Archivists re-file misfiled colonial documents based on biographical plausibility

Evidence

Valck’s letter was originally filed in the Verbeek Collection, which had been given to the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology (KITLV) in the 1920s. Rogier D. M. Verbeek (1845–1926) was a prominent geologist in the investigation of the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. In the early 1980s an archivist came across Valck’s letter; having found that Verbeek had no experience or contacts in Deli, and that the letter made no reference to Verbeek, it was refiled in a separate dossier (KITLV, H 1122/Valck, as I refer to it here). — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1020

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to reader’s colonial archival research focus: archivist judgment about biographical plausibility determines what survives as a coherent collection.
• QUESTION: How much colonial history was silently shaped by archivists classifying documents by presumed biographical connection to named figures?