 I think there's a range of archivists and a range of archives and some are private and some aren't open to the public. I think, you know, in the last 20 years the profession has changed enormously and a lot of younger people have come into it, a lot of very dynamic people and a lot of people who realized you don't passively wait for things to come for you. You have to go out and really look for the things that you want to collect and document. And of course, like all queer groups, I remember that of the two hour or so meeting, probably 45 minutes was spent discussing what the name of the organization should be with dozens of possibilities and debate over exactly what terms should be used and what geographical reference and so on and so forth. So that's been an ongoing history in the queer community. History is a creative act in the present. It's something that actually we do together now. It's not all just about facts that you can try to ascertain about in the past. Of course that is the raw material that you work with. And there's truth and there's falsehoods about history that should be discovered. But they're mostly discovered through a political process in the here and now, a political and intellectual process that we do together that should be construed as a creative act. Our most avid users are the youngest users, people like 14 through. The high school groups, when they come in, you cannot get them out again. We've had parents literally have to drag teenagers out of here and we've had groups of high school visitors that just, you know, people sit down and groups in the back, we find it. They left their socks underneath the shelves. They got so comfortable, they went barefoot and while reading, you know, couldn't get them out and then they left their socks behind. So I've been city archivist for San Francisco for almost 14 years now and before I came here I was an archivist at Labor Archives and I worked on labor union records in the five counties around the Bay Area and before that I was a congressional archivist and I worked for Senator Alan Cranston on Capitol Hill. So for me coming here was kind of a perfect blend of my interest in San Francisco and local history and also kind of broader issues of urban life and archives dealing with the technical aspects of archives. So as city archivist I'm responsible, well I think of it as being responsible for documenting the city of San Francisco. So how do you document a city? How do you document an urban area? And that's the challenge for me all the time. So on a really basic concrete level I go out and I get the records of city agencies and also documenting the city of San Francisco it's beyond city departments so I also look at community groups, ethnic groups. I kind of look around and say who's not being documented in the city? Who's underrepresented? What images do we need in the archives to kind of tell the whole story of the city? Before I was an archivist I was a community organizer and so I know some people see archivists as just being such a remote they think of an old lady in a bun shuttered away looking at sacred texts that no one else can see and to me it's all about being out in the community doing outreach to people and bringing materials in and then working with staff here to make them accessible so that other people can use them. I don't see it as a kind of shut away thing. It's a very dynamic thing. So when I first came here there was somebody who'd been here for many many years and she kind of ruled with an iron hand and you'd go in the back and you'd see written on folders not for public. That was all over. We all joke about it. Not for public. If it's not for the public why are you collecting this stuff? And she also determined who could use the collection even though we were in a public institution. If she liked you she'd pull out everything she knew was there but if she didn't like you she'd pull out one little folder and that's what you got to see. I think that really to run an archives and to be fair and to be democratic you have to open it to everybody. You have to make it accessible to everybody and that's tough. I mean it takes a lot of work to sit and work on a collection. Everything I look at just cracks me up. Okay so this is a new collection. It's People vs. Owen Bathhouse Closure. It's newly processed. It's actually been at the library for over 10 years and sometimes collections just sit there until someone can work on them and it's really, it is such a San Francisco case. It's all about closing the bathhouses during the AIDS crisis and how the Department of Public Health was trying to work with some activists to close the bathhouses while other activists were working very actively to keep the bathhouses open. So it's all the legal briefs and files and one of the really interesting things is that they hired an investigator to go into the bathhouses to observe if illegal activities were going on. So these guys' reports are in here of what he observed in the bathhouses during this time period. So it's not just a legal case. It's really fascinating and I think it's going to be used by a lot of people. This is a long discussion of the function of museums and the function of archives and to see the real thing and the real thing is still here for people who want to come and see it and for people who that's important to their project or to them. And we're not going to throw out the real thing just because we're digitizing. So I think you have to do both things. I think it's really important to do both things. To have the technology and make it accessible but to have the real thing. Yeah. I think the nature of archiving is changing and so people don't write letters to each other anymore. They send emails and then they're not saved. Or people don't write drafts of manuscripts so you can't see how an author changed their mind over time doing a draft. So I think in a large sense we're going to lose a lot of how society was documented and documentation. People don't have a good way to save electronic documentation yet. I mean even on a governmental level local, state and federal government they're all struggling with how to document their activities. And I feel like there's going to be a big gap till people figure that out. So I do feel like the nature of archiving is changing. We're not taking hard copy photos. People want to give us digital photos. How do we do that? How do we maintain those? What's the quality control? I feel like there's a lot of really tough questions in archives right now about how we're going to archive in the future. So I came to the Bay Area with an interest in both gay history and gay archives. And fairly early on, probably 82, 83, I met Willie Walker and Greg Pennington. They were obsessively collecting all the queer periodicals that they could get their hands on and busily organizing them and putting them in boxes and so on. Willie Walker, who was a nurse and a history buff, proposed that he write up the outlines of a possible organization to establish a gay historical society in San Francisco in March of 1985. 40 or so people came together to discuss whether a nonprofit association should be founded to create a historical society and voted to do so. This is a button that was produced in the first year of the historical society to exist and so in 1985 or 86, and it still shows the original name of the organization, the San Francisco Bay Area Gay and Lesbian Historical Society, the SFBA GLHS, which didn't turn out to be a particularly elegant acronym. Clearly the impetus to establish the historical society was in part the effects of the initial wave of the AIDS crisis. There was an enormous fear that the history, the memory, the movement, the culture of gay and lesbian people would be erased, would be lost, and that the memories of all of these individuals and their everyday courage and their struggles might simply vanish and that it would be extremely important for the present to honor those acts by recording them and for the future to leave behind a record of this time. But that wasn't the only impetus. It also was a moment of generational shift within the LGBT community. The initial wave of gay liberation had largely treated earlier homophile activists, the activists of the 1950s, as old, fuddy dotties who weren't militant enough and didn't want to come out of the closet and, you know, kill granddad. By 1985, that attitude had vanished and there was a much greater fascination with that prehistory, that history of early efforts to create a national gay and lesbian movement in the United States and indeed the history of the way people had lived and found pleasure, love, created a life before there was a gay movement in the United States. We didn't have briefs yet. We didn't have zippers. You had BVD. You had a panel with three buttons, which you had to drop in the back. But if you're going to have to do all that to have an anal relationship, you're going to have to drop your pants and unbutton all of this. And all of a sudden here come the cops. How do you get it all back together? And then the final impetus that's one that sort of replaces things in their historical context is that at that point in time, no university library had a special collection of gay materials. Some of us who were involved are crazed collectors. And so there was always a commitment to really try to reach the incredibly fine grain of documentation to gather every stray bit of paper and every odd photograph and every peculiar artifact and then to leave it to future users of these materials to determine what is important and what is not. And it's often hard to know when you're gathering that material. We're coming up on our 25th anniversary next year and in the last 15 years we've seen that that initial faith was rewarded. The ways in which the collection has been used is mind-boggling. Gus Van Zant's Milk is the first major feature film that we've helped out. Harvey Milk's estate donated his personal belongings to us. The Historical Society from day one has been a community-based organization with strong grassroots and therefore with the ability to reach out to the people who have marvelous materials, the people who've been living and creating those lives that we need to record and not only to reach out to them but to cultivate them over the course often of years to the point where they feel that this is the right place to leave their memories. Shaping San Francisco has, you know, stretches back into the distant foggy past of the 1990s. It started out during the period of time when the buzz was all about interactive multimedia and our vision of what this new media form was wasn't that it was really interactive. It was essentially glorified multiple-choice in a box and we chose to make a radical history project with this new art form. We're essentially using high technology as a trojan horse to promote the idea that people should talk to each other because of the underlying premise of doing this project of excavating the lost history of San Francisco was that we live in an amnesiac culture. People have no clue about how life got to be like this. So to begin to unpack some of that permanence and see it as impermanent and malleable and subject to contestation was part of our mission. And the way to create that sensibility was to create a delivery mechanism for this new kind of history. And so we did and it was called Shaping San Francisco and it's gone through a number of iterations and just now recently we've come out with our latest iteration which is done in a Wiki format called SoundSF.org. And so the imagery is what drives the project for a lot of people. They want to see cool pictures of the way the city used to be and when you show them pictures of the environment of the past whether it's a cityscape or a natural landscape where there's now an urban environment it's the place where we have our memories or associated with physical landmarks. And so by having an asynchronous place online that you can go anytime you want, day or night and look at old photographs of the city comparing them to the contemporary shots you're actually tickling a certain sense of social memory that allows people to generate new thoughts about the changing environment around them. There's a sort of intellectual premise underneath our project which is that everybody can be a historian. It's just totally within your capacity to actually contribute to the discussion and the description of the texture of life. We say no, you know, if you just lived through something yesterday put it in the project today and let us have it as a resource. You just went through a riot or you just got arrested or you were at an interesting political discussion or a philosophical or literary event or whatever. It's like that's great, let's document it and put it in and then later somebody might come in with a completely different account of that that augments our understanding of it but because you have a first person account that becomes raw material of history. Why not include it right away? So this history of the shaping of this physical landscape is what really attracted me because somebody did that shaping. It's human beings and it's the work we do that shapes the physical environment we're in. These way that we live is not fixed, not written in cement. It is written in cement actually but it doesn't have to stay that way and so we can think then more creatively about what kind of world we might make together with the labor that we spend to conduct a series of bicycle history tours. We split it now into two rides north and south because there's quite a bit to cover. It brings anywhere from five to 45 people out on bikes together in a group who are all meeting each other and chatting along the way as we go from place to place and then they're all getting all this big download of history I bring a lot of show and tell and then usually they go off and new things start to percolate. Independent of our efforts creating the space for those conversations creates new communities of friends that go out and decide what they're going to do themselves and that to me is really what's one of the things we really need more of in this culture and not less is places where people can meet and unknown new developments can happen that's interactivity, that's what we need. So there's a lot of things that are kind of behind the scenes that I think are imminent in the landscape and if you start to look at the landscape over time you start to see the clues of what's ahead and that's I think a very big part of my personal motivation for doing the project. Welcome to the Pralinger Library this is an experimental research library that we started together in June 2004 we opened to the public. This is our living room, welcome to our living room. I had moved a lot of books out from New York after I moved here in 99 and we had nine storage rooms filled with books and it was expensive and there was almost no access and you know we're independent scholars and we pursue a number of art projects and we wanted a place where we could come and use our own materials for our own reference and research but at the same time it seemed like we should also open it to the public. There was an ethos here that I think is anchored in a Bay Area community or was then I think it's now larger than that there should be a free economy of information that operates parallel to the money-based economy. That's a really really good point this idea that San Francisco is kind of a copyright free zone but there's something about the way that things happen here that's very different from what would happen in SF Public three blocks up it's not about the collection that this library is rather a place of transaction. Well and we've worked to make that I mean we positioned it from the beginning as a kind of fear-free zone in terms of people's relationship between print and making and remaking. We think people should make new work first and ask questions later rather than allowing concern about reproduction rates lead the creative process. It kills me when I get an email saying I'm my student filmmaker is it okay for me to use this clip you know people have the pig is in their head there and it intimidated from the get-go. We've had a transformative experience in early 2000s connecting with the Internet Archive I met up with them very early and I said hey why don't you put your archives online for free speaking of our film collection which had been locked up because I always thought information wanted to be expensive and out of some contrarian reaction I said sure and over the next few years we put a couple thousand films online high quality digital files for free downloading and reuse and that was a life-changing experience because we entered into collaboration with tens of thousands of people who we didn't know and all sorts of really really interesting derivative work got made out of the material and we were transformed by sharing. The library is a work in progress and people's projects are work in progress we're not an institution you know it would be lovely if this place lasted a long time but right now it's kind of defined by us defined by its use value yeah exactly we exist to be consumed we are defined through we do let people know that we value the collection based on how it's used this is a library where you go to get background and you go to understand origins and you go to understand kind of parallels like we're not living this through for the first time we are not unique people we live in a time with incredibly rapid media cycle and incredible ephemerality of information a lot of digital information comes and goes very very quickly it's very hard to remember what was in the news three months ago and we're thinking on kind of a longer cycle much longer cycle yeah maybe paper gets you kind of to think that way this is not a nostalgic project it's not about all of the book you know something is being lost you know our culture is going down the drain kids don't read we're going to lose a generation it's not about that it's about trying to keep different sort of channels of culture flourishing at the same time we want to figure out how digital and analog collections can just fit together as pieces of the same whole and not try to contradict or compete with one another as they're so often physicians doing you see a bookmark here as you go through the shelves it tells you that this book has been scanned and that you can download a free pdf facsimile or you can actually get to the ASCII tax done we kind of we love that because this library has an echo you know in the world of bits we really want to foreground and mainstream materials that people just would not run into at a public library we believe that there's truth manifested in old periodicals that doesn't show up in books books may have the authority but periodicals have that sort of ephemeral they document twists and turns in cultures and society they're only meant to be true for a week or a month at a time so they capture a kind of slice of life that's not captured in books people come here to collaborate with us in a certain way but then they also collaborate with one another and interesting things happen between the people that come into this place there's room to expand it much more than you know we've got lots more but it's also rich and exciting there's still room to expand it we have infinite room to expand it let's just get rid of books I mean really we don't need as many books as probably we have