slide show every year showing pictures from
> the early days to the present.  These shows were well attended.  In the
> past 2 or 3 years there has been talk of reinstating Founder's Day.

One way to extend founders day is to look at it as “first day”. We haven’t done 
it because Covid intervened but everyone has a founders day. I would love to 
hear all the stories from people about their first day. What were they 
surprised by? What misconceptions did they have? What were their friends and 
relatives responses? Which rules did they think were the oddest? What makes 
founders stories interesting is what no one knew would be required or what 
would happen in building a community.

We recently had a disturbing response from a parent when we said we didn’t 
allow toddlers in the kitchen. In effect, she felt that we were telling her 
what her child could and couldn’t do and preventing her from teaching her child 
to put her own dishes in the dishwasher. Obviously, she hadn’t though ahead to 
a kitchen with 8 people in it and some carrying pots of hot food, including 
sloppy soup. 

I’m sure there are many of those stories that we haven’t heard. 

> Recently our most ardent historian created montages of the folk who died in
> the community which are posted in the Common House.

We had to figure out how to find pictures of a person who had died. Just by 
chance they were not in any of our community photos.

> As an amateur archivist, starting with my high school, I've always wondered
> how much is too much to keep?  What should be culled?  Here we have most
> meeting minutes going back to 1991, many financial records, blue prints,
> plat maps, notes on why particular appliances were purchased for the Common
> House, etc.  This is too much in that what we have is not coherently
> accessible, scattered across 4 filing cabinets and binders elsewhere, not
> to mention what is kept in multiple households.

We are gradually putting everything like the blueprints, plats, etc into 
electronic files. They have to go to special services that scan stuff for 
architects. BUT we look at our construction plans very often. Someone looks at 
them at least every month. In fact, people might be lookin at them more now 
because at 22 years, more people are renovating. And more are questioning the 
original decisions — why was this done? We still use the construction binders 
with all the original purchase orders and brochures of information that the 
architect left.

We also have videos of the most of the units under construction so we have 
pictures showing exactly where the sprinkler system pipes are. They are much 
more accurate than the plans done before anyone tried to install them.

We do not have “as built” drawings and there were many changes, we have found.

>  The aforementioned
> historian and I (let me be clear, we aren't the only ones interested in our
> history) have made efforts to keep electronic materials accessible.  Even
> so we haven't coordinated our efforts and very few others know they exist,
> let alone where to find them.

Individual people have saved what was important to them and there was no place 
or commitment in the community to keep them. Every once in a while I find 
photos in my cubby from 15 or 20 years ago that someone has found and passed on 
to be scanned for the archives.

> So while we have historical documents that could be useful for practical
> reasons, they aren't used for lack of awareness or meaningful access.
> Accept for the slideshow most of our story is kept in oral tradition.  For
> several years now I've thought about recording conversations with people
> providing that tradition, but have not taken action.

I often have a burst of reminding people, before you decide we need this or 
that, ask questions. Has anyone ever tried this before? What happened? What has 
changed now? Does anyone know……?

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org