Archives & Identity:
‘The record is always in the process of
becoming’: yes but becoming what?
Louise Craven, TNA
September 2007
Agenda
•what is identity for user?
• ideas from cultural studies
•can other disciplines help? • endorsed by experience
•philosophical?
•postmodern?
• new developments in
archive theory
Sue McKemmish, ‘Are archives
ever actual?’
in
The Records Continuum, Sue McKemmish &
Michael Piggot (eds), Society of Australian
Archivists, Ancora, 1994
Definitions of identity
• consumption …
• the past …
• language…
• meaning …
• buildings …
• post colonialism …
• memory…
• place …
In Museums …
Andrew Newman, International Centre for
Cultural & Heritage Studies, …. 2006
… ‘identity constructed and re-constucted…
museums ‘facilitate identity construction’ ….
Postmodernist
interpretation….
New views!
Adherence to any shool of
thought from classicism to
modernism no longer
necessary!
one text … many
neanings….
Wheee!!
Apply to archival text
Many readings and many
meanings of a Will ?
• archivist
• biographer
• social historian
• family historian
• medical researcher
• land registry
• statistician
•local historian
Cultural texts
Relationship to text: ‘Structure of feeling’: from
Raymond Williams The Long Revolution, 1961
Online: relationship to graphic ? Like film: visual
and intimate: from Genre and Cinema, 1981
Comments from volunteer projects…..
Individual
experience…
Meaning…
Identity
The content becomes the context
Developments in
archival theory..
User focussed
What is provenance?
Professor Tom Nesmith…. postmodernist
view….American Archivist, 2007, 65, 1
The record and the
profession..
In the process of becoming…..?