Harvard produced no documentary chain of custody for the daguerreotypes

Evidence

That morning, Jarrett shared that he had been doing research on the daguerreotypes for a school project and had concerns about Harvard’s ownership claim. In a follow-up letter to me and the attorneys, he wrote, “Neither the [Peabody] Museum nor the University has produced any documentary evidence to substantiate a clear chain of custody for the principle of provenance.” He found this troubling, since when he worked at Princeton’s department of archives, he said, “provenance guided everything from how we stored materials to how we described them in online publications for researchers to find them. Practically, this entailed maintenance of any and all documentation pertaining to how the materials came into our custody.” — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 1225

Categorization

• DEFINE: Jarrett’s letter explains provenance as the archival principle that documentation must record how materials came into custody.