Researcher: "Actually, Yes It Is a Discovery If You Find Something in an Archive That No One Knew Was There."

I am the researcher for The Papers of Abraham Lincoln, Helena Iles Papaioannou, who discovered the report on the assassination of President Lincoln that Suzanne Fischer discussed in her article "Nota Bene: If You 'Discover' Something in an Archive, It's Not a Discovery" here on The Atlantic earlier this week. I would like to offer a few words of clarification. 

Fischer suggests that I could have surmised the existence of this report and thus looked in the logical place to find it. ("But if anyone thought that a report to the Surgeon General from a physician who saw Lincoln post-assassination existed, they might have looked through these correspondence files -- which is exactly what the researcher, Helena Papaioannou, did.") This is inaccurate on two counts. First, I had no idea that the report existed. No one, or at least no one alive today, knew that a copy of Leale's report was in the records of the Surgeon General. I did not, therefore, seek to pinpoint the report's location. (I would not have been looking for such a document anyway: it does not technically fall within the scope of the project I am working on, The Papers of Abraham Lincoln, as we deal with documents to and by -- not about -- Lincoln.) Second, it is not obvious that such a report would be filed in a "Letters Received" series. It is not a letter and therefore may well have been filed on receipt with a different series of the Surgeon General's records.

As a trained archivist myself (I have an MLS specializing in archives, records, and information management), I wholeheartedly agree with Fischer about the central importance of the work of archivists in acquiring, preserving, arranging, describing, and making available historically important documents. The success of The Papers of Abraham Lincoln and of all historical scholarship would be hard to imagine without the excellent work of archivists. I can only concur with the sentiment that their crucial role deserves more public recognition, which I took to be the point of Fischer's article. Nevertheless, as Fischer acknowledges, documents in most repositories are not processed at the item level. Archivists do not look at every piece of paper in their holdings. This is especially true in a repository as large and expansive as the National Archives. No archivist knew that the Leale report was in the Records of the Surgeon General because no item-level processing had taken place. It would be inappropriate to characterize a document known by an archivist as a "discovery," but no archivist knew of this report's existence….