Research in the Archivo General de Administración is a collaborative effort
Many years ago (in 2006, if I remember
correctly) I bicycled from Ghent to Amsterdam and back, on a route of
more or less my own devising. One of the subtle differences in cycle
culture that I noticed in Belgium and Holland (or more accurately in
neighboring Flanders and Zeeland) had to do with signage. In the
Netherlands, the bicycle paths were all (at least in theory)
extremely well marked, and anyone with a map or a general sense of
geography could barely get lost, which meant that those of us poor
fools who stopped at crossroads had people whiz past us at speed on
their bikes. In Flanders, the signs were considerably less
comprehensive, but it was impossible to stop for more than thirty
seconds at a crossing without another bike rolling to a stop beside
you and saying (usually in English) “Are you lost? Can I help you
find something?” The better signs meant less informal assistance
between cyclists, and the more cryptic indications meant a friendlier
camaraderie among those who were trying to puzzle them out.
I have found that the Archivo
General de Administración is
like Flanders to the nth degree. The finding aids are cryptic to the
point of unintelligibility even when they are not frankly inaccurate.
But the staff are lovely and helpful, and I have the advantage of
working alongside a fellow researcher (and former Fulbrighter), who
is doing something completely unrelated. Yesterday she came over and
knelt by my desk, whispering, “I think I've found some associations
that might be useful for you” and provided me with a bunch of box
call numbers. In return, I have noted the boxes where her subject
pops up, and have been carefully passing the information along to
her. And meanwhile the friendly archivists look at the call numbers
and say “¿estás interesada en prensa?” based
purely on the boxes you are requesting, and their memories of
previous call requests. (My former-Fulbright-friend said she was
greeted on her arrival with another grant this year with the
assurance that “the good news is that no one has looked at your
boxes since you were here two years ago. The bad news is they're
still not better catalogued.”) All of us are wandering in a
labyrinthine collection of tens of thousands of boxes with probably
millions of individual documents that would make Jorge Luis Borges
himself dizzy, like his bibliotecarios de Babel
we leave little flare guns and notes and helpful hints for each
other, which makes research at once slower and less productive, but
tremendously more fun and social.
