Sir Hilary Jenkinson:
The duties of the Archivist …. are primary and
secondary. In the first place he has to take all possible
precautions for the safeguarding of his Archives and for
their custody…. Subject to the discharge of these duties
he has in the second place to provide to the best of his
ability for the needs of historians and other research
workers. But the position of primary and secondary
must not be reversed.
Archivists as Custodians
 The social challenge: limited transportation and
communications; hierarchical and structured society
 The archival challenge: responsibility for the physical
care and management of archival holdings;
responsibility to provide in-person access to a
privileged minority
 The result: access tools – including the walking finding
aid – for use by researchers who know what they are
seeking
Archivists as Interpreters
 The social challenge: political change, improved
transportation, increasing social mobility, and the rise of
the middle class, leading to the democratization of archives
 The archival challenge: to provide wider access
 The result: more elaborate descriptive tools, such as
catalogues and indexes
Archivists as Exhibitors … Entertainers?
 The 21st century challenge: the flexibility, speed, and
pervasiveness of the Internet
 The archival challenge: to provide increased electronic
access while protecting information, ensuring privacy, and
addressing issues of confidentiality
 The result: archivists are providing electronic access to
virtual representations of a vast array of archival materials;
at the same time, archivists are more and more concerned
with copyright, privacy, security
 The pressures of the real world divert archivists from what
“ought to be” to what “has to be”
 Which of Jenkinson’s priorities still stands?
The Eternal Quest for Money
 Funding for archival preservation and access
influences the priorities of archivists and archival
institutions
 Government grants can motivate, but how can archival
institutions develop the sustainability needed to keep
programs operational after the initial funding stream
ends?
 What happens if an institution does not maintain its
online finding aids and virtual exhibits?
 Sustainability of digital access tools is a significant
concern
A Changing Legal Environment
 Privacy requirements and information legislation
 Copyright, privacy, and publicity rights
 How do restrictions inhibit access?
 Will users of online resources know if they are looking at
selections?
 How will users find and use materials not available
electronically?
Archives and Society
 What if the people identified in archival materials object to
making information publicly available?
In British Columbia, aboriginal communities are increasingly
resisting efforts by the provincial museum and provincial
archives to include images of First Nations groups on online
databases, arguing that such images should not be publicly
available without their explicit permission
 What about the privacy not of records creators but of
records users?
Digitally accessible information resources such as online exhibits
or archival databases don’t just help us find information; they
also gather information about us, information which could be
shared with us or with others.
Clifford Lynch:
We’re confronting a new set of questions about what are we
comfortable having public. There’s public and there’s really
public. There’s a difference between things that are public
for inspection if you go down to the courthouse and do a lot
of digging around, as opposed to digital documents that
pop up on Google when you’re killing time plugging
people’s names into the search box.
Clifford Lynch, “Digital Collections, Digital Libraries, and the
Digitization of Cultural Heritage Information,” First Monday 7 (5), available
electronically at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_5/index.html)
 What are archival responsibilities in selecting
materials to make accessible electronically?
 Should archivists emphasise records rarely found, to
push the boundaries and increase understanding of
the diversity and complexity of society?
 Should archivists focus attention on those materials
that form the bulk of holdings, even if the result is
stereotyping and pigeonholing aspects of society?
Clifford Lynch:
We need to study the lines of demarcation between
raw cultural heritage materials … and interpretation or
teaching, or presentations of these materials. This is a
boundary line that I don’t think we really have a very
clear understanding of. It gets to the historic mission
differences among museums, libraries and archives,
and the growing confusion about those distinctions in
the digital world; it involves the historical and perhaps
changing roles of scholars, teachers, curators, and
librarians.
Clifford Lynch, “Digital Collections, Digital Libraries, and the
Digitization of Cultural Heritage Information,” First Monday 7 (5), available
electronically at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_5/index.html)
21st Century Realities
 Archivists need to consider the long-term sustainability of
access initiatives and other archival endeavours
Creating virtual exhibits may offer short-term interest,
entertainment, or awareness-raising, but how can archivists
incorporate those efforts into a longer vision for increased access
to information from and about holdings?
 Archivists need to raise awareness of the legal and financial
constraints on access programmes
Archivists are increasingly aware of the need to be transparent in
appraisal decisions; archivists also need to be transparent in
decisions to digitize and provide online access to some resources
and not others. The public needs to understand more not only
about what archivists do but also about why and how they do it
 Archivists need to acknowledge that access decisions are
appraisal decisions
In an Internet world, people increasingly think that if they
can’t find it online, it doesn’t exist. Archivists need to let
people know that records and information may in fact exist,
but not in digitized form, and that a whole world of
information and archives is still available outside of Google
and Yahoo.
Custodians, Interpreters, Entertainers?
A balancing act, but without the records there is nothing to
interpret, no way to entertain …