For this assignment I looked at the finding aid for Walt Disney Productions Publicity Ephemera, 1938-198x. The finding aid basically acted like a general manual for all the artifacts in the collection. Rather than giving the specifics of each piece, we were given the general break down of the pieces and an a brief overview of the Walt Disney company. Through these information we would probably be only able to write an essay regarding the creation of the company and the famous works it created rather than the details of the artifacts itself. The only thing that we could discuss relating to the artifacts would be what the artifacts contains, the names of the different films that Disney created and where these artifacts are currently located. Other than these facts which were explicitly written in the “Scope and Content” and “Physical Location,” one thing that we could put together is the order in which each of the films were created. Another potentially interesting topic we could discuss is how the artifacts were organized. It was pretty interesting to see that all the files relating to the film “Big Red” was not organized into one box. To me it would make more sense to keep all of the materials with the same topic together in one box and then organize it by different folder numbers, however it seemed that this archive didn’t really organize it in this manner. The files could be found all over the place – box 1, 10, 11. Even though the finding aid does not mention as to why they ordered it this way, it would still be interesting to analyze this and see if there was any patterns to how they organized their files.
Considering that the finding aid only elaborated on the company history and the overall contents of the artifacts, there are many parts of the archive that remains unknown. One of the biggest issue for me was that I was barely able to get any information about the individual artifacts itself. I’m not sure if this is because finding aid is supposed to only give a brief run-down of the archive, but it was still bit disappointing to not learn much about the artifacts itself. It would have been nice to know at least why the archive only contained some of the movies created by Disney, why they only collected artifacts until the 1980’s and why the files that referred to one movie weren’t all located in the same box. It would also have been interesting to read about why they began creating this collection. I don’t think it would have been too difficult to address these questions, just adding a couple of more section in the finding aid would have sufficed- however, I’m not sure if that would have violated the traditional finding aid format.
I also noticed that (as far as I can tell) the materials do not appear to be categorized at all. While writing my post, I tried to find some kind of organization in how they were stored, but they do not appear to be arranged by title, year, or even material type. The finding aid orders the items alphabetically, but even this makes it difficult to create a narrative out of the materials. As far as the materials they did include, you also observe that some films are not represented. I wonder whether this is because they viewed the other materials as less important, or whether they simply could not access publicity materials for all the films. It would make sense that publicity ephemera for the more popular films might be better preserved, but not all of the films included were extremely popular. It is sort of frustrating that the finding aid leaves out all this information.