As Hurricane Milton barreled towards the Gulf Coast barely a week post-Helene, Florida archivists and museum staff had a lot on their minds. Preserving cultural heritage is a fairly common concern among memory workers in times of crisis, whether that means staying with a museum through a hurricane or struggling to protect cultural landmarks in Gaza. Natural and human-made threats to history abound, yet these moments are often historic in-and-of themselves. When the flood waters recede and the fires burn down, how can we tell the difference between preserving history and exploiting the stories of the vulnerable?

Archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions have always walked something of a tightrope between preservation and exploitation. When it comes to problematic practices in memory work, museums typically take the spotlight for their storied history of predatory behavior. Archives have received less attention for their collecting practices.

Some recent stories have asked critical questions about where archival collections come from, such as the university archivist who collected protest artwork without students’ knowledge. These kinds of examples are harder to come by than those found in museums, and conversation around problems within archives collections tend to highlight the silences—the gaps left in the historical record,
unintentionally or otherwise.

Most memory workers seem to agree that their collections are rife with ill-gotten gains, even if they don’t always agree what to do about that fact. Yet, the story of questionable collecting is far from over. The same ethical questions and moral dilemmas that plague historic collections are cropping up in contemporary ones. This is perhaps all-to-clear when disaster strikes or when society’s general understanding of something is upended.

A fairly controversial Florida example can be observed in the intense debate that surrounded the onePULSE Foundation’s attempts to build a memorial museum following the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando on June 12, 2016. Some survivors accused onePULSE of attempting to profit off of their pain and formed a coalition to redirect fundraising efforts from building a museum to supporting the survivors. As of June 2024, plans for a scaled-back memorial are underway, with hopes of completing the project by 2028 and finally bringing the Orlando community some measure of closure.

Contemporary collecting—that is, the act of collecting materials that tell the stories of the here and now—is a crucial part of building our historical record, painful as it may be. Collecting the stories and art of people struggling through a global pandemic or holding onto heritage in a warzone seems like the most logical choice, but archivist Eira Tansey challenges others in the field to ask if efforts to document and collect stories of contemporaneous traumatic events are “simply the newest form of archival commodification.” These stories are painful and remembering them requires conjuring up times of deep uncertainty, fear, and loss, among many other powerful emotions. Yet, to stop collecting these stories is to risk forgetting them—or, perhaps worse, to enable the denial that they ever happened. Tansey is right: “No one owes their trauma to archivists.” But archivists owe future communities a record of their histories.

Everyone has the right to be forgotten. For better or worse, many stories will be lost to time. That’s okay. Today, memory workers might struggle to navigate between preserving history and turning someone else’s pain into a commodity, but the movement toward trauma-informed archives and museums is a growing one. And even mistakes represent an opportunity to be accountable and do better.