She could enter it as correspondence or evidence.
Under correspondence, the letters were a life. Two people writing to each other over eleven years — the gradual shift from formal to familiar, the inside jokes accreting, the long gap after the misunderstanding in 2014 and the tentative resumption four months later with a note about weather. Under correspondence, the gap was part of the story.
Under evidence, the gap was the finding.
Her supervisor wanted a decision by Friday. The collection had to be cataloged; the catalog entry required a category; the category determined which reading room it would live in, which researchers would encounter it, which questions it would be asked to answer.
She'd been trained to treat this as administrative. A letter was a letter. The content didn't change when you moved it from one drawer to another.
But she'd been doing this long enough to know that wasn't true. Under correspondence, a researcher would read the 2014 gap as silence — a human interval, the kind that happens in any long relationship. Under evidence, a researcher would read it as suppression — a period when something was being hidden. The same four months. The same absence of pages. Two different rooms in the archive, two different absences.
The verb did the work. Filed under correspondence: the letters had been written. Filed as evidence: the letters had been produced.
She picked up the first one again. October 2008, a note about a concert. She'd read it six times now. The first time, it was charming. By the fourth, she could hear the charm performing. By the sixth, she couldn't tell whether she was hearing the letter or hearing her own previous readings of it.
The same letter. Six different documents.
She typed correspondence into the field. Deleted it. Typed evidence. Deleted it. Typed correspondence (see also: legal review, 2019). Deleted that too, because the cross-reference changed the category. A letter filed under correspondence with a note pointing to the legal review wasn't correspondence anymore. The pointing finger had reclassified it.
Her supervisor called. "Have you finished the Morrison collection?"
"Almost."
"What's the holdup?"
She looked at the letter about the concert. She could say: I can't decide on a category. Or she could say: The category decides what the collection is, and I don't know what it is yet. But the second answer was the kind of thing that got you moved to digitization.
"Just double-checking the dates," she said.
After she hung up, she typed personal papers — the category they used when nothing else fit. The residual drawer. It committed to nothing, which meant it committed to the idea that the letters were about a person rather than a case or a correspondence or a body of evidence.
It was the most honest option available. It was also, she knew, a decision dressed as a deferral.
She filed it and moved on to the next box.