Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 1985
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 5, No. 3, Summer 1985, pp. 200-201.
Abstract
The frequent users of primary sources are ever grateful for any index, catalogue, guide, or list that can help direct them through manuscripts, published documents, oral histories, and other original materials. Here is no exception; they will appreciate the efforts of Joseph Svoboda and staff for a helpful tool, even though it is one with serious limitations.
It is the product of a questionnaire mailing to which less than one third of the recipients responded. Of these, less than two thirds submitted relevant information. More disconcerting than this, Svoboda's Guide lists not only materials on Great Plains Indian peoples, but also those pertaining to Indians situated elsewhere, and it makes no reference to sources available on the Plains tribes held by repositories outside of the region. Hence, it is presented to users as a partial guide to those sources on all Indians held by repositories in this region, and not as a definitive aid to the search for information about any particular tribe or federation situated here. For this reason, it will offer small assistance to a considerable number of users, but extensive direction to no individual scholars.
There is additional deficiency in its fragmentary nature. It is limited by the qualities of the responses of questionnaire recipients, which were "very uneven, depending ... on the ability of repository personnel." Let a few examples illustrate the consequences. One small but important group of letters exchanged between the missionaries John P. Williamson and Alfred Riggs, preserved by the Dacotah Prairie Museum in Aberdeen, South Dakota, is not identified as such, and the entry about it contains no suggestion regarding how the contents might fill gaps left in greater collections held by the Minnesota Historical Society or the Houghton Library in Massachusetts. The diverse qualities of the Doane Robinson collections in Pierre are barely mentioned in a brief note that does little more than indicate that they occupy some seven feet of space. The massive holdings at the Oral History Center in Vermillion are presented with quantitative notes but almost no qualitative judgments. Similar deficiencies so limit the entries on most collections included that the prospective user is advised to regard this as a mediocre, slightly annotated list, and not as a reliable, documentary guide.
Comments
Copyright 1985 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln