What
is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future
Paradigm Shift
by
TERRY COOK
This paper was originally published in Archivaria, the journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists, 43 (Spring 97), and is published here with the kind permission of the author, who is the sole copyright holder.
Résumé
Cet
essaie analyse l'histoire de la pensée archivistique depuis la publication du Manuel
hollandais il y a un siècle. Il suggère qu'un nouveau paradigme émerge au sein
de la profession sur la base de ce passé inspirant. Les idées des principaux
penseurs des traditions archivistiques d'Europe, d'Amérique du Nord ou
d'Australie sont considérées dans le contexte de leur époque respective que
leurs contributions aient été de premier plan ou symboliques. L'accent est mis
sur ces théoriciens qui ont su reconnaître et articuler les changements
radicaux affectant la nature des archives, les créateurs d'archives, les
systèmes de gestion des documents, l'utilisation des archives, ainsi que les
mutations de société à survenir dans les domaines culturel, juridique,
technologique, social et philosophique qui ont eu une influence sur la théorie
et la pratique archivistiques. Tout cela s'imbrique aujourd'hui dans les
différents types de discours qui sous-tendent la pratique professionnelle. Des
lors, on voit cinq thèmes émerger de l'évolution de l'archivistique au cours
des cent dernières années. Les tendances actuelles suggèrent qu'il faut revoir
les bases conceptuelles des principes archivistiques traditionnels pour mettre
davantage l'accent sur le processus plutôt que sur le produit en vue de mieux
protéger la mémoire des nations et des personnes.
This
essay analyzes the history of archival thought since the publication of the
Dutch Manual a century ago and suggests that from this inspiring past a
new conceptual paradigm is emerging for the profession. Ideas of leading or symbolic thinkers within
the European, North American, and Australian archival traditions are considered
within the context of their times. The
focus is on those theorists able to recognize and articulate radical changes in
the nature of records, record-creating organizations, record-keeping systems,
record uses, and in the wider cultural, legal, technological, social, and
philosophical trends in society, as well as the impact of these changes on
archival theory and practice. That articulation
forms our collective discourse, the metatext or narrative that animates our
professional practice, and from it five broad themes are seen to emerge from
the evolution of archives over the last one hundred years. For the future, the trends of the century
suggest the need to reconceptualize traditional archival principles from a
product-focused to a process-oriented activity, to preserve in the best manner
the collective memory of nations and peoples.
Prologue: Memory, Archives, and
Archival History
The
history of archival thought in this century reflects the interaction of
archival theory and practice as archivists everywhere have sought to preserve
the memory of the world.1
Former National Archivist of Canada and ICA President Jean-Pierre Wallot
has set the inspiring goal for archivists of "building a living memory for
the history of our present." The
resulting "houses of memory,"
in his words, will contain "the keys to the collective memory"
of nations and peoples, and to the protection of rights and privileges. Thereby the world's citizens can open the
doors to personal and societal well-being that comes from experiencing
continuity with the past, from a sense of roots, of belonging, of identity.2 Archivists recall that Memory, in Greek
mythology, is the Mother of all the Muses.
Through her, society may be nursed to healthy and creative maturity.
Yet such societal or collective memory has not been formed haphazardly
throughout history, nor are the results without controversy. Historians in a postmodernist milieu are now
studying very carefully the processes over time that have determined what was
worth remembering and, as important, what was forgotten, deliberately or
accidentally. Such collective "remembering"--and
"forgetting"--occurs through galleries, museums, libraries, historic
sites, historic monuments, public commemorations, and archives--perhaps most
especially through archives.
French historian Jacques Le Goff refers to the politics of archival
memory: since ancient times, those in
power decided who was allowed to speak and who was forced into silence, both in
public life and in archival records.
Indeed, archives had their institutional origins in the ancient world as
agents for legitimizing such power and for marginalizing those without power.
This initial emphasis has continued.
Medieval archives, scholars now find, were collected--and later often
weeded and reconstructed--not only to keep evidence of legal and business transactions, but also explicitly
to serve historical and sacral/symbolic purposes, but only for those figures
and events judged worthy of celebrating, or memorializing, within the context
of their time. Taking the opposite
perspective of those marginalized by the archival enterprise, American
historian Gerda Lerner has convincingly traced from the Middle Ages to this
century the systemic exclusion of women from society's memory tools and
institutions, including archives. World
War I archives are now revealed to have been subjected to significant tampering
and alteration in order to make Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig appear less
culpable for the slaughter on the Western Front over which he had command and
much responsibility. And from yet
another perspective, archivists in developing countries are now seriously
questioning whether classic archival concepts that emerged from the written
culture of European bureaucracies are appropriate for preserving the memories
of oral cultures. All acts of societal
remembering, in short, are culturally bound and have momentous
implications. As Czech novelist Milan
Kundera asserts, "the struggle against power is the struggle of memory
against forgetting."3
But whose memory? And who
determines the outcome of the struggle?
These questions seem to me the central issues of archival history. How, for example, have archivists reflected
these changing societal realities and power struggles as they built their
"houses of memory"? How have
archival assumptions, concepts, and strategies reflected the dominant structures
and societal ethos of their own time?
Upon what basis, reflecting what shifting values, have archivists
decided who should be admitted into their houses of memory, and who
excluded? To answer these questions, we
need an intellectual history of our profession. We need to understand better our own politics of memory, the very
ideas and assumptions that have shaped us, if we want our "memory
houses" to reflect more accurately all components of the complex societies
they allegedly serve. Archival history
has other uses too. Canadian archival
educator Barbara Craig has stated the matter eloquently: "Just as personal identity is anchored
in a strong historical sense[,] so is our professional identity--both come from
the ability to experience ... continuity.
Surely if you have nothing to look backward to, and with pride, you have
nothing to look forward to with hope."4 Without continuity with the past, future
directions lack legitimacy. Without
understanding our predecessors' intellectual struggles, we lose the benefit of
their experiences and are condemned to repeat their errors. As Shakespeare discerned, "what is past
is prologue." Before archivists as
a profession can write their prologue for the next century, they need to
understand better their own past.
Exploring the Archival Discourse: Possibilities and Limitations
Many
books could (and should) be written by archivists about their professional
history, across the centuries and millennia, across cultures, languages,
gender, and nationalities, across differing media and differing types of record
creators, across the bridge of theory and practice, that is, across the chasm
of the guiding principles and ideas on one side and their actual implementation
in archival institutions on the other.
This single (if rather long) essay is limited to but one century in the
rich history of archival ideas, and is further limited to the Western European
tradition through a Canadian filter. I
think, however, that the analytical methodology employed here might be useful
in other historical contexts concerning the archival past.
In my view, analyzing the history of archival ideas requires listening
to the archival discourse of the time or place involved. Archival historical analysis requires
revisiting the principal professional discussions that leading archivists had
about their work and with each other.
It requires hearing again, and understanding within the context of their
time, and our own, their assumptions, ideas, and concepts.
Archival "theory" and archival "theorist" in this
approach do not relate, respectively, to some immutable set of fixed principles
and their constant defenders across varying realms of practice. That kind of historical perspective is
rather too Positivist and outdated for a late twentieth-century observer to
adopt. Rather, archival thinking over
the century should be viewed as constantly evolving, ever mutating as it adapts
to radical changes in the nature of records, record-creating organizations,
record-keeping systems, record uses, and the wider cultural, legal,
technological, social, and philosophical trends in society. Archival ideas formed in one time and place
reflect many of these external factors, which ideas are often reconstructed,
even rediscovered in another time and place, or reshaped across generations in
the same place. The best archival
theorists are those who have been able to recognize and articulate these
radical changes in society and then deal conceptually with their impact on
archival theory and practice. That
articulation forms our collective discourse, the metatext or narrative
animating our professional practice, and thus properly is the focus of an
intellectual history of archives.
In examining the archival discourse of this century since the
publication of the famous Dutch Manual of 1898, I am limiting my
analysis to some key European, North American, and Australian thinkers whose
works have found expression in English-language sources. Moreover, my focus will be primarily on the
twin pillars of the archival profession, appraisal and arrangement/description,
as these have been affected by changes in cultures, media, and technology, even
while recognizing that lively debates have occurred in the profession around
preservation issues, public programming, or the archives as a place of custody,
among others. And given the main
audience of this journal, I have placed some emphasis on Canadian traditions,
where relevant, within this larger Western European narrative. There are of course many archival traditions
outside these geographical and linguistic limitations. Yet in some ways that is irrelevant, for my
thesis is that the analysis in this paper, despite my limited foci, will reveal
historical trends that have some universality even within the broad pluralism
that characterizes the international archival profession. While I give voice to
particular speakers in one language, I am suggesting that the issues they have
addressed will be found to transcend their own national and linguistic
circumstances and thus be relevant to all archivists.
The Dutch Manual of 1898:
Archival Principles Defined
Almost
one hundred years ago, the Dutch trio of Samuel Muller, Johan Feith, and Robert
Fruin published their famous Manual for the Arrangement and Description of
Archives. Of course Muller, Feith,
and Fruin's work did not spring to life in a vacuum during the 1890s. Archives in various forms had existed for
centuries, but modern archival principles per se, despite some obscure
precedents, were only articulated in detail in nineteenth-century France and
Germany.5 Yet, ironically,
the important treatises which brought these principles to world attention in
the early twentieth century were not written by German or French authors, but
rather by Dutch, English, and Italian archivists.6 Of these, the Dutch Manual has had a
major influence, because it was the first, and because it reached many
archivists through French, German, English, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, and
other translations.
Muller, Feith, and Fruin produced their manual for the Dutch Association
of Archivists, in cooperation with the State Archives of the Netherlands and
the Ministry of the Interior. Each of the one hundred rules advanced in the Manual
was formally debated by the Society during the 1890s. Typical of a work written by committee, the accompanying text
bears many marks of careful qualification and elaborate examples, even if the
rules themselves are forcefully stated.
The Manual also reflects Muller's exposure to French archival
theory from his attendance in 1873 at the École des chartes in Paris and the
introduction from Germany of the concept of provenance into several Dutch
archives.
The Dutch authors' chief contribution was to articulate the most
important principles (or "rules") concerning both the nature and the
treatment of archives. The trio stated
in their very first rule, which to them was "the foundation upon which
everything must rest," that archives are "the whole of the written
documents, drawings and printed matter, officially received or produced by an
administrative body or one of its officials...." Rules 8 and 16 enunciated the twin pillars of classic archival
theory: archives so defined "must
be kept carefully separate" and not mixed with the archives of other
creators, or placed into artificial arrangements based on chronology,
geography, or subject; and the
arrangement of such archives "must be based on the original organization
of the archival collection, which in the main corresponds to the organization
of the administrative body that produced it." There, simply stated, are the concepts of provenance and original
order. The latter rule of respecting
and, if necessary, re-establishing the original filing and classification
system used by the creator, was considered by the Dutch authors to be "the
most important of all, ... from which all other rules follow." They believed that by so respecting the
arrangement of original record-keeping systems, the all-important archival activity of elucidating the
administrative context in which the records are originally created could be
much facilitated.7
We now recognize certain limitations of the pioneering Dutch Manual. As noted, it is first and foremost about
arrangement and description, as is reflected in the very title of the
book; it has little to say about
appraisal and selection as we now understand these terms. It is about government, public, or corporate
records and their orderly transfer to archival repositories to preserve their
original order and classification; it
dismisses private and personal archives to the purview of libraries and
librarians. Most important, the Manual
is based on experience the authors had either with limited numbers of medieval
documents susceptible to careful diplomatic analysis or with records found in
well-organized departmental registries within stable administrations. Such experience led directly to their
assumption, as noted above, that the "original organization of the
archive" in the creating institution would correspond "in its main
outline with the organization of the administration which produced it."8
This close relationship no longer holds true in modern organizations
where numerous record-keeping systems in several media in many sub-offices no
longer closely correspond to the internal structural organization or to the multiple
functions of the creating administration.
Moreover, the computer and telecommunications revolutions of the last
decade have radically accelerated this decentralization and diffusion, to a
point where operational functions now cross all manner of structural or
organizational lines. Herein lies the
reason for the recent dissonance between the archival perceptions animating
appraisal and electronic records strategies and those underpinning arrangement
and description. A detailed
understanding of rapidly changing administrative structures, functions, and
work activities is central to modern archival appraisal and for controlling
electronic records, as it is to contemporary business process reengineering and
computer system design. Yet such
understandings can no longer be derived solely from the study of records
following the classic Dutch methodologies devised for arrangement and
description.
The Dutch authors described accurately what they saw in the registries
and administrative structures of their time, and from that experience they
articulated our core professional principles.
Yet as administrative structures have significantly changed over this
century, these principles have sometimes been too rigidly defended or too
literally interpreted. This is not the
fault of the Dutch authors, but rather a tribute to the convincing nature of
their work. Indeed, while the authors
were rather too modest in describing their work as "tedious and
meticulous," they were generous, and realistic, in not wanting it to sit
"like a heavy yoke on the shoulders of our colleagues. We shall not mind," they stated,
"if there are deviations from ... [the rules] in certain details or even
in essentials." Over the past
century, there certainly have been deviations from, as well as confirmations
of, the principles articulated by Muller, Feith, and Fruin.9 The importance of the Dutch Manual
rests on its codification of European archival theory and its enunciation of a
methodology for treating archives.
Transatlantic archival pioneer Ernst Posner observed that the Manual
gave "final sanction" to theoretical principles that had gradually
been evolving throughout the previous century, while the first international
archival congress in Brussels in 1910 formally endorsed the Dutch principles.10 As late as 1956, American archival theorist
Theodore R. Schellenberg called the Dutch Manual "a Bible for
modern archivists,"11 and both he and English theorist Sir
Hilary Jenkinson based their landmark books on this very solid Dutch foundation. Whether directly or through Jenkinson and
Schellenberg, the work of Muller, Feith, and Fruin has widely influenced our
collective theory and practice.
Sir Hilary Jenkinson: The Sanctity of Evidence Proclaimed
Twenty-four
years after the Dutch book, Hilary Jenkinson produced the second major treatise
on archival theory and practice.
Jenkinson's defence therein of archives as impartial evidence and his
vision of the archivist as guardian of evidence have justly become clarion
calls to the profession. In a passage
that appears in no less than four of his addresses,12 Jenkinson
exclaimed:
The
Archivist's career is one of service.
He exists in order to make other people's work possible.... His Creed, the Sanctity of Evidence; his Task, the Conservation of every scrap of
Evidence attaching to the Documents committed to his charge; his aim to provide, without prejudice or
afterthought, for all who wish to know the Means of Knowledge.... The good Archivist is perhaps the most selfless
devotee of Truth the modern world produces.
If
records were the natural by-products of administration, the untainted evidence
of acts and transactions, then no post-creation interference could be allowed,
Jenkinson asserted, or their character as impartial evidence would be
undermined. If archives were the
organic emanation of documents from a record creator, then severing any record
from that organic whole seemed to violate fundamental archival principles as
established by the Dutch. If records were
to maintain their innocence in an archival setting, then any appraisal by the
archivist was utterly inappropriate.
Such exercise of "personal judgement" by the archivist, as
Jenkinson knew appraisal must necessarily involve, would tarnish the impartiality
of archives as evidence, as of course would any consideration of saving
archives to meet their actual or anticipated uses by researchers. The archivist's role was to keep, not select
archives. Consistent with such an approach, archivists were known in Britain as
"keepers." While the huge
volumes of records generated by the First World War gave Jenkinson a
perspective which the Dutch archivists did not have, he never felt comfortable,
despite some faint-hearted concessions later in his career, with archivists
doing any sort of appraisal or selection.
Jenkinson's solution to this dilemma was to consign to the records
creator the unwelcome task of reducing vast accumulations of modern records,
thus "making the Administrator the sole agent for the selection and
destruction of his own documents...."
Archivists would then take charge of the remnant, in exactly the same
way they cared in Jenkinson's day for medieval and early modern records, where
because of small accumulations no destruction was necessary in an archival
setting. While Jenkinson himself raised
the concerns that these administrators may not destroy enough, or may destroy
too much, or may even create records that consciously have one eye on history as
much as provide unbiased evidence of transactions, he advanced no satisfactory
solution to these dilemmas.
In fairness, it should be noted that Jenkinson did encourage a limited
"archive-making" role for archivists, consisting of articulating
standards whereby administrators could create and maintain high-quality
archives in the future that would bear the characteristics of authentic,
impartial evidence that he thought were invested in past archives. This was hardly a satisfactory solution to
appraisal, although it was a useful step.
He admitted the insoluble dilemma, given his overall approach, that this
"archive-making" intervention would have to distinguish more
"important" agencies (and programmes and activities) from others, and
yet these very judgements of importance and value--which are the foundation of
modern archival appraisal--immediately undermine his impartial archivist, and
therefore Jenkinson, always consistent at least, conceded that "upon this
point we have no suggestions to offer"!
He does not seem to have appreciated that even his limited intervention
of setting standards for "archive-making" would also undermine the
innocence of records as natural or pure accumulations that their administrators
created, organized, and used in the normal course of business as they (and not
standard-setting archivists) saw fit.13
American archivist Gerald Ham recently, starkly, but correctly commented
on the central Jenkinsonian dilemma about appraisal: "Allowing the creator to designate what should be the
archival record solves the problems of complexity, impermanence, and volume of
contemporary records by ignoring them."14 Jenkinson's approach to appraisal and,
indeed, to the very definition of archives would (no doubt to his horror) give
sanction to record creators such as U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon or George
Bush to destroy or remove from public scrutiny any records containing
unfavourable evidence of their actions while in office, thus undermining both
democratic accountability and historical knowledge. At its most extreme, Jenkinson's approach would allow the
archival legacy to be perverted by administrative whim or state ideology, as in
the former Soviet Union, where provenance was undermined by the establishment
of one state fonds and archival records attained value solely by the degree to
which they reflected the "official" view of history.15
In the area of arrangement and description, Jenkinson introduced the
concept of the "archive group" as a difference in interpretation, if
not principle, from the European concept of the fonds d'archives. Jenkinson's view was somewhat more
all-encompassing, with his archive group containing the entirety of records
"from the work of an Administration which was an organic whole, complete
in itself, capable of dealing independently, without any added or external
authority, with every side of any business which could normally be presented to
it." Consistent with his
"very catholic definition" of archives as the entire records universe
of an administration or agency, he admitted that the archive group for very
large agencies might contain "fonds within fonds," a
subtlety which more recent codifiers of descriptive standards sometimes
overlook. It is important to listen carefully to Jenkinson's turn of
phrase. He refers to an Administration
which was an organic whole, thus illustrating again his focus, just like
the Dutch trio, on medieval and early modern records, with their closed series,
their stable and long-dead creators, and their status as inherited records from
the past. That transfers of records
from open-ended series from fluid administrative structures might create
anomalies to challenge the archive group concept did not occur to Jenkinson.16
Jenkinson had joined the Public Record Office in London in 1906, where
his work focused almost exclusively on medieval and early nation-state
records. This experience helps to
explain his insistence on the legal character of archival records, their
evidential nature, and their stability and inherited completeness. His archival assumptions also reflect his
personal identification with the corporate culture of the prewar British Civil
Service, which underpins his faith in the government "Administrator"
being an honourable, educated, and civilized person capable of exercising
disinterested judgements in terms of record preservation. Our world of lying presidents and corrupt
commissars would have been entirely foreign, and doubtless repugnant, to
him. As for his notions that
"Truth" was revealed through archival documents or that the archivist
was an unbiased "keeper" of records and a "selfless devotee of
Truth," Jenkinson was simply mirroring the empirical Positivism common to
the historiography with which he was deeply familiar and schooled.
In summary, Jenkinson's views on appraisal are no longer valid for
modern records or for modern society's expectations of what archives should do,
nor is his perspective on the stable nature of administrations or the fixed
order of record arrangement useful for modern descriptive problems. But his spirited defence of the evidential
character of records certainly remains inspirational to archivists everywhere.
As will be seen, his ideas are enjoying a revival today, especially in
Australia and Canada, but also among many electronic records theorists everywhere,
in the face of ephemeral records, virtual documents, decontextualized
information, and increasing incidents of unscrupulous and haphazard record
destruction.17 The trick for
neo-Jenkinsonian enthusiasts is to follow the spirit, not the letter, of his magisterial
assertions.
Two broad themes emerge in the history of European archival ideas up to
1930: archival principles had been
derived primarily from solving problems in the arrangement and description of
older records; and those principles very much reflected the authors' time,
place, and the type of records they encountered. A further illustration of these two themes may be found in the
work of noted Italian archival theorist, Eugenio Casanova, whose principal work
appeared in 1928. Like Jenkinson and
the Dutch trio, Casanova mirrored the intellectual currents of the nineteenth
and early-twentieth centuries when he, in the recent words of Italian archival
commentator Oddo Bucci, "gave the discipline its empirical slant,
constructed it as a descriptive science, and applied to it the imperative of
positivist historiography, which aimed at the accumulation of facts rather than
at the elaboration of concepts...."
But such Positivist historiography and "fact"-based empiricism
have by the late twentieth century long been discredited. Bucci notes that new societal changes
fundamentally "undermine habits and norms of conduct, involving a break
with principles that have long governed the processes whereby archival records
are created, transmitted, conserved and exploited. It is clear," he continues, "that radical innovations
in archival practice are becoming increasingly incompatible with the
continuance of a doctrine seeking to remain enclosed within the bulwarks of its
traditional principles." What Bucci
says of Casanova, and which is equally true of Jenkinson and the Dutch trio, is
that archival principles are not fixed for all time, but, like views of history
itself, or literature, or philosophy, reflect the spirit of their times and
then are interpreted anew by succeeding generations.18
Facing Modern Records: T.R.
Schellenberg and the American Voice
The
next principal initiative in articulating the archival discourse came from the
United States. Not having the luxury to
formulate archival principles based on the meticulous analysis of limited
numbers of old documents, nor able to rely solely on the "descriptive
science" of Casanova, Jenkinson, and the Dutch authors, American
archivists began their collective professional activity facing a mounting crisis
of contemporary records, only a tiny fraction of which could be preserved as
archives. When the National Archives in
Washington was created in 1934, it inherited an awesome backlog of about one
million metres of federal records, with a growth rate of more than sixty
thousand metres annually. By 1943,
under the expansion of the state to cope with the Great Depression and World
War II, that growth rate had reached six hundred thousand metres annually.19 This had two principal results: the first was the emergence of the North
American records management profession to help agencies cope with this paper
avalanche; and the second was a fundamental reorientation of the archival
profession in North America, and wherever its influential ideas were read and
translated.
Margaret Cross Norton, a pioneering American archival writer and State
Archivist of Illinois, asserted in 1944 that, in light of these incredible
volumes of modern records, "it is obviously no longer possible for any
agency to preserve all records which result from its activities. The emphasis of archives work," she
noted in conscious contrast to Jenkinson, "has shifted from preservation
of records to selection of records for preservation." Philip C. Brooks, a key thinker at the U.S.
National Archives, was explicit in his criticism of Jenkinson's view that
archivists could safely remain "aloof from responsibility for how public
agencies managed their records," which would simply mean that "too
many records would be badly handled and even lost before archivists took
custody of them."20
From these concerns came the American "life cycle" concept,
where records were first organized and actively used by their creators, then
stored for an additional period of infrequent use in off-site record centres,
and then, when their operational use ended entirely, "selected" as
archivally valuable and transferred to an archives, or declared non-archival
and destroyed. Like Norton, Brooks
argued for a close relationship throughout this whole "life
cycle" between archivists doing
such selection of records for long-term preservation and records managers
organizing and caring for active records in departments: the appraisal function, he argued, "can
best be performed with a complete understanding of the records of an agency in
their relationships to each other as they are created rather than after they
have lain forgotten and deteriorating for twenty years." Specifying how that selection work was
actually to be done was left for Theodore R. Schellenberg to summarize from his
colleagues' work and then articulate in his landmark books and reports. In developing these selection or appraisal
criteria, Schellenberg became "the father of appraisal theory in the
United States."21
Schellenberg asserted that records had primary and secondary
values. Primary value reflected the
importance of records to their original creator; secondary value their use to subsequent researchers. Primary value related to the degree to which
records served their creators on-going operational needs--not unlike Jenkinson
allowing the determination of long-term value to rest with the
"Administrator." Secondary
values, which Schellenberg sub-divided into evidential and informational values,
were quite different, for they reflected the importance of records for
secondary research by subsequent users, not primary use by their original
creator. On this point, Schellenberg
explicitly denied that his "evidential value" was linked to Jenkinson's
sense of archives as "evidence."
For Schellenberg, evidential values reflected the importance of records
for researchers, not for administrators, in documenting the functions,
programmes, policies, and procedures of the creator. These values were to be determined, after appropriate research
and analysis, by Schellenberg's archivist, not by Jenkinson's
administrator. Informational value, the
other half of secondary value, concerned the content of records relating to
"persons, corporate bodies, things, problems, conditions, and the
like" incidental to "the action of the Government itself." Deciding which informational content was
important, and which was not--deciding, that is, who gets invited into the
archival "houses of memory" and who does not--was again to be
determined by the archivist, drawing on his or her training as an historian and
consulting with "subject-matter specialists," in order to reflect as
many research interests as possible.22 This search for informational value was most important to
Schellenberg, given its "usefulness ... for the larger documentation of
American life."23
Certainly consistent with his focus on secondary research, Schellenberg
to his credit attempted much more than the Dutch trio or Jenkinson to build
bridges between archivists and librarians, and between archivists caring for
institutional records and those responsible for private manuscripts.24
Another major change in archival thinking was introduced by Schellenberg
and his American colleagues. The Dutch and
Jenkinson believed that all material created and received by an administration
was "archives." For Schellenberg, "archives" were only that
much smaller portion that had been chosen by the archivist for preservation
from the larger, original whole, which he termed "records." Records were the concern of records managers
and creating institutions; archives
were the concern of archivists and archival institutions. Despite good cooperation between the two
professions, and the "continuum"-like cooperation envisioned by
Philip Brooks, the Schellenbergian distinction between "records" and
"archives" has tended to emphasize the differences between records
managers and archivists, and between records and archives, rather than their
similarities and interconnections. That
legacy creates strategic problems for archivists in a computerized world,
because electronic records especially require "up front" intervention
by archivists if records are to be preserved as archival evidence.25
In arrangement and description, Schellenberg invented the record group
concept as a tool to cope with the huge volumes of records generated by "a
highly complex government" where, in his words, "no governmental unit
completely meets Jenkinson's requirements [for the archive group] ... of
completeness and independence...."
Schellenberg rightly noted that in modern administrations "all
units are interrelated and few are completely independent in their dealing with
the business that is their main concern."
Because of this complexity of administration and large volumes of
records, the American record group "considered quantity, as well as
provenance," as a criterion for its creation. Such an approach necessarily proceeded "somewhat arbitrarily,"
as such practical factors would differ across time and place in terms of
assessing "the desirability of making the unit of convenient size and
character for the work of arrangement and description and for the publication
of inventories."26
Where the record group concept has been adopted, so too have been many
of these arbitrary and practical compromises, to the point where some critics
have asserted that the concept obscures more than protects provenance.27
Schellenberg was pointed in his criticism of Jenkinson: "I'm tired of having an old fossil
cited to me as an authority in archival matters."28 Rather than allow Jenkinson's
"Administrator" to decide what should be in archives, Schellenberg
insisted that archivists should make this crucial decision themselves and work
with records managers and subject specialists to influence the future shape of
the archival record. Rather than shy
away from records destruction, Schellenberg spearheaded the process that
eventually destroyed millions of metres of records. Rather than insist on the alleged purity of either the European fonds
d'archives or Jenkinson's archive group, Schellenberg popularized the
record group as an exercise in compromise seemingly suitable for the
arrangement and description of records from complex government agencies.
In all this, Schellenberg reflected the contemporary American political
culture of "New Deal statism, with its emphasis on the benefits of a
management technocracy and of efficiency," where the archivist became
"a contributing partner to the corporate management team...."29 Reflecting as well contemporary social
engineering initiatives in the new fields of sociology, social work, and urban
planning, and the major interventionist activities of government reformers in
Depression reconstruction projects, archivists could themselves likewise become
efficient "engineers" intervening in and managing the world of
contemporary records. Since
Schellenberg's generation also coincided in its upbringing with the widespread professionalization
of academic history in the universities, it is also not surprising to find in
his work the close identification of archivists with historians, and archival
"informational value" with historical themes and interpretations.
Much praise is due to Schellenberg.
Unlike Jenkinson, he anticipated the future rather than defended the
past, and he joined management techniques to historical scholarship in
archives. Despite working with federal
government records and within a huge national bureaucracy, he also saw the need
for archivists to be linked with broader cultural issues and allied information
professions. Yet some of the
compromises he encouraged, especially when amplified by his successors, now
trouble some archivists.
One such issue is the concept of use-defined archives. Most American archivists after Schellenberg
have until very recently emphasized--more than he did--that discerning real or
anticipated use by scholars, and particularly by academic historians, should be
the central methodology for determining which records have archival value. "Recent trends in historiography are of
prime importance to us" was the appraisal advice offered by Meyer H.
Fishbein, a leading appraisal thinker of the National Archives and Records
Service in the 1960s and 1970s.30
Maynard Brichford, in the manual on appraisal approved by the Society of
American Archivists in 1977, asserted that "successful appraisal is
directly related to the archivist's primary role as a representative of the
research community. The appraiser
should approach records ... [by] evaluating demand as reflected by past,
present, and prospective research use....
In reaching a decision ... they consider long-term needs for documentary
sources and the potential demands of scholars."31 Yet such use-based approaches to defining
the very nature of archives, Gerald Ham later objected, resulted in "a
selection process [that was] so random, so fragmented, so uncoordinated, and
even so often accidental ... [and one that] too often reflected narrow research
interests rather than the broad spectrum of human experience. If we cannot transcend these
obstacles," Ham warned, "then the archivist will remain at best
nothing more than a weathervane moved by the changing winds of historiography."32 Worse yet, a use-based approach to archives
removes records from their organic context within the activities of their
creator and imposes criteria on both appraisal and description that are
external to the record and its provenance.33 By so shifting the appraisal focus of
archivists and the definition of archival value away from record-creating
processes and record creators, advocates of use-defined appraisal ultimately
reduce archival theory to "much ado about shelving," that is, to a
few practical rules meant to supplement what is for them the key knowledge base
for archivists: the historical subject
content of records, recent historiography, and users' expectations and wishes.34
Societal Analysis and Functional Appraisal: Towards a Broader View of Archives
If
archivists are not to appraise, acquire, and describe as archival records
primarily those that historians and other users want (as Schellenberg and his
successors advocated); if archivists are not comfortable assuming that the
records creator will be able to decide fairly what records to keep, beyond a
very narrow range needed to meet the agency's legal obligations and short-term
accountabilities (as Jenkinson recommended), what are archivists to do? Answers and alternative approaches have come
from Germany, the United States, and Canada. Believing that archives should reflect more globally the society
that creates them, these differing "societal approaches" explore new
conceptions of archival theory and methodology. This perspective represents a fundamental change in the archival
discourse from one based on the state to one reflecting the broader society
that the state serves.35
Now, it may be said that archives are of the people, for the people,
often even by the people.36
Perhaps the first major voice raised in favour of a new societal
paradigm for archives was by Germany’s Hans Booms, although Schellenberg's
secondary values indirectly (and through historians' filters) also attempted to
break the statist paradigm. Booms
remains the most important thinker on the philosophical underpinnings of
archival appraisal. Reacting against
the worst excesses of the traditional archival statist approach, whereby the
state's ideological values are imposed on the very definition of the archival
record, Booms asserted that society must be allowed to define its own core
values, and that these values should then be representatively mirrored through
archival records. "If there is
indeed anything or anyone qualified to lend legitimacy to archival appraisal,"
Booms wrote, "it is society itself, and the public opinions it
expresses--assuming, of course, that these are allowed to develop freely. The public and public opinion," Booms
observed, "...sanctions public actions, essentially generates the socio-political
process, and legitimizes political authority.
Therefore, should not public opinion also legitimize archival
appraisal? Could it also not provide
the fundamental orientation for the process of archival appraisal?"37 His essential insight was that society, not
Schellenberg's specialized users and not Jenkinson's state administrators, must
generate the values that define "importance" and therefore archival
significance and archival retention.
This led to the corollary that "archivists need to orient
themselves to the values of the records' contemporaries, for whose sake the
records were created." In 1991
Booms asserted that society's values were best identified not directly by
research into societal dynamics and public opinion, as he had earlier advocated,
but indirectly through research into the functions of those key records
creators designated by society to realize its needs and wishes. He asserted that "archivists require a
useful analysis of records-creating functions to help them connect the documentary
needs ... with the records themselves."
In this way, there is an "immediate transition" from his
admittedly amorphous attempt earlier to define societal values through public
opinion research to a very concrete focus on the provenance of records as
expressed through the functionality of their creators, which, in Booms' words,
"is why [and how] provenance must remain the immutable foundation of the
appraisal process."38
Booms' approach of mirroring societal values through the functions of
the record creator is also the direction of the new macroappraisal acquisition
strategy implemented in 1991 at the National Archives of Canada and articulated
in my own theoretical writings since the late 1980s. This new conceptualization is finding increasing favour in some
international circles. In this Canadian
approach, the older archival focus on the subject content of records, and on
having that content directly reflect public opinion or users' needs or
historical trends, has been replaced by a new focus on the larger or
"macro" context of the records, as revealed through their creators'
functions, programmes, activities, and transactions, that is, through the
context and process of the records' own creation. I drew inspiration for my own theoretical work and for the
National Archives practical models from Booms' societal ideals, and those of
his colleague, Siegfried Buttner. I did
so, however, at a philosophical level (i.e., archival "value"
should be defined by social constructs and societal functions, rather than by
either Jenkinson's creators or Schellenberg's users). I did not do so at the strategic level (i.e., an appraisal
methodology, like Booms' first model, whereby archivists would research
directly into societal trends and public opinion issues to try directly to
"document society." Rather,
the National Archives has adopted a functional-structural macroappraisal
methodology that focuses research instead on records creators rather than
directly on society, on the assumption that those creators, and those citizens
and organizations with whom they interact, indirectly represent the collective
functioning of society. This is similar
to Booms' 1991 concept of an "immediate transition" from amorphous
societal functions to the concrete provenance-based institutional
manifestations of those functions. I
thus consciously placed my writings and the National Archives appraisal
methodology in a context-based, provenance-centred framework rather than in a
content-based, historical-documentalist one.39
This Canadian reinterpretation of provenance makes that principle more
conceptual than physical, as is appropriate for the age of the electronic
record. The "new" provenance
is also more functional than structural, as is fitting for an era where
organizational stability is everywhere disappearing. But it is provenance nonetheless, whereby the contextual
circumstances of record creation are again made the centre of the archivist's
universe of activities, rather than some external criteria such as use, public
opinion, or historiographical trends.
The Canadian approach is not driven by the Dutch or Jenkinsonian literal
provenance principles based on arrangement and description, which asserted an
exact congruity between creator function, creator structure, and record-keeping
system. Nevertheless, the Canadian
approach does recognize and respect the intent behind those older principles,
which was to link recorded information with the organic context of
institutional (or personal) activity.
That organic context of activity can no longer be determined, initially
at least, by trying to appraise billions of records in paper form, let alone
their more elusive electronic or visual counterparts. Rather, the focus must first be on the organic context itself of
record-keeping, and thus on analyzing and appraising the importance of
government functions, programmes, activities, and transactions--and citizen
interactions with them--that cause records to be created. Then the appraisal conclusions so derived
are tested before they are finalized by a selective hermeneutic "reading"
of the actual record "texts"--but only after the macroappraisal of
functions and business processes has been completed.40
The state archives in the Netherlands has adopted at the very same time
as the Canadians a similar method of appraising government functions rather
than appraising individual records. In
its well-known PIVOT project, the Dutch decided that, "instead of looking
to traditional principles of archives and records management, which in fact
tend chiefly to select and retain information generated by the administrative
processes, the proposed strategy bases
the evaluation of information on its role in government activities and
tasks. Following such an approach,
agencies would first analyze the processes critical to their missions and the
tasks required to carry them out;
selection and evaluation of information used in these activities should
reflect the appraised value of the tasks....
In general, information needed to reconstruct the critical functions of
government is what should be retained...."41 For the Dutch as for the Canadians,
appraisal is not focused, in the first instance, on the records or on
individual documents, but on the government functions or tasks or activities
that generate records. The Canadian project
is much broader in scope, however, for it also involves the interaction of the
citizen with the state and the impact of state actions on the citizens as
revealed through case file series, whereas the Dutch project focuses primarily
on policy and internal tasks and is not as concerned with case-level
implementation and related records.
While the Dutch PIVOT project is radical in its functional methodology,
it remains more statist than societal in its focus.
Another new theoretical approach certainly employing
"societal" rather than "statist" thinking has been
elaborated by Helen Samuels in the United States, with her concept of the
"documentation strategy."
Recognizing that the scale of modern record-keeping can only be
understood by some level of analysis above that of the record and its creating
institution, Samuels conceived the documentation strategy as a multi-institutional,
cooperative analysis that combines many archives' appraisal activities in order
to document the main themes, issues, activities, or functions of society. The documentation strategy integrates in
its analysis official government and other institutional records with personal
manuscripts and visual media, as well as published information and even oral
history. Its focus is not in the first
instance provenancial, however, but on themes such as educating college
students or developing the computer industry.42 Not surprisingly, therefore, the documentation
strategy approach has been criticized because it carries, unless applied on a
very narrow and local basis, the threat of overlapping themes/functions and
thus the possibility of duplication of archivists' research work and of records
acquisition. Moreover, the themes or
subjects chosen will always be in dispute, and thus the approach reflects some
of the "weathervane" faults of the American Schellenbergian
tradition.43 For these
reasons, the documentation strategy is most appropriate for the world of
personal manuscripts and non-corporate records rather than for government or
institutional records, or as a supplement to the latter to be used in
collection strategies to target related
creators of private fonds for acquisition.
Samuels recognized this Schellenbergian fallacy in her earlier work, and
has since developed the concept of the "institutional functional
analysis" in her important book Varsity Letters: Documenting Modern
Colleges and Universities, which, despite its title, has applicability for
any institutional archives. Here she
argues that archivists first need, not unlike what Hans Booms recommended in
1991, and as practised by the National Archives of Canada and the Dutch PIVOT
project, to research and understand the functions and activities of their own
institutions, and she outlines a precise methodology for such functional
analysis leading to a strategic plan to appraise each institution's
records. In retrospect, Samuels agrees
that she really developed her two broad concepts in reverse order of
logic: once the "institutional
functional analysis" has allowed the archivist to appraise the records of
his or her parent or sponsoring institution, then the archivist can
intelligently engage in a wider, interinstitutional "documentation
strategy" to locate related personal records that might complement or
supplement the institutional archives.
With both concepts, the key issue for Samuels is that, on a much broader
scale than archivists traditionally have done, "analysis and planning must
precede collecting."44
By bridging the world of corporate records archivists with that of
personal manuscript archivists, by focusing on the entire interrelated
information universe (records in all media as well as publications and other
cultural artifacts) of all relevant creators rather than just a portion of
them, by advocating a research-based, functional approach to institutional
appraisal rather than the old search for "values" in the content of
records, Samuels provides an important direction for coping with the voluminous
records of complex modern organizations and contemporary societies, and thus
for revitalizing archival theory.
Samuels' approach of searching for connections between formal
institutional archives and private manuscript archives was anticipated in
Canada by the "total archives" concept which, from the early 1970s,
articulated a long-evolving Canadian tradition.45 That tradition is certainly shared by other
countries, but rarely with the balance between public and private archives at
the national level that Canada displays, and indeed in virtually all
non-business archival institutions across the country. The Canadian "total archives"
approach involves the integration of the official role of archives as guardians
of their sponsors' continuing corporate requirements for recorded evidence of
their transactions and the cultural role of archives as preservers of
societal memory and historical identity, in both cases encompassing all
media. Like Booms, Cook, and Samuels,
the Canadian approach therefore reflects a wider vision of archives, one
sanctioned in and reflective of society at large rather than one shaped
primarily by powerful interest groups of either users or creators, or the
state. In the rather inspired words of
Canadian archivist Ian Wilson, the Canadian "total archives" tradition
focuses more on the records of governance rather than on those of government. "Governance" includes cognizance
of the interaction of citizens with the state, the impact of the state on
society, and the functions or activities of society itself, as much as it does
the governing structures and their inward-facing bureaucrats. The archival task is to preserve recorded
evidence of governance, not just of governments governing. The "total archives" perspective
may be threatened with marginalization, the late Shirley Spragge stated in an
emotional parting call to her colleagues, only if Canadian archivists overlook
or abdicate their own traditions.46
No one better represents the new "societal" rather than
"statist" paradigm than Canada's Hugh Taylor. Himself a key architect of the "total
archives" concept at the National Archives of Canada, Taylor came to
Canada from England in 1965 and was influenced early on by the communications
and media theories of Canadians Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Taylor soon began blending together an acute
awareness of the transforming character of new audio-visual and electronic
recording media and the immense power of world-wide communication technologies,
with deep ecological, holistic, and spiritual perspectives. With this potent mixture, he pulled many
Canadian and international archivists out of their "historical shunt"
of looking after old records and placed them firmly in the Information Age of
electronic records, global communications networks, and local community
heritage concerns and bio-regional initiatives. Through it all, he exuded a revitalized sense of the
contextuality (or provenance) of records by exploring the rich interconnections
between society and the documentary record, between the act and the document. In a long series of speculative, probing
essays, Taylor challenged archivists to see the archival connections in the
evolution from the ancient to the medieval to the industrial to the information
society, and from the oral to the written to the visual and to the electronic
record. Moreover, Taylor discerned, in
our new world of interactive electronic transactions and communications,
"a return to conceptual orality," that is to say, a return to the
medieval framework where words or documents gained meaning only as they were
"closely related to their context and to actions arising from that
context." In that oral tradition,
meaning "lay not in the records themselves, but [in] the transactions and
customs to which they bore witness as 'evidences.'" Given the centrality of these "evidential"
or contextualized actions both to the very definition and even existence of the
record in the Information Age and to any subsequent understanding of it,
Taylor encouraged archivists to adopt "a new form of 'social historiography'
to make clear how and why records were created...." Archivists need to do this, in Taylor's
view, because, faced with incredible information overloads and technological
transformations, they need to concentrate less on "dealing with individual
documents and series" and more on "the recognition of forms and
patterns of knowledge which may be the only way by which we will transcend the
morass of information and data into which we will otherwise fall...."47 Not surprisingly, Taylor's thoughtful
speculations also explicitly challenged archivists not to remain isolated in
their professional cloisters or behind disciplinary walls.
By combining in his own person the European and North American
traditions, by enhancing rather than undermining the archival traditions of his
adopted country, by ranging imaginatively from medieval orality to the
"global village," by welcoming rather than shunning the new
electronic and visual record, by searching for patterns and connections in
place of fragmentation and compartmentalization, and by linking archives to
their social, philosophical, and technological contexts, Taylor demonstrated
that archivists could still serve society well as its new "chip
monks," rather than simply as allies (or minions) of the powers of the
state.
Provenance Refreshed: Canada and
Australia
Hugh
Taylor's work led North American, and especially Canadian, archivists to what
Canadian archival educator Tom Nesmith has called "a rediscovery of
provenance."48 In many ways, of course, provenance had not been
lost. But until the later 1970s, North
Americans limited their use of the concept of provenance to a narrow range of
arrangement and description activities.
Even here they allowed compromises such as the Schellenbergian record
group to weaken the contextualizing power of provenance. While provenance was never openly rejected,
therefore, and theoretical lip-service was paid to the concept, all too often
in practice it was either ignored or actually undermined. Following Schellenberg's widespread
influence, knowledge of the historical subject content of the records replaced
provenance as the animating force in most North American archival appraisal,
description, and public service until the late 1970s. Accordingly, the ideal education of the archivist was perceived
to consist of graduate degrees in history supplemented by on-the-job
training.
Nesmith argues that this older approach has changed radically in Canada
over the past two decades, from both Canadian and European influences. Archivists trained as historians began to
apply their historical skills and research methodologies not as before to the
subject content of records, but to researching and understanding, in Nesmith's
words, "the evidential context which gave them birth." In this Nesmith was himself a leader,
calling for a "history of the record" as the basis of Hugh Taylor's
"new form" of socio-historiographical scholarship, and establishing
on a regular basis in Archivaria a "Studies in Documents"
section as a way to develop a "modern diplomatic."49 Supporting this same thrust to refresh
provenance, I then argued that, by focusing on "provenance, respect des
fonds, context, evolution, interrelationships, order" of records, that
is, on the traditional heart of our professional and theoretical discourse,
archivists could move from an "information" to a
"knowledge" paradigm, and thus to renewed relevance in the era of
electronic records and networked communications.50 Rather than abandoning archival principles
for those of information management or computer science, as some commentators
were then suggesting, or remaining locked in the Schellenbergian
content-centred cocoon, Canadian archivists began discovering (or
"rediscovering") the intellectual excitement of contextualized
information that was their own profession's legacy. A whole range of archival studies soon flourished across Canada
to "explore provenance information about the creators of documentation, the
administration of documents, and the forms, functions, and physical
characteristics of various archival documents" in all media.51
Perhaps not surprisingly, this encouraging Canadian atmosphere led
Americans David Bearman and Richard Lytle to publish their oft-cited 1985
article "The Power of the Principle of Provenance," in Archivaria
rather than in the United States. In
this landmark statement, they argued that provenance-based retrieval of
information, centred on a study of form and function of records, and the
context of creation, and re-presented to researchers in authority records, was
superior to subject- and content-based methods of retrieval, and thus provided
the key to the archivist having a valuable role in the age of electronic
records. Provenance was not some past
legacy, but rather a promise of future relevance based on the archivist’s
"unique perspective ... [of] how organizations create, use, and discard
information."52
To this indigenous Canadian stream of rediscovering the intellectual or
theoretical core of the profession through the historical and contextual
analysis of records and their creators was joined an awakened interest in
European archival theory per se. The key figure here is Luciana Duranti,
who came to Canada from Italy in 1987 and articulated through a series of six
articles the centuries-old discipline of diplomatics and posited its continued
relevance for understanding modern records.53 Duranti's exposition contained a rigour of
analysis beyond that which had evolved through the above-noted Canadian
neo-provenance or "history of the record" approach, and helped to
spark, with her other work and that of her students, a neo-Jenkinsonian revival
of focusing archivists' attention on the record, especially on its properties
as evidence of the acts and transactions of its creator.54 While diplomatics has much of value to say
to modern archivists (as does the central thrust of the indigenous
"history of the record" approach) about the necessity to conduct
careful research into the form, structure, and authorship of documents,
especially in electronic environments, it is evident that diplomatics must
still be coupled with a broader understanding, as Booms, Samuels, Taylor,
Nesmith, and Cook suggest, of the animating functions, structures, and
interrelationships of the creators that contextualize those isolated,
individual documents.55 As
these two traditions merge in the Canadian archival discourse, it should not
become a question of a top-down functional analysis of creators being better or
worse than a bottom-up diplomatic analysis of individual documents, but rather
a recognition that both approaches have important insights to offer to a
contextualized understanding of the record, and thus both should be used as
interrelated tools by the archivist.56 The top-down approach permits a better understanding of function,
process, and activity; the bottom-up
approach allows sharper insight into evidential transactions. One cautionary note must be added,
however. Despite the benefits of
enriched understanding offered by the neo-Jenkinsonian approach, its implicit
emphasis--like that of Jenkinson himself--on the archives of administrations
and institutions must not be allowed to turn the Canadian archival profession
away from its "total archives" comprehensiveness in the public and
private sectors, nor to diminish the overall cultural dimensions of all
archives.57
This rediscovery of provenance, this richer understanding of creator
contextuality that can turn information into knowledge, has had three major
results in Canada that have drawn widespread international attention and
praise, as well as a host of more local benefits. The first impact is the new macroappraisal acquisition strategy
articulated at the National Archives of Canada, which is now being adopted in
some other countries and jurisdictions.
As mentioned before, this strategy features a functions-oriented,
multi-media, and provenance-centred approach that does not assess records for
their anticipated research uses, but rather seeks to reflect in the archival record
the functions, programmes, and activities of records creators and those
in society with whom they interact or whose values they indirectly reflect.58 The second impact of the rediscovery of
provenance is a major Canada-wide national initiative to develop a system of
descriptive standards that replaces Schellenberg's record group with the
provenance-centred concept of the archival fonds; structures description in a
general-to-specific, multi-level, multi-media
relationship for all record entities within a single fonds; and asserts
the need to protect provenance further through authority files to illuminate
multiple-creator relationships--as well as codifying precise rules for
describing archives within such a reordered contextualized universe.59 The third impact has been the establishment
of several world-class, full-time, graduate-level archival education
programmes. The articulation of
professional educational requirements for archivists certainly reflects the
rediscovery of provenance and revival of archival theory in Canada, and, in
turn, by the work of these programmes' professors and students, actively
contributes to it.60
If Canadians were thus acquiring a much stronger and more conscious
appreciation of the relevance of provenance to address modern archival
problems, European archivists have also made the same affirmation. In at least four recent volumes of essays
representing authors from many countries, European archivists have wrestled
with the continued relevance of provenance to the challenges facing archives
today. That archivists from the
birthplace of archival theory have felt the need to undertake repeatedly this
re-examination may help Europeans to forgive North Americans their temporary
archival apostasy and to understand the enthusiasm of their recent
rediscoveries! Europeans through these
studies have in large part reaffirmed the relevance of the principle of
provenance, but see the need to interpret it liberally rather than literally,
conceptually rather than physically, if the principle is to continue to
vitalize the profession as it faces the new environment of the automated office
and electronic records.61
The most forceful reinterpretation of provenance since the mid-century
has come from Australia, in the work of Peter Scott and his colleagues.62 While most archival theorists after
Jenkinson and Schellenberg have concentrated on the thorny problems of
appraisal or electronic records, Peter Scott focused on description. The traditional archival model for
description, as articulated by the Dutch trio, and only slightly adapted or
somewhat modified by, respectively, Jenkinson and Schellenberg, assumed a
mono-hierarchical and thus mono-provenancial administrative and records
environment, and these theorists designed their descriptive concepts and tools
accordingly. Scott's fundamental
insight was that the traditional archival assumption of a one-to-one
relationship between the record and its creating administration was no longer
valid. He also demonstrated clearly
that administrations themselves were no longer
mono-hierarchical in structure or function, but ever-changing, complex
dynamisms, as were their record-keeping systems. He therefore developed the Australian series system approach as a
means for describing multiple interrelationships between numerous creators and
numerous series of records, wherever they may be on the continuum of records
administration: in the office(s) of
creation, in the office of current control, or in the archives. To Scott's own focus on interrelating
records and their immediate creator(s) is now being tested in Australia the
addition of other multiple relationships based on formal functions and the
larger ambient provenance contexts beyond those of the immediate creator.63 All these interrelationships are not fixed
one-to-one linkages, as in most archival descriptive approaches (despite some
cross-referencing), but rather exist as many-to-one, one-to-many, and
many-to-many relationships: between
many series and one creator, between many creators and one series, between many
creators and many series, between creators and other creators, between series
and other series, and between series and creators to functions, and the
reverse. In effect, Scott shifted the
entire archival description enterprise from a static cataloguing mode to a
dynamic system of multiple interrelationships.
Unfortunately, the misconception exists that the Australian series
system is simply a very minimalist version of Jenkinson's archive group or
Schellenberg's record group or the European fonds d'archives.64 This misconception masks Scott's truly
revolutionary changes to archival description and indeed archival theory
generally. Scott's essential
contribution was to break through (rather than simply modify) not just the
descriptive strait-jacket of the Schellenbergian record group, but the whole
mindset of the "physicality" of archives upon which most archival
thinking since the Dutch Manual had implicitly been based. In this way, as is finally being
acknowledged, Peter Scott is the founder of the "postcustodial"
revolution in world archival thinking.65 Although he worked in a paper world, his insights are now
especially relevant for archivists facing electronic records, where--just as in
Scott's system--the physicality of the record has little importance compared to
its multi-relational contexts of creation and contemporary use.
In recent years, Australian archivists have developed a second useful contribution
to the archival discourse and another significant revitalization of provenance
thinking about the context and character of archives. Reacting to several major public scandals, in which important
records were lost or intentionally destroyed, Australian archival educators Sue
McKemmish and Frank Upward have written with much sophistication about the
concept of "accountability" throughout the records continuum--a
notion that certainly has been long prevalent in Europe, especially France, and
accepted by many archivists, but rarely articulated with the sustained power of
the Australians.66
Consciously based on Jenkinson's central dictums and on Canadian
articulations of a neo-provenance creed, and especially on the insights of
visiting American theorist David Bearman, McKemmish and Upward assert that the
Schellenbergian distinction between "records" and
"archives" as the purview of, respectively, records managers and
archivists distracts from their common, unifying purpose as "archival
documents" at any point in their life, which they see as a common
continuum rather than separate, distinct cycles. McKemmish and Upward observe
correctly that information technology professionals too often are concerned
only with the efficient access and use of information, and lose sight of the
essential qualities of "integrity, completeness, accuracy and
reliability" that information must also have if it is to serve as evidence
of actions for anyone: creators, sponsors,
citizens, or later archival researchers.
Such evidentiary qualities of archival documents form, in short, a basis
for the institution's internal accountability and for a wider public
accountability essential for any democracy where leaders and institutions are
required to account to the people for their actions. Unless institutions can thus be held accountable, which includes
being accountable for ensuring that these qualities of "recordness"
are present in their record-keeping systems, then any efficient access gained
to information will be meaningless, for current and archival users alike.67
Australian colleague Glenda Acland has crystallized the issue by telling
archivists to manage records rather than relics.68 Needless to say, the Australian
Jenkinsonians do not follow their master's stance as passive keepers and
custodians of records, but rather see archivists as active interveners, even
auditors, in the archival document continuum.69 The Australian articulation anew of the
evidentiary character of archival documents within an accountability framework
is very important, because it combines archival concepts concerning evidence
and recordness with creating institutions' own self-interest in protecting
themselves legally and ethically. It
thus sanctions a potentially powerful strategy to get archival issues addressed
by record creators at the front end of the records continuum, which is
essential if an archival record is to survive in the electronic era. Yet with its heavy focus on institutional
and official records in its formulation and examples, the accountability
approach also carries with it, as some Australian advocates are now beginning
to recognize,70 a danger of rendering into two camps the
administrative and cultural roles of archivists, and thus of devaluing
archives' role as a bastion of national culture and societal memory in favour
of narrower, strictly legal accountabilities. The same threat is implicit in
the emphases of Canada's neo-Jenkinsonians and, as will be seen, in the
formulations of some electronic records theorists.
"Reinventing Archives":
Electronic Records and Archival Theory
The
revitalization or rediscovery of provenance has also been motivated by the many
challenges posed to archivists by electronic records. Discussion about such records is increasingly dominating the
professional discourse, and is leading to exciting new conceptual insights, as
well as to new strategies and practices.71 Despite significant contributions by Canadians and Australians,
the leadership in the electronic records discourse belongs to the United
States, especially to David Bearman.72
The early impact of electronic records, or machine-readable records as
they were called, was not quite so promising, however. In panic over the then relatively new
technology, some commentators in the 1970s and early 1980s advocated that
archivists should stop being archivists, and instead become computer
specialists or information managers in order to cope with this challenging new
medium. In what I have called the
"first generation" of electronic records archives, there was also a
strong emphasis on information content over provenancial context, on library
cataloguing over archival description, on one-time, one-shot statistical
datafiles over continuing and continually altering relational databases and office
systems, and on treating electronic datafiles as discrete and isolated items
rather than as part of the comprehensive, multi-media information universe of
the record creator.73 Such
approaches by the pioneering, first-generation of electronic records archivists
are perfectly understandable: the only
working models available to them had been created by data librarians dealing
with social science datafiles bearing the above characteristics. This changed by the mid-1980s when new
information technology featuring relational databases became the norm in
business, universities, and government.
The archivally valuable computerized data in such large social and
economic programmes' relational systems are often added, revised, or deleted
almost every second. Outside the world
of such databases, wherein information is at least structured logically, there
is the automated office, where text, data, graphics, images, and voice are
converted into electronic formats, and even combined into "compound"
or "smart" multimedia documents.
All these new and complex computerized formats, until controlled,
standardized, and linked to business processes, threaten decision-making
accountability and the long-term corporate memory of record creators,
especially when joined with a telecommunications revolution affecting the
transmission and interconnectivity of this electronic information. Even more, these new formats threaten the
very possibility that archives can continue as vibrant institutions able to
maintain such records in their full context or functionality over decades and
centuries. If an electronic document
has only a transient existence as a "virtual" composite or fleeting
"view" on the computer screen of randomly stored information created
by the different commands of different users in different organizational
structures for different purposes, how does any one accountable institution
preserve reliable evidence of specific transactions? What is the functional context of such transient and disjointed
data? Whither provenance? Electronic records, much like the earlier
thinking of Peter Scott, bring archivists to the era of virtual archives and
virtual records, where the physical record and its arrangement, so central to
much traditional archival discourse in this century, is now of rather secondary
importance compared to the functional context in which the record is created,
described by its creator, and used by its contemporaries. Such revolutionary changes suggested by the
electronic record have led archival theorists, such as Sue McKemmish of
Australia, to ask, "Are records ever actual?"74
Answers to these fundamental challenges are beginning to come. Archivists are now perceiving that a world
of relational databases, of complex software linkages, of electronic office
systems, of hypermedia documents, of multi-layered geographical information
systems, is, when all the high-technology rhetoric is put aside, still a world
of information relationships, of interconnections, of context, of evidence, of
provenance. Re-creating such relationships
for complex electronic records should be no different for the archivist, at a
conceptual and theoretical level, than unravelling the interconnections of the
many series of records that were typical of the nineteenth-century office, and
linking them to their animating functions and creators. Of course, at the level of strategy and
tactics, there is a world of difference.
Margaret Hedstrom and David Bearman accordingly recommend
"reinventing archives" entirely by moving the focus away from actual
custody of records in archives and more towards remote control of records left
on interconnected computers all over the government or business. Archivists would then be less concerned with
traditional curatorship of physical objects than with the centralized
management of organizational behaviour in order to protect a sense of
"recordness" or evidence in the organization(s)' computerized
information systems.75 But
the essence of the archivist's task of comprehending and elucidating contextual
linkages remains the same.
David Bearman, the most visionary of thinkers dealing with electronic
records, echoes these themes throughout his many writings. He asserts, for example, that "the important point of these
challenges to the traditional document is that the boundaries of the document
have given way to a creative authoring event in which user and system
participate. Only the context in which
these virtual documents are created can give us an understanding of their
content." Bearman argues,
reassuringly for archivists, that this new mindset "corresponds closely to
a professional perspective of the archivist, which has long focused on
provenance and the context of records creation rather than on the physical
record or its contents." He
concludes that, in terms of the many problems posed by electronic records,
"the analysis to date has enriched the concept of provenance and
reinforced its direct link to missions, functions and ultimately the activities
and transactions of an organization rather than to organizational
units...."76 For some
archivists, this latter phrase may prove more troubling. Such conceptual linkages of records to
functions and business processes rather than to single administrative units
undermine many of the traditional perspectives of archival theory and
methodology, as defined above in the work of the Dutch trio, Jenkinson,
Casanova, even Schellenberg. Electronic
records present this stark challenge to archivists: core archival principles will only be preserved by discarding
many of their traditional interpretations and practical applications.
While there is much long-term merit to the new strategic directions
suggested for the archival profession to deal with the electronic records of
governments and major corporations, such as implementing formal functional
requirements for record-keeping through policy and procedure or within
metadata-encapsulated record objects as part of business-acceptable
communication standards, these methodologies are much less relevant for private
sector records, or even for the records of many small, transient, let alone
defunct, government agencies, boards, and commissions. Archivists must not ignore present (if
perhaps flawed) electronic records-creating realities or older legacy system
records in order to pursue exclusively reengineering strategies for the future,
or assume that metadata descriptions will replace the broad contextuality of
archival "value added" descriptions.
It seems clear that, for some years at least, the assumptions made by
electronic records theorists about redesigning computer systems' functional
requirements to preserve the integrity and reliability of records, about
enforcing organizational accountability through policy fiat, and about
long-term custodial control being assigned to the creator of archival records
will de facto privilege the powerful, relatively stable, and continuing
creators of records capable of such reengineering, and thus, equally, will
disadvantage private and transient record creators who are not so capable or
for whom it is irrelevant. Indeed, the
very limiting definition of an archival record, increasingly used by electronic
records archivists, as consisting of evidence of business transactions,
excludes, at least implicitly, any record--and their creators--not meeting this
narrow accountability-driven definition from the very purview of archives and
archivists. The "politics of
memory" are apparently with us still.77
Conclusion I: What is the Past
that Forms Our Prologue
The
challenge of the electronic record provides archivists with a perspective from
which to reflect back on the archival discourse of the century, on the various
interpretations of the interaction of theory and practice. Every archivist in almost every country
shares the cumulative benefit of Muller, Feith, and Fruin's formal articulation
of core archival principles; of Jenkinson's moral defence of the sanctity of
evidence; of Schellenberg's attempts to
address actively the voluminous records of complex modern administrations; of
Booms, Samuels, and others' broadening of the archival vision from an
administrative to a societal conceptual basis; of Taylor's imaginative
transformation of fixed archival mindsets from past to flexible future mode; of
the Canadian rediscovery and the Australian recasting of provenance in light of
the complex contextuality of modern records; of Bearman's persistent challenges
to archivists to move from being keepers to auditors if they hope to preserve
provenance and protect the evidential accountability of archival electronic
records. Yet despite the richness of
archival thinking since the publication of the Dutch manual, whereby all
archivists are the beneficiaries of those who have gone before, there remains
today the need for a fundamental change in archival thinking. The major shifts in the archival discourse
of this century suggest the need to recognize these patterns of change within
that discourse and to debate the related issues and implications for archival
methodologies and strategies, and then to incorporate the results into daily
practice. In listening to the
collective archival discourse from 1898 to the present, I believe that there
are five such broad themes or changes that have emerged, and these in turn
suggest to me the need to reconceptualize some of our basic theoretical
concepts for the future.
The first theme is a marked change in the very reason why archives
exist. There has been a collective
shift from a juridical-administrative justification for archives grounded in
concepts of the state, to a socio-cultural justification for archives grounded
in wider public policy and public use.
This broad shift reflects in part the dominance during this century of
historians as the driving force within the profession and in part the changing
expectations by citizens of what archives should be and how the past should be
conceived and protected and made available.
Archives traditionally were founded by the state, to serve the state, as
part of the state's hierarchical structure and organizational culture. Archival theory not surprisingly found its
early legitimization in statist theories and models, and from the study of the
character and properties of older state records. Such theory has since been widely adopted in many other kinds of
archival institutions around the world.
Public sanction for archives late in the twentieth century, or at least
for taxpayer-funded non-business archives in democracies, has changed
fundamentally from this earlier statist model:
archives are now of the people, for the people, even by the people. Few citizens would approve the expenditure
of large sums of money to fund archives whose contents mainly featured
bureaucrats talking to each other.
While the maintenance of government accountability and administrative
continuity and the protection of personal rights are still rightly recognized
as important purposes for archives, the principal justification for archives to
most users and to the public at large rests on archives being able to offer
citizens a sense of identity, locality, history, culture, and personal and
collective memory. Simply stated, it is
no longer acceptable to limit the definition of society's memory solely to the
documentary residue left over by powerful record creators. Public and historical accountability demands
more of archives, and of archivists.
However, whether that socio-cultural justification is manifested by
methodologies based on patterns of use, the study of society and its
institutions directly, the functional provenance analysis of records creators,
or some other means has not yet been resolved by archivists.
The second theme emerging from the archival discourse relates to how
archives and archivists have tried to preserve authentic, reliable records as evidence
of acts and transactions. Archivists
throughout the century have consistently sought to understand and illuminate
the context or provenance of a record as much as its subject content. Archivists first accomplished this
protection of context by preserving in unbroken custody and in original order
all surviving records no longer needed by their parent administration. Such records were most often closed series
from defunct organizations, or were old, isolated, prestigious documents. Archivists have now dramatically shifted
their focus. Today, they try instead to
ensure that records are initially created according to acceptable standards for
evidence and, going further, to ensure that all important acts and ideas are
adequately documented by such reliable evidence.
In a world of rapidly changing
and very complex organizations that create voluminous and decentralized
records, in a world of electronic records with their transient and virtual
documents, their relational and multi-purpose databases, and their
cross-institutional communication networks, no reliable record will even
survive to be available to the archivist to preserve in the traditional
way--unless the archivist intervenes in the active life of the record,
sometimes before it is even created.
When such records are able to be preserved in archives, the comfortable
notion of the permanent value of archival records over time will require
similar modification, simply because the electronic record either will become
entirely unreadable or must be recopied and its structure and functionality
reconfigured into new software every few years.78 Traditional preservation of archival records
focused on proper standards for the repair, restoration, storage, and use of
the physical medium that was the record.
With electronic records, the physical medium becomes almost totally
irrelevant, as the records themselves will be migrated forward long before the
physical storage medium deteriorates.
What will be important is
reconfiguring the actual functionality and thus provenance or
evidence-bearing context of the "original" record, and it is on that
problem that archivists must increasingly focus their attention.
The third broad theme relates to the source of archival theory. A century ago, archival principles were
derived from a diplomatics-based analysis of individual documents or from the
rules devised for the arrangement and description of groups or closed series of
records received by archives from stable, mono-hierarchical institutions. A quite different perspective is now
required. Because there are countless of on-going series of multi-media records
to appraise within unstable organizations, because such appraisal should often
occur at the computer system-design stage before a single record has been
created, modern appraisal focuses on the functions and transactions of the
record creator, rather than on individual records and their potential
uses. The focus has shifted, therefore,
from the actual record to its functional process or context of creation, from
the physical artifact to the "very act and deed" which first caused
that artifact to be created. While this
shift in archival perspective from the record to its context was initially
stimulated by the spectre of virtual documents in computer systems and by the
recent developments of function-based appraisal theory, it reflects some of the
strategies for interrelational description of multiple-creator fonds, or
postcustodial proposals for "archives without walls" existing on a
world-wide Internet. Archival theory
now takes its inspiration from analysis of record-creating processes rather
than from the arrangement and description of recorded products in
archives. As Eric Ketelaar concludes,
"functional archival science replaces descriptive archival science, ...
only by a functional interpretation of the context surrounding the creation of
documents, can one understand the integrity of the fonds and the
functions of the archival documents in their original context."79
The fourth theme to emerge from our collective history over the past
hundred years is related to the previous three. Because of the now-required
active intervention by the archivist in record-keeping processes in order to
ensure that the properties of reliable evidence exist for records, because of
the need to research and understand the nature of function, structure, process,
and context and to interpret their relative importance as the basis for modern
archival appraisal (and description), the traditional notion of the
impartiality of the archivist is no longer acceptable--if it ever was. Archivists inevitably will inject their own
values into all such activities, as indeed they will by their very choice, in
eras of limited resources and overwhelming volumes of records, of which
creators, which systems, which functions, which transactions, which descriptive
and diffusion mechanisms, indeed which records, will get full, partial, or no
archival attention. Archivists have
therefore changed over the past century from being passive keepers of an entire
documentary residue left by creators to becoming active shapers of the archival
heritage. They have evolved from being,
allegedly, impartial custodians of inherited records to becoming intervening
agents who set record-keeping standards and, most pointedly, who select for
archival preservation only a tiny portion of the entire universe of recorded
information. Archivists have become in
this way very active builders of their own "houses of memory." And so, each day, they should examine their
own politics of memory in the archive-creating and memory-formation
process. By doing so, with sensitivity
and some historical perspective, archivists may better balance which functions,
activities, organizations, and people in society, through their records, are to
be included and which are to be excluded from the world's collective memory.
The fifth and final theme is that archival theory should not be seen as
a set of immutable scientific laws disinterestedly formed and holding true for
all time. The leading archival thinkers
in this century have imaginatively reinvented the concept of archives in ways
that very much reflected, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes consciously, the
dominant strains of public discourse in their time and place.
Archival theory has reflected, and has evolved through, several such
broader societal phases: from
nineteenth-century European Positivism to American New Deal managerialism,
onward to the media-focused McLuhanism of the 1960s and to more recent
postmodern historicism. If recognized,
this changing nature of archival theory over time becomes a professional
strength, not a weakness. Indeed, the
best archival theorists have usually been those able to recognize and
articulate broad, often radical changes in society, in organizational
structure, and in record-keeping technologies, and then integrate the impact of
these changes into archival work and archival thought. If Hugh Taylor and Tom Nesmith rightly urge
archivists to undertake a new scholarship to study the very rich links between
the authoring context and the resulting record, a similar research focus is
needed for the profession concerning the relationship between the archivist and
his or her contemporary society, both now and in the past.
And, finally, an important qualifier.
The history of archival theory, despite the foregoing simplified
presentation because of space constraints, is not a linear evolution, with
exclusive schools of thinkers, neatly ascending in some cumulative process to
the glorious Archival Theoretical Consensus of the present day. Archival history is instead a rich collage
of overlapping layers, of contradictory ideas existing simultaneously or even
blended together, of thinkers exhibiting differences of emphasis more than of
fundamental ideas, of individual thinkers changing their ideas in light of new
circumstances, of old ideas appearing in new guises in new places. The pendulum of thought swings back and
forth, as one generation solves its predecessor's problems, but thereby creates
new problems for the next generation to address, with ideas having their day,
being discarded, and then even being revitalized in modified form in later
work. And so it should be.
Conclusion II: What is the
Prologue from our Past?
Where,
then, do we go in future? After
surveying the archival ideas of the century, I believe that we are gradually
developing a new conceptual or theoretical framework for our profession. In the new century ahead, I think that
archivists will continue to shift their emphasis from the analysis of the
properties and characteristics of individual documents to an analysis of the
functions, processes, and transactions which cause documents to be
created. Appraisal will therefore
continue to change from being an assessment of records for their potential
research value to becoming a macroappraisal analysis of the creator's key
functions, programmes, activities, and interactions with clients, which the records subsequently selected for
continued preservation should most succinctly mirror. Arrangement and description will concentrate less on physical
record entities and media, and develop instead enriched "value-added"
contextual understandings of the information systems that create records and of
related system documentation and computer metadata. The role of archives within at least public administrations and
corporate bodies may change from being a supplicant agency hoping for
cooperation from record-creating entities in the transfer of old records to
becoming an auditing agency that monitors creators' performance in maintaining
and servicing certain categories of archival records left under the creator's
control.80 Reference and
outreach services may accordingly change when archives gradually evolve from
being primarily sites for the storage of old records that researchers visit to
becoming instead virtual archives where archivists, from their contextualized
postings to the Internet, will facilitate access by the public anywhere in the
world to thousands of interlinked record-keeping systems both under the control
of archives and those larger, more complex systems left in the custody of their
creators. Preservation will certainly
shift its focus from discardable physical storage formats to safeguarding
through repeated migrations the structure and contextual functionality of the
information itself.
These
coming conceptual shifts in archival practice suggest to me the need to
redefine core archival theory. To
respond to these challenges, provenance should change from being seen as the
notion of linking a record directly to its single office of origin in a
hierarchical structure, to becoming instead a concept focused on these
functions and business processes of the creator that caused the record to be
created, within and across constantly evolving organizations.
Provenance
is thereby transformed from the static identification of records with a
structure to a dynamic relationship with a creating or authoring activity. Original order should change from being
viewed as the notion of a physical place for each record within a single series
of records, to becoming instead a logical reflection of multiple authorship and
multiple readership, where, for example, data may be united in multiple ways into
new conceptual or virtual "orders" (or "series") for
different transactions by different creators.
A record will therefore belong to or reflect several series or original
orders, not just one.81 In
similar fashion, the concept of the record itself should change from being
perceived as a single piece of recording medium that integrates the structure,
content, and context of information in one physical place, to becoming a
virtual composite of many scattered parts linked together (under varying
software controls and business processes) to perform, or bear evidence of, a
transaction or idea. Likewise, the
archival fonds should not be conceived as reflecting some static physical order
based on rules arising from the transfer, arrangement, or accumulation of records,
but rather should reflect the dynamic multiple creatorship and multiple
authorship focused around function and activity that more accurately captures
the contextuality of records in the modern world.
All these changes move the theoretical (and practical) focus of archives
away from the record and toward the creative act or authoring intent or
functional context behind the record.
This new paradigm for archives replaces the profession's traditional
intellectual focus on the physical record--that thing which is under our actual
physical custody in archives--with a renewed focus on the context, purpose,
intent, interrelationships, functionality, and accountability of the record,
its creator, and its creation processes, wherever these occur. Because this suggested focus goes well
beyond drawing inspiration for archival activity from the study of records
placed in the custody of an archives, it has been termed a postcustodial
mindset for archives.82 Such
a postcustodial paradigm for archives, let it be quickly stated, does not mean
abandoning archival principles or no longer acquiring records, but rather
reconceiving traditional, Jenkinsonian guardianship of evidence from a physical
to a conceptual framework, from a product-focused to a process-oriented
activity, from matter to mind.83
By embracing this postcustodial and conceptual redefinition of
provenance as the dynamic relationship between all connected functions,
creators, and "records,"
archivists can acquire an intellectual tool to meet, with confidence,
the challenges of integrating electronic records into their professional
practice, of appraising complex modern records with acuity, of describing in
rich context archival records in all media, and of enhancing the contextualized
use and understanding of archives by their many publics. A redefined sense of provenance also offers
archivists, their sponsors, and their researchers a means to stop drowning in
an overwhelming sea of meaningless data and to find instead patterns of
contextualized knowledge, which in turn leads to the hope for wisdom and
understanding. From the contextual
principles of the archival past, the guiding prologue to the archival future
emerges. From the lessons of their history, archivists may find inspiration to
guide humankind with greater sensitivity through these varied "houses of
memory" that they so lovingly construct.
And by so reflecting the postmodern and postcustodial ethos of their
times, archivists today can facilitate "making present the voices of what
is past, not to entomb either the past or the present, but to give them life
together in a place common to both in memory."84
Endnotes
1 This article
has a long history and owes much to many colleagues, whom I want to acknowledge
here in order to make clear my gratitude, and which history will make clear the
provenance of a paper already cited in various existing versions. The paper was first commissioned in 1993 as
the third plenary address to be delivered at the Thirteenth International
Congress on Archives to be held in Beijing, China, in September 1996. After several drafts greatly benefitted from
comments by colleagues (see below), a very long paper was finalized in May
1995, which was distributed to delegates at the Congress in English and
Chinese. To reduce translation costs
into the other ICA official languages (Spanish, German, Russian, and French)
for Congress distribution, a second version was produced in December 1995,
approximately one-half the length of its predecessor, and this second, much tighter
version forms the core of the present article, but with some additions from the
first and with significant updating and refocusing, many more extensive
explanatory footnotes, and especially overall rewriting to make the article
more "Canadian," by setting Canadian archival traditions and
contributions within the original broader international context. A brief third version highlighting only the
key themes of the paper, approximately one-seventh the length of the original
paper's text, was also prepared for actual delivery in Beijing, and that
summary forms part of the conclusion of this article. The ICA will pro forma publish a significantly different version
of the paper without any of these changes.
I consider this version in Archivaria to be the definitive
text. In writing the original version
of the paper, I received the formal advice of twenty-eight archivists in six
countries. I wish to thank sincerely
these colleagues who took the time to comment (often very extensively) on my
earlier drafts. Their criticisms have
much improved the content of this version of the paper, as well as its
predecessors, and I hope that none are distressed by the many changes
subsequently introduced. Any errors
that remain are my full responsibility.
The readers were from Australia
(Glenda Acland, Sue McKemmish, and Angela Slatter), China (Han Yumei), the
Netherlands (Jan van den Broek and F.C.J. [Eric] Ketelaar), South Africa (Verne
Harris), the United States (David Bearman, Richard Cox, Margaret Hedstrom, Jim
O'Toole, and Helen Samuels), and Canada (Barbara Craig, Gordon Dodds, Luciana
Duranti, Tom Nesmith, Hugh Taylor, and Ian Wilson); and my National Archives of
Canada colleagues (Gabrielle Blais, Brien Brothman, Richard Brown, Jacques
Grimard, Candace Loewen, Lee McDonald, John McDonald, Heather MacNeil, Joan
Schwartz, and Jean-Pierre Wallot). The
paper at various stages also benefitted from the careful editorial corrections
of Ed Dahl and Tim Cook of the National Archives of Canada. I wish to thank Jean-Pierre Wallot and Lee
McDonald for the rare luxury (in terms of my past publications) of significant
time away from work to research and write the various versions of the paper,
and to Sheila Powell, as General Editor of Archivaria, for agreeing to
publish a very long article in one rather than two or more segments and for her
usual helpful editorial comments.
2 Jean-Pierre
Wallot, "Building a Living Memory for the History of Our Present:
Perspectives on Archival Appraisal," Journal of the Canadian Historical
Association 2 (1991), pp. 263-82, with citations from p. 282.
3 Jacques Le
Goff, History and Memory, translated by Steven Rendall and Elizabeth
Claman (New York, 1992), pp. xvi-xvii, 59-60, and passim. On medieval archives and their purposes, see
Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of
the First Millennium (Princeton, 1994), pp. 86-87, 177, and especially
chapter 3: "Archival Memory and the Destruction of the Past" and passim;
and Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word
(Cambridge, 1989); also on the symbolic rather than evidential characteristics
of some records, see James O'Toole, "The Symbolic Significance of
Archives," American Archivist 56 (Spring 1993), pp. 234-55. For women and archives, see Gerda Lerner, The
Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy
(New York and Oxford, 1993), passim, but especially chapter 11:
"The Search for Women's History;" see also Anke Voss-Hubbard,
"'No Documents -- No History': Mary Ritter Beard and the Early History of
Women's Archives," American Archivist 58 (Winter 1995), pp.
16-30. On World War I, see Denis
Winter, Haig's Command: A
Reassessment (Harmondsworth, 1991), especially the final section:
"Falsifying the Record." Milan
Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980), Part I, Section ii,
cited in Justin Kaplan, ed., Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th ed.,
(Boston, 1992), p. 761. For discussion
about the "controlling" politics of archiving, see Terry Cook,
"Electronic Records, Paper Minds:
The Revolution in Information Management and Archives in the
Postcustodial and Postmodernist Era," Archives and Manuscripts 22
(November 1994), especially pp. 315-20. Archivists need to explore this field
of "memory scholarship" more carefully, for it puts into context many
unquestioned assumptions underpinning archival theory and conceptualization,
even if the authors (unlike those above) rarely explicitly address archives
(except for Clanchy). See, for example,
Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York, 1984),
which is a fascinating exploration in cross-cultural history of the interaction
of Ming Dynasty China and sixteenth-century Counter-Reformation Christian
Europe, as well as a good introduction to the art of memory, which was then in
the final throes of a very long history.
For the original ground-breaking
analysis of memory and its elevated place for over one thousand years in
Western education and culture, and of various fantastic mnemonic devices (such
as memory palaces, memory trees, and memory theatres), see Frances A. Yates, The
Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966).
Continuing analysis in that vein is Mary Carruthers, The Book of
Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval
Culture (Cambridge, 1990). The
classic analysis of the shift from oral memory to memory recordings (or written
records, and thus archives) is Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written
Record: England, 1066-1307, 2nd ed.
(Oxford and Cambridge MA, 1993), although Patrick Geary (as cited above)
respectfully questions some of Clanchy's central interpretations. For the use of the past to construct
memories through various civic and heritage initiatives in order to defend
one's status in the present, a whole range of recent studies have been
produced: the pioneering study was Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, eds., The
Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983); and three of the best known are
David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge MA, 1985);
Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory:
The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York,
1991); and John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and
Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1992). Biochemists, psychologists, poets, literary
critics, and philosophers, among others, join historians (and one hopes
archivists) in being drawn to the study or mystique of memory: what it is, how
it works, and why it functions as it does, both in remembering and in
forgetting. Their works could fill a
library, but for a short, yet incisive introduction, see Mary Warnock, Memory
(London and Boston, 1987).
4 Barbara Craig,
"Outward Visions, Inward Glance:
Archives History and Professional Identity," Archival Issues
17 (1992), p. 121. The fullest argument for archivists researching, writing,
and reading their own history, including the many benefits this will have for
daily practice and professional well-being, is Richard J. Cox, "On the
Value of Archival History in the United States" (originally 1988), in Richard
J. Cox, American Archival Analysis:
The Recent Development of the Archival Profession in the United States
(Metuchen, N.J., 1990), pp. 182-200.
Lamentably few have followed Cox's sound advice, and oddly so
considering the historical training of most archivists.
5 The best short
summaries in English are Michel Duchein, "The History of European Archives
and the Development of the Archival Profession in Europe," American
Archivist 55 (Winter 1992), pp. 14-24; and Luciana Duranti, "The
Odyssey of Records Managers," in Tom Nesmith, ed., Canadian Archival
Studies and the Rediscovery of Provenance (Metuchen, N.J., 1993), pp.
29-60. Their notes point to many other
sources and in other languages. Also
useful is James Gregory Bradsher and Michele F. Pacifico, "History of
Archives Administration," in James Gregory Bradsher, ed., Managing
Archives and Archival Institutions (Chicago, 1988), pp. 18-33; as well as
several of the essays on national archival traditions published in Oddo Bucci,
ed., Archival Science on the Threshold of the Year 2000 (Macerata,
Italy, 1992). A recent overview of the
nature of the profession, including significant historical perspectives, is
James M. O'Toole, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago,
1990).
6 Duchein,
"History of European Archives," p. 19.
7 S. Muller, J.A.
Feith, and R. Fruin, Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives
(1898), translation (1940) of the 2nd ed. by Arthur H. Leavitt (New York,
reissued 1968), pp. 13-20, 33-35, 52-59.
The story of the Manual is best told in English in Marjorie Rabe
Barritt, "Coming to America: Dutch Archivistiek and American
Archival Practice," Archival Issues 18 (1993), pp. 43-54. I have used the 1940 translations of the
terms found in the Manual itself, rather than Barritt's modernization of
them. More recently, see Cornelis
Dekker, "La Bible archivistique néerlandaise et ce qu'il en est
advenu," in Bucci, Archival Science on the Threshold, pp.
69-79. The best source of biographical
information on the Dutch trio, including their not entirely happy interpersonal
relations, is Eric Ketelaar, "Muller, Feith and Fruin," Archives
et bibliothèques de Belgique 57 (nos. 1-2, 1986), pp. 255-68.
8 Cited by Frank
Upward, who also makes this critical point,
in his "In Search of the Continuum: Ian Maclean's 'Australian Experience' Essays on
Recordkeeping," in Sue McKemmish and
Michael Piggott, eds., The Records Continuum: Ian Maclean and
Australian Archives First 50 Years (Clayton, 1994), pp. 110-30.
9 Muller, Feith,
and Fruin, Manual, p. 9 (authors' original preface). The Dutch themselves led the way in
recognizing new administrative realities affecting record-keeping and thus in
recasting or expanding the original rules; it is unfortunate that some others
do not show the same flexibility towards their successors. As an example of such changes by the Dutch,
see Herman Hardenberg, "Some Reflections on the Principles for the
Arrangement of Archives," in Peter Walne, ed., Modern Archives
Administration and Records Management: A RAMP Reader (Paris, 1985), pp. 111-14. Eric Ketelaar has shown that a
nineteenth-century Dutch forerunner to the Manual's authors, Theodoor
Van Riemsdijk, broached the idea of functional and organizational analysis as
the basis of archival theory, but that his ideas were pushed aside, which
thereby "blocked the development of archival theory for a long
time." See "Archival Theory
and the Dutch Manual," Archivaria 41 (Spring 1996), pp. 31-40.
10 Ernst
Posner, "Some Aspects of Archival Development Since the French
Revolution," in Ken Munden, ed., Archives and the Public Interest:
Selected Essays by Ernst Posner (Washington, 1967), p. 31; Lawrence D. Geller, "Joseph Cuvelier,
Belgian Archival Education, and the First International Congress of Archivists,
Brussels, 1910," Archivaria 16 (Summer 1983), p. 26.
11 Cited
in Barritt, "Coming to America," Archival Issues, p. 52. 12 "Memoir of Sir Hilary
Jenkinson," in J. Conway Davies, Studies Presented to Sir Hilary
Jenkinson, C.B.E., LL.D., F.S.A. (London, 1957). This "Memoir" is the best biographical sketch of
Jenkinson, which can be supplemented by Richard Stapleton, "Jenkinson and
Schellenberg: A Comparison," Archivaria
17 (Winter 1983-84), pp. 75-85.
13 Hilary
Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration (London, 1968, a reissue
of the revised second edition of 1937), pp. 149-55, 190.
14 F.
Gerald Ham, Selecting and Appraising Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago,
1993), p. 9. Even archivists very
friendly towards Jenkinson opposed his views on appraisal; in a festschrift
in his honour, the leading archivists of Canada and Australia underlined the
difficulties of Jenkinson's approach: see W. Kaye Lamb, "The Fine Art of
Destruction," pp. 50-56, and Ian Maclean, "An Analysis of Jenkinson's
'Manual of Archive Administration' in the Light of Australian Experience,"
pp. 150-51, both in Albert E.J. Hollaender, ed., Essays in Memory of Sir
Hilary Jenkinson (Chichester, 1962).
15 See
Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR:
Moscow and Leningrad (Princeton, 1972), pp. 23-60; and, more pointedly, her
recent Intellectual Access and Descriptive Standards for Post-Soviet
Archives: What Is to be Done?, International Research and Exchanges Board
preliminary preprint version (Princeton, March 1992), pp. 9-23. From the 1930s on, she notes (p. 10),
archivists had "to emphasize Marxist-Leninist conceptions of history and
to demonstrate the ingredients of class struggle and the victory of the toiling
masses. Archivists were fired for
preparing 'objective' or purely factual descriptions of materials, rather than
showing how a given group of documents portrayed struggle against the ruling
class. Archival documents not
pertaining to party themes were simply not described or their inherent nature
and provenance not recorded."
16 Jenkinson,
Manual of Archive Administration, pp. 101-2. Jenkinson's sense of breadth in arrangement still survives in
British archival practice. Although his
"archive group" is now termed simply the "group," it
retains Jenkinson's broad definition.
Conversely, the term "archive group" itself relates to even
broader thematic categories. See
Michael Cook, The Management of Information from Archives (Aldershot,
1986), pp. 85-87, and Chapter 5 generally, especially the examples on p.
92. The context of Jenkinson's ideas
and their impact (and weaknesses) are nicely analyzed in Michael Roper,
"The Development of the Principles of Provenance and Respect for Original
Order in the Public Record Office," in Barbara L. Craig, ed., The
Archival Imagination: Essays in Honour
of Hugh A. Taylor (Ottawa, 1992), pp. 134-49.
17 See,
for example, the unabashed Jenkinsonianism of the Australians, perhaps
represented best in Sue McKemmish, "Introducing Archives and Archival
Programs," in Judith Ellis, ed., Keeping Archives,2nd ed. (Port
Melbourne, 1993), pp. 1-24; Sue
McKemmish and Frank Upward, eds., Archival Documents: Providing Accountability Through
Recordkeeping (Melbourne, 1993); Sue
McKemmish and Frank Upward, "Somewhere Beyond Custody," Archives
and Manuscripts 22 (May 1994), pp. 138-49;
and most explicitly Glenda Acland, "Archivist -- Keeper, Undertaker
or Auditor?," Archives and Manuscripts 19 (May 1991), pp.
9-15. For Canada, the most explicit
statement is by Heather MacNeil, "Archival Theory and Practice: Between Two Paradigms," Archivaria
37 (Spring 1994), pp. 6-20. For a
Canadian neo-Jenkinsonian perspective on appraisal, see Luciana Duranti,
"The Concept of Appraisal and Archival Theory," American Archivist
57 (Spring 1994), pp. 328-44. In these
examples, Australian neo-Jenkinsonians tend to follow the Master's spirit,
while their Canadian counterparts adhere more to the letter of his dictums. All Jenkinsonians should remember that even
the Master himself dismissed as "fools" any archivists
"unduly" influenced by administrative and institutional concerns, and
stated that researchers' "interests and needs must therefore be ultimately
the governing consideration." In
the same letter to Professor F.M. Powicke of Oxford, 22 January 1946, Jenkinson
also asserted that "no Archivist can do his job efficiently without
learning a little History deliberately ... and a good deal incidentally.... It would be unwise to try and prevent the
Archivist practising occasionally the metier of Historian." Cited in Laura Millar, "The End of
'Total Archives'?: An Analysis of Changing Acquisition Practices in Canadian
Archival Repositories," (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1996),
p. 255.
18 For
the Italian scene and Casanova's work, see Bucci, "The Evolution of
Archival Science," pp. 17-43. The
quotations are pp. 34-35, and from his "Introduction," p. 11.
19 The
figures are taken from James Gregory Bradsher, "An Administrative History
of the Disposal of Federal Records, 1789-1949," Provenance 3 (Fall
1985), pp. 1-21. I have made the
rounded conversions from imperial to metric measurements.
20 Margaret
Cross Norton, "Records Disposal," in Thornton W. Mitchell, ed., Norton
on Archives: The Writings of Margaret Cross Norton on Archives and Records
Management (Chicago, 1975), p. 232, and "The Archivist and Records
Management" in the same volume; Philip C. Brooks, "The Selection of
Records for Preservation," American Archivist 3 (October 1940), p.
226; on the contrast with Jenkinson, see Donald R. McCoy, The National
Archives: America's Ministry of Documents, 1934-1968 (Chapel Hill, 1978),
p. 178. Brooks' interventionist notion
was re-articulated and explored further by Jay Atherton, "From Life Cycle
to Continuum: Some Thoughts on the Records Management-Archives
Relationship," Archivaria 21 (Winter 1985-86), pp. 43-51, and the
idea of front-end work by archivists on this records continuum underpins much
current thinking about electronic records.
Atherton's continuum formulation was itself anticipated by Ian Maclean
of Australia: see his "An Analysis of Jenkinson's 'Manual of Archive
Administration' in the Light of Australian Experience," pp. 128-52; and
Ian Maclean, "Australian Experience in Record and Archives Management, American
Archivist 22 (October 1959), pp. 387-418.
The continuum concept has recently been reactivated, with much broader
implications for archival theory that are welcomingly inclusive of all
dimensions and sectors of archival work and ideas: social/cultural and
legal/administrative accountabilities, public and private sectors, individual
and corporate creators, document-focused rules of evidence and
functional/contextual linkages. See
Frank Upward, "Australia and the Records Continuum," paper presented
to the Society of American Archivists, San Diego, August 1996, publication
forthcoming in Archives and Manuscripts.
21 Ham,
Selecting and Appraising Archives, p. 7. Schellenberg's fullest statement of his oft-cited principles is
"The Appraisal of Modern Public Records," National Archives
Bulletin 8 (Washington, 1956), pp. 1-46.
An extract is available in Maygene F. Daniels and Timothy Walch, eds., A
Modern Archives Reader: Basic Readings
on Archival Theory and Practice ((Washington, 1984), pp. 57-70.
22 Quotations
from Ibid., pp. 58-63, 69.
23 Ham,
Selecting and Appraising Archives, p. 8. Schellenberg's influence
remains strong; a recent textbook chapter asserted that his secondary values
relating to "research uses" are still "the principal concern of
archivists." See Maygene F.
Daniels, "Records Appraisal and Disposition," in Bradsher, Managing
Archives, p. 60.
24 For
an analysis of Schellenberg's personal evolution, especially regarding private
archives and archival relations with librarians, see Richard C. Berner, Archival
Theory and Practice in the United States:
A Historical Analysis (Seattle and London, 1983), pp. 47-64, and passim.
25 The
Australians have been most articulate in objecting to the Schellenbergian
distinction between "records" and "archives" as one that
distracts from their common, unifying purpose as "archival documents"
at any point in their life along the records continuum. See, for example, McKemmish and Upward, Archival
Documents, pp. 1, 22, and passim; or Glenda Acland, "Managing
the Record Rather Than the Relic," Archives and Manuscripts (20
(May 1992), pp. 57-63. For the
Australian interpretation and implementation of the records continuum instead
of the life cycle approach, see several of the authors (but especially Frank
Upward) in McKemmish and Piggott, Records Continuum.
26 Schellenberg,
Management of Archives, pp. 162ff.
For a parallel American statement at the time, and an influential source
of thinking on this topic, see Oliver W. Holmes, "Archival Arrangement --
Five Different Operations at Five Different Levels," American
Archivist 27 (January 1964), pp. 21-41, and especially pp. 25-27.
27 A
growing number of critics strongly advocate the end of the record group and a
return to a more strict adherence to provenance rather than to Schellenberg's
practical compromise. The first
objections were raised by Australian Peter Scott in "The Record Group
Concept: A Case for Abandonment," American Archivist 29 (October
1966), p. 502, and passim; and more recently David A. Bearman and
Richard H. Lytle, "The Power of the Principle of Provenance," Archivaria
21 (Winter 1985-86), p. 20; and Terry Cook, "The Concept of the Archival
Fonds: Theory, Description, and
Provenance in the Postcustodial Era," in Terry Eastwood, ed., The
Archival Fonds: From Theory to Practice (Ottawa, 1992), especially pp.
47-52. The decade-long Canadian effort
to design and implement a national system of bilingual descriptive standards,
through Rules for Archival Description (RAD), is also intended to
address the worst failings of the Schellenbergian record group. While RAD does so by establishing a
more contextual framework for records description than existed before in
Canada, it also includes its own compromises (and thus blurring of provenance)
by adhering to traditional European definitions of the archival fonds that
originated from physical arrangement rather than creation activity, and by
overlooking the major implications of Scott's work and that of later electronic
records theorists (Bearman, Cook, Hedstrom, Brothman) concerning multiple
creators and virtual series. Despite
good intentions to the contrary, perhaps the Canadian archival fonds is really
just another name for the record group?
28 Cited
in McCoy, National Archives, p. 180. The biographical details for
Schellenberg may be found in "In Memoriam: T.R. Schellenberg," American Archivist 33 (April
1970), pp. 190-202.
29 Barbara
Craig, "What are the Clients? Who
are the Products? The Future of
Archival Public Services in Perspective," Archivaria 31 (Winter
1990-91), pp. 139-40, where she speculates on the impact of contemporary social
mores on the development of archival ideas.
30 Meyer
H. Fishbein, "A Viewpoint on Appraisal of National Records," American
Archivist 33 (April 1970), p. 175.
31 Maynard
J. Brichford, Archives and Manuscripts: Appraisal & Accessioning
(Chicago, 1977), p. 13. Despite growing
protests against this approach to archives, it continues, with explicit
acknowledgement of Schellenberg's influence; see Elizabeth Lockwood,
"'Imponderable Matters:' The Influence of New Trends in History on
Appraisal at the National Archives," American Archivist 53 (Summer
1990), pp. 394-405.
32 F.
Gerald Ham, "The Archival Edge," in Daniels and Walch, Modern
Archives Reader, pp. 328-29.
33 For
this reason especially, I have pointedly criticized the use-defined approach to
archives: see Terry Cook, "Viewing the World Upside Down: Reflections on
the Theoretical Underpinnings of Archival Public Programming," Archivaria
31 (Winter 1990-91), pp. 123-34; "Easy To Byte, Harder To Chew: The Second Generation of Electronic Records
Archives," Archivaria 33 (Winter 1991-92), pp. 210-11; and
"Mind Over Matter: Towards a New Theory of Archival Appraisal," in
Craig, Archival Imagination, pp. 40-42, and passim. Almost all the writers on contemporary
archival frameworks in the following paragraphs also reject, at least
implicitly, use-defined appraisal to determine the actual composition of
archives. More explicitly on the
subject, see Eric Ketelaar, "Exploitation of New Archival Materials,"
Archivum 35 (1989), pp. 189-99.
I agree wholeheartedly with Ketelaar that archives should not be
appraised and acquired to support use; once acquired, however, I certainly
agree (and have advocated) that their description, reference, and diffusion
should reflect client needs as far as possible.
34 That
this utilitarian content-based approach would radically diminish, if not deny,
the value of any archival theory, is best revealed in John Roberts,
"Archival Theory: Much Ado About Shelving," American Archivist
50 (Winter 1987), pp. 66-74; and "Archival Theory: Myth or Banality,"
American Archivist 53 (Winter 1990), pp. 110-20. The leading proponent of the use-based
approach, Elsie T. Freeman (now Finch), also exemplifies this kind of thinking,
when she dismisses traditional archival theory as mere "rules of order and
practice (sometimes called principles);"
see her "In the Eye of the Beholder: Archives Administration from
the User's Point of View," American Archivist 47 (Spring 1984), pp.
112-13, 119. Note the title, which
mirrors the content of Lawrence Dowler's "The Role of Use in Defining
Archival Practice and Principles: A Research Agenda for the Availability and
Use of Records," American Archivist 51 (Winter and Spring 1988), p.
74, and passim. For a supportive
Canadian view of this largely United States perspective, see Gabrielle Blais
and David Enns, "From Paper Archives to People Archives: Public Programming in the Management of
Archives," Archivaria 31 (Winter 1990-91), pp. 101-13, and
especially p. 109. For a countering
Canadian view, challenging Roberts's assertions, see Terry Eastwood, "What
is Archival Theory and Why is it Important," Archivaria 37 (Spring
1994), pp. 122-30, printed with two more responses by John Roberts in the same
issue.
35 Oddo
Bucci makes the same observation, in "Evolution of Archival Science,"
p. 35, and ff.
36 Abraham
Lincoln's memorable phrase was first given an archival twist by Eric Ketelaar; see his "Archives of the People, By the
People, For the People," South Africa Archives Journal 34 (1992),
pp. 5-16.
37 Hans
Booms, "Society and the Formation of a Documentary Heritage: Issues in the Appraisal of Archival
Sources," Archivaria 24 (Summer 1987), (original 1972: translation
by Hermina Joldersma and Richard Klumpenhouwer), p. 104. On the lack of legitimacy provided by
Hegelian models based on a prediction of historical trends in society, or by
the Schellenbergian dream of "a futurology of research interests," or
by Marxist or other models using alleged "objective laws for social
development," all of which models ignore the very "existential
conditions of human existence," as well as the impossibility of ever knowing
accurately what "society" is or means, see p. 100, and passim
(pp. 69-107). For an amplification of
Booms' views that records reflect or embody an "image" of society,
see the work of his Bundesarchiv colleague, Siegfried Büttner, as described in
Terry Cook, The Archival Appraisal of Records Containing Personal
Information: A RAMP Study With
Guidelines (Paris, 1991), pp. iv-v, 35-37; and inter alia through
comments on Büttner's views by Hans Booms himself, "Überlieferungsbildung:
Keeping Archives as a Social and Political Activity," Archivaria 33
(Winter 1991-92), pp. 28-29.
38 Ibid.,
pp. 25-33 (quotations from pp. 31-33).
39 See
Cook, Archival Appraisal of Records; and "Mind Over Matter: Towards
a New Theory of Archival Appraisal."
Those who do not read my work carefully can occasionally get this
important distinction confused, or even reversed, between the philosophical
warrant for "societal" archives and the actual provenance-based
appraisal strategies and research methodologies developed to realize that
warrant. As a result, some have even
suggested that my work is part of the "archivist as subject-content
historian" or "European documentalist" traditions--which are
exactly the traditions against which I have been reacting (and have so stated
explicitly) in articulating these new approaches! Attempting to reposition archivists from being passive receptors
of records to active appraisers does not mean advocating their abandonment of
provenance as the basis of archival decision-making (including appraisal), or
nostalgic hankering to transform archivists into either European documentalists
or Schellenbergian historians. For the
critiques, see Angelika Menne-Haritz, "Appraisal or Selection: Can a Content Oriented Appraisal be
Harmonized with the Principle of Provenance?," in Kerstin Abukhanfusa and
Jan Sydbeck, eds., The Principle of Provenance: Report from the First Stockholm Conference on Archival Theory and
the Principle of Provenance 2-3 September 1993 (Sweden, 1994), pp. 103-31,
abridged as "Appraisal or Documentation: Can We Appraise Archives by
Selecting Content?" American Archivist 57 (Summer 1994); and Terry
Eastwood, "Nailing a Little Jelly to the Wall of Archival Studies," Archivaria
35 (Spring 1993), pp. 232-52; which I have rebutted with Terry Cook,
"'Another Brick in the Wall': Terry Eastwood's Masonry and Archival Walls,
History, and Archival Appraisal," Archivaria 37 (Summer 1994), pp.
96-103.
In an otherwise interesting slant on the archivist's métier, Elizabeth
Diamond assumes that archival "value" in my approach would be
determined by judging the importance of records to the "administrative
historian;" see her "The Archivist as Forensic Scientist--Seeing
Ourselves in a Different Way," Archivaria 38 (Fall 1994), pp.
145-46. In so stating, she confuses
methodology with theory. While the
archivist doing macroappraisal must obviously do sustained research into the
records of administrative activity (functions, business processes, structures,
activities), he or she does so in order to discern the degree of sharpness of
the societal image and citizen-state interaction revealed by the
record-creating processes within those general administrative activities, not
to focus on the history of administrations per se. It is research into the history and
character of records, not administrations, to learn how and why records
were created, and what those records-creation, records-organization, and
contemporary record-use processes reveal about societal functions,
citizen-state interaction, and governance dynamics. The records which after this research are found to mirror most
succinctly those societal functions and interactions are judged to have
archival value. The theoretical stance
and focus is societal, therefore, not administrative. Perhaps it is enough to say that research into records to
understand their context is not the same as appraising records.
40 For
the actual approach, see Terry Cook, "An Appraisal Methodology: Guidelines
for Performing An Archival Appraisal," (December 1991); and Terry Cook,
"Government-Wide Plan for the Disposition of Records 1991-1996"
(October 1990) both internal National Archives reports. For a proposed sophistication of these
methodologies, although one still requiring fuller implementation strategies,
see Richard Brown, "Records Acquisition Strategy and Its Theoretical
Foundation: The Case for a Concept of
Archival Hermeneutics," Archivaria 33 (Winter 1991-92), pp. 34-56;
and Richard Brown, "Macro-Appraisal Theory and the Context of the Public
Records Creator," Archivaria 40 (Fall 1995), pp. 121-72.
41 T.K.
Bikson and E.F. Frinking, Preserving the Present: Toward Viable Electronic
Records (The Hague, 1993), pp. 33-34.
42 The
original statement is Helen Willa Samuels, "Who Controls The Past," American
Archivist 49 (Spring 1986), pp. 109-24.
A later article updates the theme, and contains additional
cross-references; see Richard J. Cox
and Helen W. Samuels, "The Archivist's First Responsibility: A Research Agenda
to Improve the Identification and Retention of Records of Enduring
Value," American Archivist 51 (Winter-Spring 1988), pp. 28-42. Two other oft-cited examples are Larry
Hackman and Joan Warnow-Blewett, "The Documentation Strategy Process: A
Model and a Case Study," American Archivist 50 (Winter 1987), pp.
12-47; and Richard J. Cox, "A Documentation Strategy Case Study: Western
New York," American Archivist 52 (Spring 1989), pp. 192-200
(quotation is p. 193). The working out of Samuels's approach, without the
theoretical underpinnings, was first evidenced in Joan K. Haas, Helen Willa
Samuels, and Barbara Trippel Simmons, Appraising the Records of Modern
Science and Technology: A Guide (Chicago, 1985).
43 For
critiques, see David Bearman, Archival Methods, (Pittsburgh, 1989), pp.
13-15; and Terry Cook,
"Documentation Strategy," Archivaria 34 (Summer 1992), pp.
181-91.
44 Helen
Willa Samuels, Varsity Letters: Documenting Modern Colleges and Universities
(Metuchen, N.J., and London, 1992), p. 15, and passim. See also her overview of both documentation
strategies and institutional functional analyses in Helen W. Samuels,
"Improving our Disposition:
Documentation Strategy," Archivaria 33 (Winter 1991-92), pp.
125-40. Curiously, Samuels publicly
launched (and later published in this latter essay) her new approach at the
same 1991 conference of the Association of Canadian Archivists in Banff at
which Hans Booms made the significant modification of his own ideas, in part
because of his concern that his older documentation plan of assessing public
opinion might be confused with Samuels's older documentation strategies, with
which he disagreed! Both of these major
thinkers on appraisal matters, therefore, unbeknownst to each other, added
significant new dimensions to their ideas, and moved in the same
provenance-based, functions-driven direction for the same reason at the same
time, in exact step with the new Canadian macroappraisal approach. For Booms on Samuels, see his "Überlieferungsbildung," p.
32. For Samuels's own rejection of the American
tradition of defining value through use and for her insistence on the
centrality of provenance, see Varsity Letters, pp. 8, 13, and 16. For another, complementary approach to
developing strategic plans for appraisal, see Joan D. Krizack, Documentation
Planning for the U.S. Health Care System (Baltimore, 1994).
45 The
best analysis is Wilfred I. Smith, "'Total Archives': The Canadian Experience" (originally
1986), in Nesmith, Canadian Archival Studies, pp. 133-50. For a supportive but critical view, see
Terry Cook, "The Tyranny of the Medium: A Comment on 'Total
Archives'," Archivaria 9 (Winter 1979-80), pp. 141-49.
46 See
Ian E. Wilson, "Reflections on Archival Strategies," American
Archivist 58 (Fall 1995), pp. 414-29; and Shirley Spragge, "The Abdication
Crisis: Are Archivists Giving Up Their Cultural Responsibility?", Archivaria
40 (Fall 1995), pp. 173-81. The reasons
for the growing threat to "total archives" are studied in detail and
with subtlety by Laura Millar, in her already-cited doctoral thesis: "The
End of 'Total Archives'?: An Analysis of Changing Acquisition Practices in
Canadian Archival Repositories."
For a complementary analysis of other reasons for this threat, see Joan
M. Schwartz, "'We make our tools and our tools make us': Lessons from
Photographs for the Practice, Politics, and Poetics of Diplomatics," Archivaria
40 (Fall 1995), pp. 40-74. Robert A.J.
McDonald puts the case exactly right in "Acquiring and Preserving Private
Records: Cultural versus Administrative Perspectives," Archivaria
38 (Fall 1994), pp. 162-63, by stating that those undermining "total
archives" either fail to understand the essence of the Canadian archival
tradition or lack the imagination or nerve to recast "total archives"
to flourish in economically difficult times.
Merely doing what we think our sponsors want or need regarding their own
institutional records, or what we think will please them and show that we are
being good corporate "players," is, as Shirley Spragge says, too easy
an abdication of the archivist's mission and responsibilities.
47 Hugh
A. Taylor, "Transformation in the Archives: Technological Adjustment or
Paradigm Shift," Archivaria 25 (Winter 1987-88), pp. 15, 18,
24; "The Collective Memory:
Archives and Libraries As Heritage," Archivaria 15 (Winter
1982-83), pp. 118, 122; "Information Ecology and the Archives of the
1980s," Archivaria 18 (Summer 1984), p. 25; and "Towards the
New Archivist: The Integrated Professional," paper delivered at the annual
conference of the Association of Canadian Archivists, Windsor, June 1988,
manuscript, pp. 7-8. Other important
statements in a large and continuing body of work are Hugh A. Taylor, "The
Media of Record: Archives in the Wake of McLuhan," Georgia Archive
6 (Spring 1978), pp. 1-10; "'My Very Act and Deed': Some Reflections on
the Role of Textual Records in the Conduct of Affairs," American
Archivist 51 (Fall 1988), pp. 456-69; "Recycling the Past: The
Archivist in the Age of Ecology," Archivaria 35 (Spring 1993), pp.
203-13; and "Some Concluding Thoughts," to a special theme issue of
the American Archivist 57 (Winter 1994), pp. 138-43, devoted to the
future of archives. The fullest
analysis of Taylor's thought is Tom Nesmith's, "Hugh Taylor's Contextual
Idea for Archives and the Foundation of Graduate Education in Archival
Studies," in Craig, The Archival Imagination, pp. 13-37. Most of the essays in this festschrift
reveal inter alia the profound impact of Hugh Taylor's ideas on an
entire generation of archivists in Canada and elsewhere.
48 Tom
Nesmith, "Introduction: Archival Studies in English-Speaking Canada and
the North American Rediscovery of Provenance," in Nesmith, Canadian
Archival Studies, pp. 1-28; see p.
4 regarding Taylor's leadership in this rediscovery.
49 Ibid.,
pp. 14, 18-19. See also Tom Nesmith, "Archives from the Bottom Up: Social
History and Archival Scholarship," (originally 1982), in Ibid, pp. 159-84;
and his introductory editorial, "Archivaria After Ten Years," Archivaria
20 (Summer 1985), pp. 13-21. To these
ends, Nesmith also teaches as the central core of the graduate-level archival
education program he created at the University of Manitoba a
Tayloresque-humanist exploration of the nature and impact of record-keeping in
society, historically and for the present day and future (see note 60 below).
50 Terry
Cook, "From Information to Knowledge: An Intellectual Paradigm for
Archives," Archivaria 19 (Winter 1984-85), pp. 46, 49.
51 Nesmith,
"Introduction," p. 18. His
book (Canadian Archival Studies) was also designed, in part, to showcase
the rich variety of this exploration and rediscovery of provenance, based on
the study and analysis of records and records creators.
52 Bearman
and Lytle, "The Power of the Principle of Provenance," pp. 14-27,
especially p. 14 for the quotation and footnote 1 for their sensitivity to the
positive Canadian influences in receiving their work.
53 See
Luciana Duranti, "Diplomatics: New
Uses for an Old Science," Archivaria 28 (Summer 1989), pp. 7-27,
for a general statement in the first of a series of six articles, and
especially "Part V," Archivaria 32 (Summer 1991), for an
explicit enunciation of the overall diplomatic method and approach, as opposed
to its component parts outlined in the four earlier articles.
54 For a
flavour, see Heather MacNeil, "Weaving Provenancial and Documentary
Relations," Archivaria 34 (Summer 1992), pp. 192-98; Janet Turner,
"Experimenting with New Tools: Special Diplomatics and the Study of
Authority in the United Church of Canada," Archivaria 30 (Summer
1990), pp. 91-103; and Terry Eastwood, "How Goes It with Appraisal?,"
Archivaria 36 (Autumn 1993), pp. 111-21, as well as his article in note
34 above. For highlights of Luciana
Duranti's work, see those cited in notes 5 and 53 above, as well as her main
theoretical statements in "The Concept of Appraisal and Archival
Theory;" "The Archival Body of Knowledge: Archival Theory, Method,
and Practice, and Graduate and Continuing Education," Journal of
Education for Library and Information Science 34 (Winter 1993), pp. 10-11;
and "Reliability and Authenticity: The Concepts and Their
Implications," Archivaria 39 (Spring 1995), pp. 5-10. Other Canadian archivists not within
Duranti's immediate orbit have also defended the primacy of the record: Barbara Craig, for example, has repeatedly
called attention to the record's importance, demonstrating thereby that there
is the potential for much compatibility between the "history of the
record" approach (of which she is a good representative) and the
"diplomatics" stream; see among others her "The Acts of the
Appraisers: The Context, the Plan and the Record," Archivaria 34
(Summer 1992), pp. 175-80, and well as her many writing on health and British
government records. For a different,
post-modernist, and certainly non-Jenkinsonian perspective on the importance of
the record, as hermeneutic text to be read (in the sense of contextualized
narration), see Brown, "Records Acquisition Strategy and Its Theoretical
Foundation: The Case for a Concept of Archival Hermeneutics." As my critics rarely acknowledge, I have
also defended the central importance of the record in archival
conceptualizations; see, among others
already cited, "It's Ten O'Clock: Do You Know Where Your Data Are?" Technology
Review (January 1995), pp. 48-53.
55 This
point is made explicitly by one of the few published case studies of applying
diplomatics, whose author notes "that it will be necessary to employ other
tools of the archivist's trade in order to corroborate the discoveries of
diplomatics and to address questions left unanswered by diplomatics." Among such tools are the "History"
of administration, law, and organizational culture (ideas, societal forces,
etc.) and "Archival Theory," which I presume would encompass the
wider provenance-based insights that the history of the record approach offers
into the juridical context of creation.
See Turner, "Experimenting with New Tools," p. 101. With billions of records to appraise, modern
archivists should reverse Turner's formula, simply because no one can possibly
undertake modern appraisal by performing diplomatic analyses on individual
documents (which in some electronic and audio-visual environments do not even
exist at the time of appraisal). Her
formula would then read "that diplomatics can be usefully employed to
corroborate the discoveries and answer any questions left unanswered by the
functions-based, provenance-driven macroappraisal." Diplomatics becomes, then, not unlike Rick
Brown's suggested use of an archival hermeneutic, a means to corroborate
macroappraisal analyses and hypotheses.
56 This
point about recognizing, celebrating, and merging the two traditions, rather
than either ignoring or denigrating the other tradition, has also been made by
Heather MacNeil, in "Archival Theory and Practice: Between Two
Paradigms," pp. 17-18; however,
she sometimes does not practise what she advocated: see her one-sided
"Archival Studies in the Canadian Grain: The Search for a Canadian Archival
Tradition," Archivaria 37 (Spring 1994), pp. 134-49; and the
corrective offered by Tom Nesmith, "Nesmith and The Rediscovery of
Provenance (Response to Heather MacNeil)," Archivaria 38 (Fall
1994), pp. 7-10.
57 The
danger has been suggested by Joan M. Schwartz, in "'We make our tools and
our tools make us': Lessons from Photographs for the Practice, Politics, and
Poetics of Diplomatics." There is
nothing, in my view, in the application of diplomatics or neo-Jenkinsonian
methods that inherently favours institutional over private archives, or indeed
the administrative over the cultural perspective on archives. It is more a question of emphasis and lack
of balance. The examples used by the
principal authors involved and the history of the evolution of these methods
certainly lead in these directions, as does the assumption of either positive
institutional compliance with the related archival perspectives, or at least
strong juridical and societal sanctions being readily imposed for
non-compliance. Neither assumption is
true for many late twentieth-century North American institutions, and are
almost completely irrelevant for the targeting and appraisal of papers and
related media of private individuals, and many private associations and
groups. From these unrealistic
practical assumptions comes the danger rather than from any logical fault in
the ideas or theory.
58 See
notes 39 and 40 above.
59 Bureau
of Canadian Archivists, Working Group on Archival Descriptive Standards, Toward
Descriptive Standards: Report and Recommendations of the Canadian Working Group
on Archival Descriptive Standards (Ottawa, 1985); Wendy M. Duff and Kent
M. Haworth, "The Reclamation of Archival Description: The Canadian
Perspective," Archivaria 31 (Winter 1990-91), pp. 26-35; Eastwood, ed., The Archival Fonds;
and numerous articles in the two thematic issues on descriptive standards of Archivaria
34 (Summer 1992) and 35 (Spring 1993), especially those by Hugo Stibbe and
Cynthia Durance. These two issues also
contain articles by David Bearman, Kathleen Roe, and Terry Cook challenging
some of the assumptions and implementation strategies of the Canadian effort,
particularly some RAD (Rules for Archival Description)
definitions of the nature of the fonds, but there is no serious challenge to
its provenance-enhancing intentions and contextualizing purposes.
60 The
two best articles on the substance of graduate education are Terry Eastwood,
"Nurturing Archival Education in the University," American
Archivist 51 (Summer 1988), pp. 228-52; and Nesmith, "Hugh Taylor's
Contextual Idea for Archives and the Foundation of Graduate Education in
Archival Studies," which outline the approaches at the University of
British Columbia and the University of Manitoba, respectively. For a general framework, see Association of
Canadian Archivists, Guidelines for the Development of a Two-Year Curriculum
for a Master of Archival Studies (Ottawa, 1990).
61 The
European re-examination of provenance is often in the context of the electronic
record or the voluminous records of large organizations. For examples, see Claes Granström,
"Will Archival Theory Be Sufficient in the Future?," pp. 159-67; and
Bruno Delmas, "Archival Science and Information Technologies," pp.
168-76, both in Angelika Menne-Haritz, ed., Information Handling in Offices
and Archives (München, 1993). The
same affirmation is made by many of the European authors in Bucci, Archival
Science on the Threshold; in Abukhanfusa and Sydbeck, The Principle of
Provenance; and in Judith A. Koucky, ed., Second European Conference on Archives:
Proceedings (Paris, 1989). The same
argument was well presented at the Montreal ICA by Angelika Menne-Haritz,
"Archival Education: Meeting the Needs of Society in the Twenty-First
Century," plenary address offprint, XII International Congress on Archives
(Montreal, 1992), especially pp. 8-11.
62 The
best exposition of the Australian Series System (including a significant
reconceptualization and updating of Scott's ideas) is in Piggott and McKemmish,
The Records Continuum, especially the essays by Sue McKemmish and Chris
Hurley. For his own statement, see
Scott, "The Record Group Concept," pp. 493-504; and his five-part
series, with various co-authors: "Archives and Administrative Change -- Some
Methods and Approaches," Archives and Manuscripts 7 (August 1978),
pp. 115-27; 7 (April 1979), pp. 151-65; 7 (May 1980), pp. 41-54; 8 (December 1980), pp. 51-69; and 9
(September 1981), pp. 3-17. Scott's
breakthrough was the product of a lively debate within the Commonwealth
Archives Office (now Australian Archives), with Ian Maclean, the first
Commonwealth Archivist, also having a very significant role, especially in
terms of taking the series concept out of the archival cloisters and applying
it to current records in agencies, and thus helping to mend the Schellenbergian
split between records managers and archivists, and between "current"
records and "old" archives.
Yet it was Scott who primarily articulated the concept in theoretical
writing for the broader profession.
63 See
Chris Hurley, "What, If Anything, Is A Function," Archives and
Manuscripts 21 (November 1993), pp. 208-20; and his "Ambient
Functions: Abandoned Children to Zoos," Archivaria 40 (Fall 1995),
pp. 21-39.
64 The
best summary of the fonds concept is by one of the leading archival thinkers of
Europe: see Michel Duchein, "Theoretical Principles and Practical Problems
of Respect des fonds in Archival Science," Archivaria 16
(Summer 1983), pp. 64-82 (originally 1977).
For these maximalist-minimalist distinctions, see Cook, "Concept of
the Archival Fonds," pp. 54-57.
65 Indeed,
the rethinking of descriptive paradigms for archives in a postcustodial
framework by North Americans is explicitly due to Scott's inspiration: see Max J. Evans, "Authority Control:
An Alternative to the Record Group Concept," American Archivist 49
(Summer 1986), pp. 251-53, 256, 259, and passim; Bearman and Lytle,
"Power of the Principle of Provenance," p. 20; and Cook,
"Concept of the Archival Fonds," pp. 52, 67-68. Scott's large influence in his own country
helps explain the Australian leadership in much postcustodial thinking,
especially regarding revitalized records management and descriptive
practice. For postcustodial thinking
generally, and references to other postcustodial work, see Cook,
"Electronic Records, Paper Minds: The Revolution in Information Management
and Archives in the Postcustodial and Postmodernist Era."
66 For
the Australian interpretation and implementation of the records continuum
instead of the life cycle approach, see many of the authors (especially Frank
Upward) in McKemmish and Piggott, Records Continuum. For France, and its long-standing
"pré-archivage" work within the government ministries which also
reflects the continuum concept, see Jean Favier, ed., La Pratique
archivistique française (Paris, 1993).
The Canadian case has been stated in Atherton, "From Life Cycle to
Continuum."
67 McKemmish
and Upward, Archival Documents, pp. 1, 22, and passim.
68 Glenda
Acland, "Managing the Record Rather Than the Relic," pp. 57-63. She has been one of the key movers towards
an accountability framework; see her
testimony to government bodies cited in McKemmish and Upward, Archival
Documents, pp. 13-15.
69 See
the revealing title of Acland's "Archivist -- Keeper, Undertaker or
Auditor?," in which she argues for the last role.
70 Upward
and McKemmish, "Somewhere Beyond Custody," pp. 145-46, and Frank
Upward in Archival Documents, p. 43.
For an interesting attempt to break out of this mode, see Sue McKemmish,
"Evidence of Me," Archives and Manuscripts 24 (May 1996),
pp. 28-45.
71 Regarding
the latter, a great number of strategies and practices have evolved, or at
least are being recommended to archivists, to deal with electronic records,
although there is no space to discuss them in this essay devoted to conceptual
discourse rather than practical methodologies--which is not to say that those
methodologies do not generate their own controversies, such as whether archives
need acquire physically all electronic records in order to ensure their
authenticity or the appropriate linkage of creator metadata and archival
contextualized authority files. The
best single source for strategic approaches to electronic records remains
Margaret Hedstrom, ed., Electronic Records Management Program Strategies
(Pittsburgh, 1993), which offers case studies, with analyses of critical
factors of success and failure, of electronic records programmes at
international (2), national (4), state (4), and university (1) levels, with an
overall assessment, and an extensive (59 pages) annotated bibliography compiled
by Richard Cox for readers to continue their explorations. See also David Bearman, "Archival
Strategies," paper discussed at the SAA 1994 conference, and forthcoming
in the American Archivist.
72 For
a sample, see David Bearman's works cited throughout these notes; ten of his
essays are now collected into David Bearman, Electronic Evidence: Srategies
for Managing Records in Contemporary Organizations (Pittsburgh, 1994); and
a wide range of his commentary and analysis appears throughout all the issues
of Archives and Museum Informatics, which he edits. The other principal American voice has been
Margaret Hedstrom: see her
ground-breaking SAA manual, Archives and Manuscripts: Machine-Readable Records (Chicago,
1984); and more recently "Understanding Electronic Incunabula: A Framework
for Research on Electronic Records," American Archivist 54 (Summer
1991), pp. 334-54; "Descriptive Practices for Electronic Records: Deciding
What is Essential and Imagining What is Possible," Archivaria 36
(Autumn 1993), 53-62; and with David Bearman, "Reinventing Archives for
Electronic Records: Alternative Service Delivery Options," in Hedstrom, Electronic
Records Management, pp. 82-98. An
early pioneer for electronic archiving was also American: Charles M. Dollar;
see his "Appraising Machine-Readable Records," (originally 1978), in
Daniels and Walch, Modern Archives Reader, pp. 71-79; and, more
recently, Archival Theory and Information Technologies: The Impact of
Information Technologies on Archival Principles and Methods (Macerata,
Italy, 1992); and "Archival Theory and Practices and Informatics. Some
Considerations," in Bucci, Archival Science on the Threshold, pp.
311-28. An early Canadian voice was
Harold Naugler, The Archival Appraisal of Machine-Readable Records: A RAMP
Study With Guidelines (Paris, 1984).
73 Cook,
"Easy to Byte, Harder to Chew: The Second Generation of Electronic Records
Archives," pp. 203-8.
74 For
a stimulating discussion, see Sue McKemmish, "Are Records Ever Actual?,"
in McKemmish and Piggott, The Records Continuum, pp. 187-203.
75 This
is the provocative argument of David Bearman and Margaret Hedstrom in
"Reinventing Archives for Electronic Records," pp. 82-98, especially
p. 97. Bearman's other key articles on strategic reorientation, differing
tactics suitable for varying organizational cultures, and risk management is
"Archival Data Management to Achieve Organizational Accountability for
Electronic Records," in McKemmish and Upward, Archival Documents,
pp. 215-27; and his "Archival Strategies." For tactics addressing the
archivist's traditional functions and principles, see Dollar, Archival
Theory and Information Technologies, chapter four.
76 David
Bearman, "Multisensory Data and Its Management," in Cynthia Durance,
ed., Management of Recorded Information: Converging Disciplines
(München, 1990), p. 111; and "Archival Principles and the Electronic
Office," in Menne-Haritz, Information Handling, p. 193.
77 For
a more detailed critique of the biases of electronic records archiving as it
has been evolving, as well as an analysis of its strengths in affirming
archival relevance in protecting evidence in context, see Terry Cook, "The
Impact of David Bearman on Modern Archival Thinking: An Essay of Personal
Reflection and Critique," Archives and Museum Informatics 11
(1997), pp. 15-37. On the issue of
metadata and archival description, see Heather MacNeil, "Metadata
Strategies and Archival Description: Comparing Apples to Oranges," Archivaria
39 (Spring 1995), pp. 22-32; with the
countering case put by David Wallace, "Managing the Present: Metadata as
Archival Description," in Ibid., pp. 11-21; and originally by David
Bearman, notably in "Documenting Documentation," Archivaria 34
(Summer 1992), pp. 33-49. An attempted
reconciliation is David Bearman and Wendy Duff, "Grounding Archival
Description in the Functional Requirements for Evidence," Archivaria
41 (Spring 1996), pp. 275-303.
78 See
James M. O'Toole, "On the Idea of Permanence," American Archivist
52 (Winter 1989), pp. 10-25, for an important analysis. O'Toole is also exploring the continuing
relevance of the usually unquestioned concept of "uniqueness" in
archival theory and practice, in a forthcoming article.
79 Ketelaar,
"Archival Theory and the Dutch Manual," p. 36.
80 For
a discussion of these categories and related circumstances that permit an
archives to leave records with their creators for an open-ended period of time
without threat, see Terry Cook, "Leaving
Archival Electronic Records in Institutions: Policy and Monitoring
Arrangements at the National Archives of Canada," Archives and Museum
Informatics 9 (1995), pp. 141-49.
The footnotes in that article refer readers to the original 1990 debate,
subsequently published in David Bearman, ed., Archival Management of
Electronic Records (Pittsburgh, 1991), between David Bearman and Ken
Thibodeau, moderated by Margaret Hedstrom, on the advantages and disadvantages
of this strategy, a debate enjoined again by the contrasting conclusions of the
projects at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of British Columbia
on electronic records, and articulated anew by Luciana Duranti, Terry Eastwood,
Frank Upward, and Greg O'Shea and David Roberts, in a special theme issue of Archives
and Manuscripts 24 (November 1996).
81 For
a very provocative analysis of archivists' understanding and assumptions--many
being false and misleading--about "order" and about the nature of
their own work in establishing, re-creating, and defending original and other
"orders," as well as the first major postmodernist analysis of the
archival enterprise, see Brien Brothman, "Orders of Value: Probing the
Theoretical Terms of Archival Practice," Archivaria 32 (Summer
1991), pp. 78-100.
82 The
"postcustodial" term was first coined by F. Gerald Ham, in
"Archival Strategies for the Postcustodial Era," American
Archivist 44 (Summer 1981), pp. 207-16.
Ham broached many of the same ideas without the label even earlier, in
his ground-breaking "The Archival Edge," American Archivist 38
(January 1975), pp. 5-13, reprinted in Daniels and Walch, Modern Archives
Reader, pp. 326-35. While the term
"postcustodial" appears increasingly in archival literature, and
certainly implicitly lies behind much recent thinking around electronic
records and documentation strategies, its implications for the profession and
for actual daily practice by the archivist have not been directly or
systematically addressed by many writers--always with the already noted,
although somewhat different, exception of the work of Australians Ian Maclean
and Peter Scott decades ago and all of David Bearman's work. For more recent Australian discussion, see
McKemmish and Upward, "Somewhere Beyond Custody," especially pp. 137-41,
and their own essays and introductory pieces throughout their volume Archival
Documents, as well as Frank Upward's work on the records continuum (notes 8
and 20 above). For an example of
postcustodial appraisal thinking combined with actual work experience, see Greg
O'Shea, "The Medium is not the Message: Appraisal of Electronic Records by Australian Archives," Archives
and Manuscripts 22 (May 1994), pp. 68-93.
Outside Australia, for suggested practical applications for appraisal
and description of postcustodial thinking, see again Cook's "Mind Over
Matter: Towards a New Theory of Archival Appraisal," and "Concept of
the Archival Fonds;" and Hedstrom and Bearman, "Reinventing
Archives." The fullest explicitly
postcustodial analysis to date is Cook, "Electronic Records, Paper Minds:
The Revolution in Information Management and Archives in the Postcustodial and
Postmodernist Era." I wish to underline here that
"postcustodial" does not mean "non-custodial." The postcustodial paradigm is a overarching
conceptual mindset for the archivist applicable whether the records are
transferred to the custodial care of an archives or left for some time
in an distributed or non-custodial arrangement with their creator.
83 On
this point and explicitly criticizing "postcustodial" assumptions
that can, admittedly, be asserted too blithely as a radical break from the past
rather than a difference of emphasis, see the fine essay by Heather MacNeil,
"Archival Theory and Practice: Between Two Paradigms," pp.
16-17. She argues for good reasons that
the substance of archives centred around "the protection and safeguarding
of evidence" should be retained, even if our means and strategies to
accomplish this end may have to change fundamentally. That has been also my perspective for some time and in this
article.
84 Carruthers,
Book of Memory, p. 260.