This lecture seeks to pose paths and challenges in the construction of an archive area within a museum. The Peruvian House of Literature¹ was created in 2010 as a museum and cultural center. At the end of 2018, the archive and preservation area took shape. That is to say, we are immersed in an already established dynamic of activities linked to the promotion of reading, and the reaching of new readers in areas with very defined roles, both as a public library as well as a team in charge of conceptualizing and setting up museographic exhibits. We also encounter scholars and mediators responsible for disseminating resources to all sorts of audiences; specially to students and teachers inside the classroom, and diverse educational resources that deepen on Peruvian literature. In this universe of professionals, why was it important to open a call for archivists? How can we insert ourselves in this dynamic?

Museographic exhibitions are one of the Peruvian House of Literature main activities. They revolve around a Peruvian author or a literary cultural issue. The done research has a curatorial purpose and it starts with a mapping of the archives. This last idea, focuses on the search and identification of archives that contain documents of interest related to the topic of the exhibit. These archives can correspond to archives of institutions such as municipalities, regional governments, universities and libraries, both in Lima as in the country. Also, these can be private archives obtained from the writer’s families, kin and friends which are usually little known before becoming archives safely guarded.

Identifying these archives and their documents enables the construction of a narrative or curatorial script that ends up in the museographic exhibit. The exhibits seek to give the audience the chance to observe from close an original piece or one that corresponds to the writer’s intimacy. This piece can be exhibited in a showcase or in the shape of a facsimil: an identical reproduction of its original that allows the spectator to have both a reader as well as a sensorial experience.

In that sense, The Peruvian House of Literature long before the arrival of professionals in archives, already gave archives a key role: it is not only the main character’s museographic exhibit, but also it stands as a main source to deepen in the author’s knowledge or literary theme. The archives are mapped, recognized, visited and inquired. Links are also created among them and the documents they are subjected to. The goal is to give the archive a voice.

When the archive and preservation area was created in The Peruvian House of Literature, first thing in order was to arrange the historical documentation: custody documents, loose donated objects or documents that were part of exhibitions, magazines, paintings, audiovisual material, full files on loan, as well as a great amount of digital images extracted from hard drives.

According to the evaluation of documents and assets, two main groups were established; collections and archive holdings:

• The Peruvian House of Literature Collection:

  According to the International General Ruling of Archivist Description ISAD-G (2000), a collection is the “artificial grouping of accumulated documents on the basis of some common attribute without considering its origin”, (p.16).

  The Peruvian House of Literature Collection is composed mainly of donations or assets created for a specific purpose. Pieces like the typewriter from the writer Magda Portal are salient, as well as an identical replica from Manuel González Prada printing house used to print the work Minúsculas (Lowercases) and the collection Imprenta Minerva (Minerva Printing), which it was donated in 2016 to The Peruvian House of Literature, which consisted of a letterpress machine acquired by José Carlos Mariátegui in 1925 and approximately 3,000 types of wood moviles and metal clichés. Some of these pieces are being displayed, others have been saved due to its materiality and have gone under inventory control.

• Archive Holdings:

  According to the same Ruling, a holding is a “grouping of documents, independent to its type of document and support, organically produced and/or gathered and used by a natural person, family or entity in the course of its activities and functions as a producer”, (p.17).

  In The Peruvian House of Literature we keep the following archive holdings:

• Private archives from the Peruvian writers Blanca Varela and Alejandro Romualdo.

• The Sarita Cartonera Publishing House archive, as the first example of an archive holding from an institution linked to Peruvian literature.

• The Peruvian House of Literature holding which takes the documentation produced by an institution in its trajectory, particularly, the series of museographic exhibits.

To build a truly interdisciplinary work dynamic, it was key for the archivist team and preservers to disseminate concepts and basic work tools for archives, which could allow other specialists to value the contributions to the discipline and add them to their own processes:

• Archival terminology. It was required to explain the bottom concepts and the collection, its differences and peculiarities in the organization.

• The archival principles and ruling, particularly the procedence principle or the respect to the documents origins, where it becomes fundamental to know the trajectory or the person’s and the producing organization’s history for the ordering of its archive.

• The technical processes that are executed in an orderly and systematic way. Usually, institutions bet on digitalization without acknowledging other previous processes such as classification and ordering of its archive, that are as equally important and needed.

• Preservation has been the most shared and internalized process accomplished with colleagues. Previously, preservationship was seen as a first task before the assembly of a museographic exhibit. Currently, preservation is acknowledged, and in particular, the preventive preservation as a transversal process in every stage of the exhibit, since the beginning of the investigation, curatorship, museography, assembly and monitoring through the period of staging, and finally, disassembly.

• Descriptive instruments. Antonio Herdia once said (1991) that there is a disproportion between the demands and information services; it is not just about institutions creating more information, but also about the increase in users. On the other hand, there is the misconception that the only means of knowledge of an archive is the catalog which describes the pieces and documentary units.

• Due to this, we propose a multi level description that retrieves in a first instance the background information: archive and its producers, institutions’ biography or history, the information behind the context of the documentation production, the history of how archives became archives. These types of instruments not only allow us to describe and make bottom archives more asequible in less time, but also to offer new and richer information for the investigation process of a writer and its entailment with the archive, to deepen in its trajectory and context.

Within the exercise of this interdisciplinary dialogue it has been key to break down certain prejudices in regards to archives. In a team meeting, some colleges mentioned how important it was to “unarchive the archives”, bringing up Patricia Funes, who participated in the archive study of the Intelligence Direction from the Buenos Aire Provence Police (DIPPBA) and who proposes that these needed to be open and make them asequible to fulfill its role as guarantors of rights, that is to say, that through this documentation certain repairs become effective in the seek for truth and justice for the victims of the Argentinian dictatorship. Though Patricia Funes refers to the archives of the repression, the call to unarchive the archives arise from a common sense in which archives are perceived as closed and inaccesibles; without any description instrument which will give some light on which documents are being saved; unknown or only known by some investigators and scholars.

Changing this “common sense” was a key exercise: it allowed us to strengthen the idea we could work in an interdisciplinary way with other specialists within the institution, betting on opening archives, the execution of better access conditions for a broad and diverse audience, and with descriptive instruments which enable the exploration and the awareness of archives in a whole way.

The repository project

The Institutional Repository is a project of Casa de la Literatura Peruana that is part of the Open Science movement and the promotion of open access, that is, “online access, at no cost to any user, without technical obstacles (such as mandatory registration or login on specific platforms) to publications resulting from research, such as articles and books”. (CONCYTEC, 2021, p.6)

Thereby, the aim is to make accessible, through a digital platform, the documentation produced and guarded by the Peruvian House of Literature. In this way, we are contributing to the country’s culture and education as it is the first national repository devoted exclusively to openly and digitally disseminate material on Peruvian literature.

The Repository’s first project is the online staging of the permanent display Intensidad y altura de la literatura peruana (Intensity and altitude of the Peruvian literature), in which we go on a tour of our literature’s history with the focus on the construction of identities. The exhibition was opened in 2015 and its preparation lasted around a year; in that time, the investigation was wide, tens of archives and libraries were navigated, and primary diverse sources from different supports were recollected, as well as a large number of documentation on investigation, curatory and museography was produced.

With this project the objective is to make available for users primary sources and its institutions of origin, not with the sole objective to make it known as a source for study, but to also recognize and make visible Peruvian literature archives, nationally disseminated, as well as the origin of the institutions, archives and private collections. Through documents, the Peruvian House of Literature aims to bring the processes for the promotion of knowledge in order to set a museographic exhibition; it focuses on Peruvian Literature and sets the criteria to build an institutional memory. We hope to accomplish this project by the end of 2022.

Building this repository, as mentioned by Mariana Nazar (2021), points to think and make decisions on how public access is displayed, not only of its primary sources found in the investigation but the archives produced by the work teams. This presents a challenge as it must guarantee the normalization of such documents (which were not created for its public dissemination); the regularization of public use licenses from each of the authors; and finally, the construction of descriptive metadata which will enable users to access these documents.

In these reflections it is also important for archivists to participate in the theoretical and methodological frameworks we manage, and with open access of our archive practices guiding principles.

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1. Peruvian House of Literature webpage: http://www.casadelaliteratura.gob.pe/ ↩︎