Accessibility of J. P. Harrington Notes

By the 1970s the National Anthropological Archives (NAA)--the final repository of most of Harrington's materials--found itself devoting a good portion of its staff resources to cataloging and giving access to the Harrington collection. To facilitate this, the NAA obtained funding from the National Historical Publication and Records Commission to microfilm all of Harrington's linguistic and ethnographic notes, papers, and correspondence. Begun in 1977, this project was completed in 1991, except for the photograph collection and some of HarringtonŐs personal files and office records. The microfilm edition of Harrington's linguistic notes is divided into eight sections (Harrington 1981-91, volumes 1-8), 477 reels in all. Volume 9 consists of 17 additional reels containing correspondence and financial records.

The nine Guides to the Filed Notes, one for each major section of the microfilm, prepared by Elaine L. Mills and her assistants (Mills 1981-85; Mills and Brickfield 1986-89; Mills and Mills 1991) offer orientation to the collection. Mills was the Smithsonian staff member assigned to the Harrington collection from 1977 to 1983, and had primary responsibility for arranging the materials in a coherent order for microfilming. In the first decades of work based on the Harrington papers, the small group of active scholars was largely made up of professional linguists and anthropologists, most of whom were in contact with each other. Since 1981, thanks to the dissemination of the Harrington materials through microfilm, many researchers have begun to make use of the data. A growing number of these are Native Americans, some, descendents of the men and women from whom Harrington obtained his data.

To establish a regular channel of communication among researchers using the Harrington materials, an inaugural conference on the J. P. Harrington papers was held in Santa Barbara, California in June 1992. It was the first in an ongoing series of annual conferences and workshops (1992-1997) resulting in a series of ten newsletters (Golla 1991-1996). Excerpts below describe the importance of the material and problems related to access to the microfilmed notes.

J. P. Harrington Newsletter #1 November 1991 J. P. Harrington Newsletter #4 February 1993 J. P. Harrington Newsletter #5 June 1993 J. P. Harrington Newsletter #6 February 1994 J. P. Harrington Newsletter #10 May 1996
Whatever their backgrounds and goals, all users of the Harrington materials must surmount a number of difficulties, largely philological in nature, ranging from determining the precise significance of Harrington's phonetic symbols and deciphering various shorthand devices he used (e.g., Latin nescit or usually just N. or n., 'does not know'), to understanding the sequence and context of the data as a whole. As anyone who has worked with more than a small sample of JPH's data knows, his phonetic transcription changed over time and sometimes varied from language to language. He also used a number of abbreviations and non-phonetic symbols, some of whose meanings are understood (cf. the lists in Elaine Mills' Guides), but some of which require further elucidation.

The J. P. Harrington Database Project has already increased access to the Harrington papers. As a result of the previous NSF funding, the project purchased a high volume microfilm reader printer (Bell+Howell ABR 2700 ). This has allowed us to print copies from the microfilm to be used by students and community volunteers in transcribing the notes, thus avoiding the problems associated with access to microfilm readers. Reliance on readers in public libraries makes working on the materials for long periods difficult. Many library microfilm printers produce copies of poor quality, to say nothing of the time and effort required to copy an entire reel, often one coin at a time.

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Last updated July 1, 2003.