Project Description
Documentary Focus
The Battle Creek Sanitarium was a Seventh-Day Adventist health resort in Battle Creek, MI, thought to be a place for health optimization and healing. An integral part of that mission included the dietary practices of the guests during their stays. This archive serves as a guide throughout the sanitarium, from the dining room to the kitchen to the director's office. Each section highlights important aspects of the dietary practices of the sanitarium's guests.
Consideration of Archival Concepts and Practices
Our archive engages with archival principles and practices including collection development, arrangement and description, and promotion/use.
While developing our collection, we engaged with F. Gerald Ham’s (1984) writings on “Archival Choices.” Ham writes, “Rather than build collections indiscriminately or redundantly, archivists need a strategy to enable institutions to move … to individual center specialization.” With this in mind, we considered how our archive could fill existing gaps and reduce redundancy. We decided to accomplish this by focusing on the food of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, bringing together disparate records across numerous repositories that are relevant to that theme.
Next, we generated descriptions using existing information gathered from other institutions’ metadata and our research of relevant topics. We then arranged items thematically by placing them within three categories: Kitchen, Dining Room, and Director’s Office.
Elizabeth Yakel (2003) argues “Archivists should begin to think less in terms of a single, definitive, static arrangement and description process, but rather in terms of continuous, relative, fluid arrangements and descriptions as on-going representational processes.” As such, we decided we wanted movement throughout our archive so it did not feel static. Within each page, the records would be shown in a carousel of items for a glance, and then clicking on an item would show item-specific information. Yakel’s words also prompt us to consider how our descriptions could be updated over time as new information emerges, rather than remain static and unchanged.
Yakel (2003) also expresses how “Each successive representation and representational system builds on its predecessors, recovering what was judged valuable in a given temporal and cultural context, incorporating or discarding what was deemed essential.” We heavily engaged with this concept within our selection phase. We collected records from many different repositories and brought them together here to tell the story of the Battle Creek Sanitarium Cafeteria.
Finally, we created our archive with the hope that it will be used and provide educational value for our audience. In Amy Williams’ (2015) article about digital archives, she engages with Kate Theimer’s concept of “Archives 2.0,” arguing that digital archives promote community involvement and collaboration among archivists and between archivists and the public. To make our archive enjoyable and engaging to potential users, we prioritized the display of item images rather than item metadata. To do so, we utilized Omeka’s item carousel displays, hoping that it would prompt users to scroll through all of the items in a given page rather than looking at one or two before clicking away.
Criteria for Record Selection
The records in this collection come from a variety of online repositories. A large number of the records are from different university libraries such as the Bentley Historical Library (University of Michigan), the Ebling Library for the Health Sciences (University of Wisconsin-Madison), the McKee Library (Southern Adventist University), and the Historical Medical Library (College of Physicians of Philadelphia). Other sources include the Library of Congress, Willard Library Digital Collections, Maine Historical Society, National Museum of American History, and the Internet Archive.
For inclusion in this archive, items must represent a food item, dietary regimen, culinary practice, or nutritional dogma developed and implemented in the Battle Creek Sanitarium by institutional leadership.
Target user group
The primary user of this archive is the general public. This is why we created a website that was easy to navigate since most people do not have experience using a more complicated archive interface. For example, we decided to split up the items into three categories: the Kitchen, the Dining Room, and the Director’s Office. In addition, the website includes a general browse option so users have the option to see all the items in one location. According to Smith and Villata (2020), the general public fall under the category of skimmers since they have a personal interest in the topic and are not doing in-depth research on the subject. This is also why we focused on displaying the items as images rather than metadata or a list. The easier it is to view items, the more accessible it is to our primary users. We wanted to “focus on what needs to be known to the user” (Smith & Villata, 2020).
Our secondary users include historians interested in Michigan, Seventh-Day Adventism, or food history; public health professionals and scholars who may do research on the evolution of health and medicine; and the government administrators who work in the former sanitarium building who may want to learn about the building’s history.
Perspectives
The perspectives of sanitarium “Physician-in-Chief” John Harvey Kellogg, institutional leadership, and leaders of the Seventh-Day Adventist church are reflected through the ideals of this digital archive’s printed materials. Details showcased in included photographs reveal how these entities implemented their beliefs regarding physical and spiritual wellness.
Perspectives missing from this digital archive include sanitarium patients, guests, and staff. Today, we have legal protections for medical patients and their records; it is our intention to offer the same protections to the patients of this health resort. Additionally, as numerous public figures passed through “the San” throughout its run, we recognize that the inclusion of their records may raise ethical concerns. In “In Secret Kept, in Silence Sealed: Privacy in the Papers of Authors and Celebrities”, Sara S. Hodson (2004) writes, “...collections of the papers of modern authors and celebrities seem to present a somewhat greater degree of difficulty in the area of privacy than do other kinds of collections.” While the aforementioned figures are no longer considered “modern,” they are still relevant names in the American consciousness. As their records and correspondences relating to time as a sanatorium patient are likely to be more personal and unrelated to their claims to fame, they may draw in more interest and even scrutiny.
Another missing perspective is that of the Race Betterment Society. While a major influence in the history of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, the overarching beliefs and ideals of eugenicists and race scientists are not to be amplified without meticulous care. For future work on this project, a dedicated disclaimer should be included on the welcome page, asking users to be critical of the resources in this archive and wary of sensationalizing such histories.
References
Force, D. C., & Smith, R. (2021). Context Lost: Digital Surrogates, Their Physical Counterparts, and the Metadata that Is Keeping Them Apart. The American Archivist, 84(1), 91–118. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-84.1.91.
Ham, F. G. (1984). Archival Choices: Managing the Historical Record in an Age of Abundance. American Archivist 47(1), 11-22. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.47.1.v382727652114521.
Hodson, S. S. (2004). In Secret Kept, in Silence Sealed: Privacy in the Papers of Authors and Celebrities. The American Archivist, 67(2), 194–211. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.67.2.b53338437x161076.
Smith, M., & Villata, J. (2020). Applying user centred design to Archives. Archives and Manuscripts, 48(3), 239–249. https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2020.1798790.
Williams, A. (2015). Participation, Collaboration, and Community Building in Digital Repositories. Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science 39(3), 368-376. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/598451.
Yakel, E. (2003). Archival Representation. Archival Science, 3, 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02438926.