Keeping It All Together: Paper Fasteners at the National Archives

Today’s post comes from Alan Walker, archivist at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.

In my reflective moments, I think about what has kept me here at the National Archives for all this time. It couldn’t be the bone-wearying monotony of shuffling heavy cartons of records from here to there, or the tedium of changing out old information systems and learning the vagaries of new ones. No, there’s something else that gets me in the door every morning. Fasteners.

There is a seemingly endless variety of shapes and constructions to be found among the fastener family. Here are some that the author saved.

You wouldn’t think that something so trivial would hold my attention for any length of time. And yet, paper fasteners play such a vital role in our daily lives here. Consider: when researchers open boxes of records, they will see the telltale signs—the double round holes centered at the tops of the documents, the pinprick perforations in the corners. And many fasteners are still doing their duty among the records now.

It is a canon of archival preservation that fasteners are the devil’s work; capable of doing lasting and disfiguring damage to their host’s integrity, they must be removed, and forthwith. And so they are. Textual processing staff at all National Archives facilities do this every day. Perhaps gazillions of the little buggers get the boot each year; here are some Acco fasteners awaiting  their fate.

About thirty pounds of fasteners removed from documents by archivists.

My fellow staff like to collect the unusual ones. Clips, pins, staples, nails (!), tabs, and types whose names I couldn’t begin to fathom—we have come across an astounding variety among the records. Customer Service Division chief Diane Dimkoff told me that she once found an inch-and-a-half-long thorn holding papers together! They were Army records from the field during World War II; you had to make do with what you had.

Just among the humble paper clip, the range of artistry is astounding! Twisted into an amazing variety of shapes, angles, and patterns, there is a touching industrial beauty about them. And the range of raw materials from which these fasteners were produced—steel, aluminum, copper, plastic, string, even compressed paper! —offers a history lesson in itself; how industry introduced new materials and methods of production in the search for more efficiencies of cost, while ever mindful of how they could stylishly set themselves apart from the competition.

Example of an E-Z-TIE fastener

The fasteners themselves generate conversation. Archivist Pam Anderson at Lee’s Summit tells of how court records from Puerto Rico were, for lack of folders, simply pierced through the center with extra-large staples. Not a bit of fun for the National Archives staff who have to remove them.

These court records from Puerto Rico have a large staple through the middle!

Folks who work in processing the records will tell you that part of what they love about their work is the excitement of opening a box to see what’s inside. And sometimes, while the records themselves may not seem interesting, what’s attached to them can be fasten-ating.

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