“BUT, OH, HOW OUR DADDY HAS CHANGED!”
ARCHIVAL ENTERPRISE IN THE TRANSMISSION
AND PRESERVATION OF KNOWLEDGE
by
David B. Gracy II
Governor Bill Daniel Professor in Archival Enterprise
School of Information
University of Texas at Austin
Early in the career of New Mexico artist Peter Hurd, two brothers from
a poor, Hispanic family begged him to paint a portrait of their father. All
three of the men had worked for Hurd; this was something special Pete could
do for them; and so he invited them to bring their father to his studio. They
couldn’t. He was dead. That was the reason they wanted Pete to paint a
picture of him. OK, bring me a photograph, Pete offered. They couldn’t do
that either. One brother had had a small photograph that he carried in his
billfold, but after learning that his girlfriend had jilted him, in a rage he had
thrown the wallet into the Hondo River. It and the photograph were long
gone. With neither the man nor a photograph, Hurd didn’t see how he could
paint a portrait. But Pete, each brother begged and pled (Hurd mimicked the
accents, speech, and emotion of the two brothers impeccably as he told me the
story during an oral history interview in the late 1960s, giving his telling a
depth mine cannot begin to match)—but Pete, each brother begged and pled,
you knew our father; our family wants a picture to remember him by; and you
paint pictures of people. Please! Well, as he painted, would they help him
recall their father’s features? Oh, yes, they would. So it was agreed.
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Hurd began by drawing a standard oval for the face, then sprinkled it
with dark pock marks he recalled the weathered father having. Didn’t the
father usually wear a blue shirt, Pete asked, and sometimes a red bandana?
Si! Good, adding these would save having to include personal features of the
neck. As brush stroke followed brush stroke, the brothers sat in a far corner
of the studio sharing a jug of tequila. As the jug emptied, their memories
blurred. Thrown ever more on his own recollections, Pete found himself
giving his subject a rather generic potato nose, a heavy mustache to cover the
mouth, dark eyebrows over basic shoe-button eyes, and a head of heavy black
hair obscuring the ears.
Done at last, Pete signaled to the brothers to come see. By then
unsteady but euphoric, the brothers stared at the canvas for a moment in
silence. Then in unison they exclaimed: “Pete, oh, Pete, that’s our daddy.
That’s our daddy all right. But, oh! how our daddy has changed!”
The emotion driving the creation of this record of a life and the energy
the three men in the studio invested in generating a document through which
to continue to know the father as personally, faithfully, and fully as they were
capable under the circumstances makes the answer to the question of how we
keep knowing through archives, including pictorial reminiscences as this
one—makes the answer to the question of how we keep knowing through
archives fundamental to the existence of humanity itself.
While, as was the case with the portrait, archival enterprise may play
little part in the creation of what becomes archives, its role in how we keep
knowing through archives is not only significant but likely formative. By
“archival enterprise” I mean the dynamic delivery of the archival service to
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society. The archival service consists of providing the inexhaustible well of
source material from which society’s memory is fashioned and continually
reviewed, elaborated, and debated. On the surface, this memory is knowledge
of historical developments from genealogical lines to the circumstances and
trail of presidential decisions, and all of human activity in between. More
immediately, this memory provides for an efficiency in the administration of
affairs by making possible construction of historical context to inform
decisions. At a deeper level, it undergirds continuity in society from
generation to generation.
To play their role, archivists need answers to two fundamental
questions. What does society in all of its dimensions want to continue to
know of and from former periods, events, and figures, and for what purposes?
Contributing to the answer for the archivist are responses to the related
questions of: What does contemporary society want successive generations to
be able to know of it? And, within what parameters does society allow and
provide for the archivist to function? Input comes from a variety of voices,
including those of employers and users of archives such as historians,
philosophers, and genealogists, and from the collective voice expressed
through legislative mandate.
As one must expect, the question has been answered differently in
different times. In the straightened economic period of the Great Depression,
for example, the interests of society, and correspondingly of historians,
focused on economic motivations and solutions to social problems.
Archivists responded by working to increase the knowledge and availability
of the kinds of documentation that users of archives sought. When history
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was defined as events of long ago, then acquiring old documentation met the
need. Neglected was that of more recent origin which, in the march of time,
any thoughtful person must have realized would achieve a hallowed age. In
our time, for another example, in light of the litigiousness of our society,
central to our approach to documentation is consideration of it not just as
potential historical source, but also as evidence.
Finally, at the outset, I need to observe that though from a distance
archivists share a mindset and play a singular role in how society keeps
knowing, within our ranks, variations obtain that are grounded in the setting
in which we work. Archivists in academic environments that prize the
freedom of exploratory research enjoy an independence in promoting the
continuing of knowing that colleagues laboring in private organizations
whose archives undergird competitive advantage cannot. The remarks that
follow express the general archival outlook which, as reflected in the Code of
Ethics of Archivists adopted by our Society of American Archivists, radiates
the continuation of knowing as a raison d’être.
DEFINING “THE RECORD”
Of the few basic questions to which archivists need answers in order to
be able to deliver the archival service to society, the most immediate and
important is defining what is “the record,” that is, the object that archivists
work to preserve for contemporary use and to transmit to successors for
subsequent generations of users. Put bluntly, what are archives and with
whom does the authority lie both to say that something is archives and if it is,
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that it will go into an archival repository to be available for continuing
knowing?
As archivists define the term in 2008, archives at their most
fundamental are bodies of papers and records including some or all of
communications as letters and emails, formal arrangements as contracts,
personal treasures as photographs and diaries, acquired contemporary items of
information as clippings and posters, financial accounts as income tax filings
and significant receipts—bodies of papers and records of a person or
organization (a “creator,” archivists call the entity). More specifically,
archives are that portion of the documentary record of the creator judged to
have a value extending beyond that of satisfying the purpose or matter in the
conduct of which and for the purposes of which they were created. That
value lies in the fact that archives are a particular kind of information—
records information—information generated in the conduct of affairs for the
purposes of either or both facilitating and/or documenting those affairs.
Throughout all of the past two-hundred-plus years—the period we
define as being that of modern archival practice—the term “archives” has not
been used as broadly as it is in 2008. For the first half of the period, the term
archives designated the records of government. Earlier in Europe than in
America, the term was expanded to designate additionally the records of nongovernmental organizations. Since 1965 and publication of T. R.
Schellenberg’s Management of Archives, the definition been has expanded to
its fullest breadth to designate also the papers of individuals. For me,
archives are that portion of the records information of a creator—any creator,
whether individual (any one of you) or organization (government agency as
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the Office of the Governor, or business as the Union Pacific Railroad, or
entity as the Episcopal Church)—judged to have enduring value. Of course,
the term further denotes buildings that house and the institutions that manage
these archives, as well as the total of holdings of the archival institution in the
archives building. So the archives of Texas can mean at one time any or all
of: the records of an agency of government, the total of historical records of
state government, the department of state government responsible for
performing the archival function, and/or the edifice east of the capitol where
these records are kept. Good luck! But at base, and the way you should first
think of it, archives are that portion of the records information of a creator
judged to have enduring value.
Normally for archivists working in collecting archives, by which I
mean archival repositories that seek and acquire the papers of individuals and
the records of organizations from outside of the institution of which the
archival repository is a component—normally the decision of what archives
(papers or records) should have a place in the repository is that of the
archivist. It is so with the Modern Politics Archives of the Cushing Library
here at A & M, which acquires the papers of politicians, as former Texas
House Speaker Billy Clayton, who had an association with the university
alright, but whose papers as House Speaker were not created in the conduct of
administrative functions of the university. The papers were not obtained for
the purpose of documenting the history of the university.
Archivists working in administrative archives—repositories charged to
handle the records of the organization of which the archives is a part, as the
Texas State Archives is responsible for the archival record of state
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government—archivists working in administrative archives decide what
documentation will or will not go into the archival repository only within
parameters established by policy makers at the highest level of responsibility
for the organization. In Texas, for example, a special law gives the governor
the right to place the administrative records of the governor’s office, the
highest office of state government, not only outside of the Texas State
Archives, which until passage of the law was designated as the repository for
state government records of enduring value, but also outside of the
jurisdiction of the State of Texas itself, as long as the records are housed
within the geographical boundaries of the state.
The administrative archives archivist, in other words, normally
possesses less authority to designate what is “the record” than his or her
counterpart in a collecting archives enjoys. For both, though, delivery of the
archival service to society, empowering our ability to know richly, depends at
the beginning from the authority to determine what is the record.
WHAT DOES SOCIETY WANT TO CONTINUE TO KNOW
AND FOR WHAT PURPOSES?
In its breadth, what people want to know is unbounded—as extensive,
broad and narrow, deep and shallow—as there are people wanting to know
something, information about which or of which can be found in archives.
Though documentation of genealogical descent, land ownership, medical
history, legislative history, and political, economic, and social history among
others commonly comes to mind, University of Georgia Archivist Gilbert
Head tells of the occasion when a person came into the archives and asked
simply to see the oldest old thing he had. A map, a letter, a diary? Gilbert
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asked in an effort to determine what sort of document would best serve the
purpose. Just really old, came the reply. Gilbert fetched a document
centuries old—a map as I recall—and laid it before the visitor. After studying
the document closely, the person stood erect, looked Gilbert in the eye, and
remarked: “Uh huh, that’s old,” and walked out.
To know the course of affairs, History broadly defined (knowledge of
people, events, periods) is the motivation most would offer as the reason it is
important to have archives to preserve and transmit knowledge. Beyond
knowing for knowing’s sake, knowing so as to belong—to be part of
something larger than one’s self—and to appreciate one’s place in time by
knowing one’s roots, brings many to archives. Knowing so as to be able to
create a track record motivates the members of groups who visit the Texas
State Archives in association with legislative sessions for the purpose of
justifying why historically it is time for their groups’ causes to receive
attention. Patriotic motives drive the keeping of archives, especially the
establishment of archives by organizations that reach anniversaries and
discover that to celebrate the occasions, they need archives to document the
accomplishments they have realized since the beginning point. Reference to
archives to inform contemporary decisions in organizations forms the
administrative class of motives for keeping, preserving, and transmitting
archives. Study of its archives helped the Coca Cola Company turn Sprite
from an earlier failed drink into one of its staple products. Symbolism is the
fourth class of motivations for having and using archives. Newspaper
accounts of the opening in 1998 of the archives of the Inquisition quoted
scholars calling the act a symbol of the Vatican “turning the page” in an effort
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to clean its image. Protection is a motive for keeping and using archives.
The records of county school superintendents in Texas were used extensively
in the 1950s and 1960s by individuals born before Texas required registration
of births who, upon reaching the age of eligibility for social security, needed
some government record to document their age. Finally, in a democratic
society, archives undergird accountability of governments and organizations
to their constituents.1
THE ROLE OF ARCHIVAL ENTERPRISE
IN THE PRESERVATION AND TRANSMISSION OF KNOWLEDGE
Against the high-minded reasons society wants to have archives, the
stereotypes people reference from movies and the media when they think of
archivists and archives could lead one to conclude that the basic contribution
of archivists to the continuation of knowing is simply that of keeping—
keeping records—and doing it with a minimum of exuberance, given the
1
For more than forty years, the Public Information Act in Texas has
asserted the right of citizens to have access to records of government. But the
exceptions have affected access to archives. Specifically the exception that
documents bearing the signature of a physician are closed (the rationale being
to protect personal information) kept from the public access to muster rolls of
troops raised for the Spanish-American War, though the physician’s signature
only certified that the men were fit for duty—nothing more specific than that.
In this case, enactment regarding information society wanted to withhold
from being known prohibited the archivist from being able to facilitate
knowing information that in documents lacking the signature was not a matter
of privacy and thus would have been legally available. Once again, in the
government environment, the archivist’s role in facilitating knowing is
circumscribed by a higher authority.
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number of times one hears archives described as “dusty.” That there is more
to it than esoteric technical matters seems to confound people. Typical is the
conversation of one archivist friend who was asked what he did by a nextdoor neighbor he saw infrequently. Larry replied that he was an archivist.
Seeing that telltale blank look that escorts saying one is an archivist, Larry
explained that his job as an archivist for the state was to determine which
government records had enduring value, secure them into the archives,
arrange and describe them to facilitate their use, and then assist people in
finding in them the information they sought. Radiating this new knowledge,
the neighbor brightened and blurted out: “My, you must have to get up
awfully early to do that!” While keeping may be the most obvious, and
certainly is important, anyone can keep—oversee storage. The archivist’s
real and most substantive contributions lie elsewhere.
What you have seen so far is, first, that the documentation in bodies of
papers and records that become archives is created to accomplish
contemporary business of the creator, in other words is not brought into
existence to be history. This is what makes archives the bedrock source that
they are for any kind or sort of historical inquiry. Second, as archives, the
documentation is searched for details of events, decisions, personalities, and
periods past for myriad purposes; use is not confined to any one or a few
kinds of historical study. These two facts being true, the job of the
contemporary archivist must be to identify, secure, prepare for use, and
facilitate use of archives so that the ability of every user (present and future)
to know from the archives is facilitated equally and none is impaired by
actions taken to support the opportunity of others. Preserving that
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characteristic of association with the events of which the records were a part
and facilitating equal access (which requires transmission of that
characteristic into the future) are the challenge of the archivist.
In regard to preservation and transmission in the pursuit of continuing
to know, archivists face the challenge particularly in three phases of their
work: appraisal (determining that portion of the documentary record that has
enduring value), organizing, or in the archivist’s vocabulary, arrangement of
the documentation taken into archival repositories, and taking action to extend
its life—preservation in the profession’s vocabulary.
APPRAISAL
Many would argue rightly that in determining what portions of the
entire documentary record have enduring value and are appropriate for
preservation and transmission, archivists have their greatest affect on how we
continue to know. Whatever archivists do not select will never be available.
Recognizing that they have no crystal ball empowering them with certainty in
regard to what portions of the documentary record will be useful into the
future, in the best of all possible worlds, archivists would exert as light a
touch as possible in making such life or death decisions. But the volume of
hardcopy documentary record created in the twentieth century, matched with
inadequate space in which to store it has forced the need for selection. That
being true, archivists have sought to structure their conduct of appraisal in as
formulaic a manner as possible in order to minimize the likelihood of
personal preference pressuring professional judgment.
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Seeing the problem, some have argued to me that the simplest solution
is to leave the decision to the next generation. After all, it will have insight
we lack. But, I answer, we are the next generation, and we have the problem
here and now of too great a quantity to fit into too small a space. Decisions
must be made, and no group is more informed regarding the issues and
considerations than archivists. The job is ours.
The first solution to the problem Hilary Jenkinson of the Public Record
Office in Great Britain offered in 1922 in his Manual of Archive
Administration. Whatever the creator of the record kept because it continued
to have potential use for the creator in conducting affairs of the creator was
that which should survive was the elegantly simple solution Jenkinson
proposed. His rationale, born of conflict between his historical training in
medieval history for which every document that survived opened a window
and the reality that the conduct of World War I had generated records in a
volume and many of a facilitative character such that preservation of them all
was neither practical nor desirable, saved the archivist from making any
choice. If the creator ever allowed anticipated use for historical study to
influence what was kept, then the creator’s decision was void. Jenkinson’s
solution continues to anchor one side of the continuing and animated debate
over appraisal methodology. Survival-of-the-Fittest this approach has been
styled.
American archivists argued the reverse. The volume of government
records they confronted upon creation of the National Archives of the United
States in the mid 1930s, a century and a half after the founding of the country,
was staggering. The three million cubic feet were enough that, placed two
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boxes deep on shelves fourteen feet high, they would have covered more than
seventeen football fields. American archivists could not indulge the luxury of
a hands-off approach. They developed an elaborate range of factors to
consider in reaching appraisal decisions, including such seemingly straight
forward categories as: age, time span, representativeness, uniqueness, place
in the records-making process, and intrinsic value. In the end, though,
choices were made as much, if not more, on their best understanding of needs
and likely uses by historians as themselves. The criteria in fact could back
arguments both to destroy and to preserve, since important ones were paired,
as: completeness and concentration (the extent to which all the records were
present as against how much significant information was contained in the
volume of paper); evidential value and informational value (the depth of
evidence of administrative functioning of the creator in relation to the
richness of information on matters other than departmental management).
Because microfilm provided the capability of capturing in considerably less
physical space records that in their original likely would not have been
accommodated, they did utilize contemporary technology to avoid as much
disposal decision as they could. In the end, though, their judgment about the
records as research resources left the decision being one primarily of personal
perception informed by as many considerations as could be applied. Valuein-Use this approach has been styled.
The Survival-of-the-Fittest and the Value-in-Use approaches shared
one important assumption—that the archival record was the documentation
which had survived, however it occurred. The assumption fit the confinement
of administrative archival operations for which both were shaped. For
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collecting archives which gathered the papers of individuals and records of
organizations from outside the institution of which the archives was a part, the
Value-in-Use approach had led to a distinct emphasis on papers of prominent
figures (men especially) and commonly studied institutions, such as political
parties and churches. Missing from their shelves, collecting archivists came
to realize, was documentary record of entire communities of activity and
categories of people.
The documentation movement of the 1980s sought to correct that—to
expand and enrich the social coverage of the archival record. The
documentation strategists set out to document, as the term was and is, peoples
and communities in domains of society previously sparsely represented in
archival repositories. Domains of society they defined in a number of
different ways, including by geography (Western New York State), by
movement (evangelical religion), and by group (physicists). Since the
volume of archives produced by all the creators within a domain multiplied
by times the quantity an archival repository faced when proceeding one body
of records at a time, the documentation strategists accepted that selection had
to be made. To be systematic about it, they seized on the concept of
representativeness. Within the defined community, they would select for
accession into their archival repositories the archives of individual men,
women, institutions, and organizations that most fully documented the type of
which they were deemed to be good examples. Study of the historical
development of the community grounded this representativeness. To keep the
choices they had to make from becoming any more severe than necessary,
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they sought to arrange a consortium of archives for each domain in order to
accommodate more of the volume.
Documentation strategists looked beyond the traditional in terms not
only of communities but also of documentation. Helen Samuels in Varsity
Letters (1992), applying documentation strategy to a single large institution, a
university in her case, asserted that rather than starting the appraisal process
with records that existed as a result of the functioning of the institution, the
archivist should study the history and purposes of the institution sufficiently
to identify the basic functions of the organization, noting especially those that
produced few, if any, traditional records. In the case of the university, such
functions included, for example, instruction and conducting research. The
documentation produced by researchers and by teachers and students is (in
large measure) personal to the individuals involved, rather than being
administrative records of the institution. Where functions as these were
found, she argued, the archivist should actively seek to document the activity
in their realms by conducting oral history interviews and/or collecting
documentation that lay outside of the regular administrative channels. This,
along with the records obtained through the normal channels, would result in
a more representative documentary record of the institution. Functional
analysis this approach was styled.
In a subsequent stage of appraisal, all bodies of archives accessioned
into the archival repository would undergo traditional value-in-use appraisal
to ensure that they possessed a sufficiency of information for the space they
consumed. If the first appraisal were more formula driven, the second one
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engaged the archivists’ unique knowledge of the records needs and desires of
each of the creators and users built up through long contact with each group.
When the functional analysis elaboration of the documentation
strategists was applied in the government realm, where the volume of
hardcopy records continued to mushroom, the approach reached the bazaar
end that selection of records for archival preservation could be made without
ever looking at the records themselves. By identifying the functions of
government and the principal concerns of society, under the theory of
Macroappraisal, the archivist could locate the points within government
where the two met and find there those records out of the total, uncontainable
mass the securing of which would yield an adequately representative
selection.
In theory, the role of the archivist in determining the archives that
belonged in an archival repository had become one of selection by theory
rather than by inspection. Inherent in all of the appraisal formulae since
Jenkinson was the assumption that selection was necessary, and in all since
the value-in-use adherents that representativeness was the best the archivist
could hope to do in documenting the domain of society which the archivist’s
repository served. The search continues for formulae which, as fully as
possible, accept that choices must be made, which remove from the appraisal
decision all the personal bias possible, which account for all of the records in
the volume which exceeds both space to house them and manpower to inspect
them all, and which provide a system that achieves as even-handed and
defensible a selection as possible.
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Upon reflection, you will note that none of these considerations
specifies that the purpose of appraisal is to provide documentation to support
historical research. The goal of the contemporary archivist and his or her
predecessor of at least a generation is and has been to preserve evidence of the
functioning of creators—individuals, institutions, and organizations within
society. When Illinois State Archivist Margaret Cross Norton articulated this
for the first time in 1929, she was received with stony silence. Appraised as
of the greatest value in collecting archives some eighty years ago were caches
of documents anticipated to be sought by users in order to write history. The
documentary record was searched more for its informational value—the
content of documents for use in historical writing—than for its evidential
value—how it documented its creator. As the emphasis has changed, so the
work of appraisal has developed a more formulaic patina overlaying the
continuing utilization of value-in-use considerations at the individual archives
level. And as long as value-in-use considerations are applied, archivists will
continue to struggle with the challenge of minimizing personal preference
while engaging their best professional judgment in determining the
documentation that, in light of their decision, will and will not be available for
those wanting to continue to know.
In the electronic environment, by comparison with that of paper, the
minimal cost of storage and the minimal physical space required for servers
on which to maintain the documentation suggest that we can save everything
and eliminate the need for appraisal. After all, the computer can find in
fractions of a second, say among the 40 million emails of the Clinton White
House, what could take considerably longer when working through hardcopy
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files of that volume of memos, directives, drafts of reports and position
papers, and so on. Be that as it may, in the electronic environment appraisal
may be the least challenging work facing the archivist. Maintaining the
functionality, and thus authenticity, of electronic records through time
presents challenges in organization and preservation the resolutions of which
will affect materially how we continue to keep knowing through records
information.
ARRANGMENT
In organization of archives—“arrangement” in the archivist’s
vocabulary—the archivist strives to harmonize respect for the salient
character of archives as the documentary record of the creator, and more than
that, as an artifact of the creator, with the need for a uniformity in the
approach to arrangement and subsequent description of both the arrangement
and the content.
Two fundamental tenets guide the work. First is the principle of
respect des fonds which charges the archivist to respect the integrity of (that
is, to keep separate) each body of archives—for example, the papers of each
of you. Though the papers of each of you document the common experience
of this conference, each of you contextualizes it differently in light of your
own life, work, and experience. Those differences, not to mention the full
breadth of your life, exist only as your archives is preserved as the product
and reflection of its creator. This principle was established in 1841 in
reaction to the problems that arose from treating each document received by
the archival repository, no matter its creator, as the basic unit of archives and
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to organization of the individual documents following the principle of
pertinence, that is in regard to the subject (rarely is there just one in, say, a
letter) to which the content of the document pertained. Second is the
principle of provenance or, as many call it, original order. Established in the
1880s, this principle commands that the organization of the documents within
a body of archives—the arrangement fashioned and used by the creator—be
retained.
As you well know, the date something first occurs and the date after
which its application becomes common can be years or decades apart.
Uniform adoption of original order took a half century in the Texas State
Archives. In putting people to work during the Depression organizing bodies
of archives, the state archives employed chronology, simpler even than
pertinence because it requires no analysis of content. For the Nacogdoches
Archives, documentation of administration of the farthest northeastern flank
of the Spanish empire, abandoning original order produced one salient
benefit—preservation. Absent knowledge of the date of any event occurring
between 1736 and 1836, the user had only a single strategy for searching the
records—dive in at whatever date seemed likely according to the subject of
inquiry and begin wading backward and forward in time hoping to strike the
information sought. Hardly anyone used the records. A consequence happy
for extending the life of the documentation, this thwarted the purpose for
which the records were kept at all—use. The circumstance points up starkly
one of the archivist’s greatest challenges in preservation and transmission of
knowledge in hardcopy, which is the conflict between use which contributes,
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however slowly, to deterioration, and preservation, a principal pillar of which
is reducing handling.
For records, unlike the Nacogdoches Archives, that arrive at the
archival repository in disarray, the archivist, as you by now anticipate—the
archivist strives to provide an order as reflective as possible of the life, work,
and actual filing system of the creator. Standard in this endeavor, the
archivist studies the life and activity of the creator, immersing himself or
herself in the mind that shaped the archives so as to fashion an organization
that orders the documentation effectively relative to the matters with which
the creator dealt. So it happened after the staff of the United Textile Workers
of America Southern Regional Office in Memphis mentally transferred the
enthusiasm I expressed for the excellent organization in which I found the
records in the file drawers—transferred it to the containers in which the
records were housed. Believing that my effervescence over the wonderful
transfile cases that functioned as individual file cabinet drawers, but more
importantly could be shipped as was to the archives, meant that somehow
they—the transfile cases—contributed meaningfully to the good organization
of the files in them, the staff in packing the records to travel to the Southern
Labor Archives in Atlanta unceremoniously dumped the records into other
containers for the trip and saved the transfile cases to reuse. We spent a year
ferreting out every hint of filing systems in order to recover as fully as
possible the organization employed by the office, which arrangement
conveyed information of its own about the manner in which the office
conceived and conducted its work.
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Regarding organization of the documentary record in the electronic
environment, a significant contribution to knowing, that is, to finding desired
information among 40 million email messages, for example, is a means of
relating communications where threads departed from subject lines that
characterized only the original message and in which different authors used
different terminology for the same matter. Global searches alone do not
ameliorate the need for some structure.
PRESERVATION
Preservation presents a set of challenges all its own. As the term is
used in 2008, preservation at base means extending the life of the archival
material for the purposes for which it has been received into the archival
repository. In some cases, this means ensuring the continued existence of the
original document—for example, the Texas Declaration of Independence. In
others, it means maintaining only the information in the document (such as
through a microfilm copy) and disposing of the original.
As with archives, the definition and the work of preservation have not
been static during the past two hundred years. For Thomas Jefferson,
preservation meant publication. Jefferson sent off original documents to be
published and bothered little whether they ever were returned to him.
Published, they were preserved. Innumerable copies both ensured the
continuing existence of (the information in) the document and greatly reduced
the possibility of it being surreptitiously altered. Through most of the
twentieth century, with the volume of records skyrocketing, with the cost of
preparing print editions increasing, and with archival repositories being
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created in large numbers after World War II to support research—for these
reasons in the twentieth century, saving of the originals in an archival
repository replaced printing as the optimum means of preservation of the
archival record. In the electronic environment, one cannot help but wonder
whether Jefferson’s method may gain new life.
For twentieth century hardcopy archival records, the first preservation
decision to be made is whether the thing whose life is to be extended is the
information alone (in which case, a photographic copy—microfilm,
photocopy, or digital) would suffice, or is the information and its carrier
together, in which case emphasis falls particularly on the carrier. Preserving
the original of the 1876 constitution of Texas, for example, means attending
the paper, the ink, and the binding. Several circumstances necessitate
preservation of the information and its carrier: where any question exists
whether the item is a forgery, such as in the case of the questioned de la Peña
account of David Crockett’s death at the Alamo; where the item has great
public interest, such as the Texas Employment Commission form completed
by Kennedy Assassin Lee Harvey Oswald; and where destruction of the
documentation stands to call into question the motive for its destruction,
which occurred following supposedly routine disposal in Canada of records of
German war criminals living in the country.2
Terry Cook, “‘A Monumental Blunder’: The Destruction of Records on Nazi War
Criminals in Canada,” in Richard J. Cox and David A. Wallace, eds., Archives and the
Public Good: Accountability and Records in Modern Society (2002).
2
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Regarding documents judged to have intrinsic value, that is, to be
important in their original, archivists have tried to adopt the dictum of
conservators, those professionals equipped with a deep knowledge of
materials chemistry and dexterous hand skills who treat documents so that
they can be used without compromising either their integrity or their
continuing existence. The dictum is to do nothing that cannot be undone.
Though this sounds cut and dried, it is not always so, and treatment that
technically can be reversed can, at the same time, impede knowing. At mid
twentieth century, lamination was the new, well researched and highly
recommended solution for strengthening and protecting flat paper. By
melting acetate, the process sealed a document between two sheets of
Japanese tissue. One of the documents in the Texas State Archives so treated
was the brightly colored first rendering of the flag adopted in 1839 as the
national banner of the Republic of Texas and subsequently as our state flag.
Condition of the document did not warrant the treatment, but enthusiasm for
new solutions to on-going problems, the application of which might somehow
eliminate the problems, always can be seductive. In the case of the flag
drawing, its authorship, and thus authorship of the design of the flag, was and
continues to be disputed. Study of the chemistry of the colors might yield
information pointing to one or the other of the two claimants to authorship.
Removing the lamination requires chemical treatment. With no way to test
the effect of acetone on the colors to ensure that the treatment will not harm
them, possibly vital information lies not out of view, but out of reach.
Pursuing the best of preservation intentions, archivists can severely affect our
ability to know, specifically to know something new from something old.
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Where in the electronic environment, preservation may appear to be the
least of the archivists’ work, in fact it is among the most important. Essential
to the concept of records information is the relationship between the
document and the action of which it was a part. More difficult in the
electronic than in the paper environment is maintaining the functionality of
the record—that is, the look and feel of the context in which it existed—and
the operability of the record—that is, the ways in which the document could
be manipulated and used. Especially is this true for electronic documents
composed of text, image (still and moving), sound, and links to information
objects existing beyond the control of the document in question. If the
existence, or even the functioning, of any of the components is lost, the
“original” document no longer is what it was.
CONCLUSION
Well, the role of the archivist in preserving and transmitting records
information to serve the end that humans can keep knowing is, to say the
least, challenging. Competing prescriptions tug the archivist in different
directions. One calls on the archivist to manage each archives (documentary
record of a creator) in a manner that maintains the documentation as much as
possible as the creator generated, filed, and used it. The archives is an artifact
of a unique life. Sustaining the association of its components with the events
of the creator’s life in which the documents were generated provides a
common foundation for creators and users alike consulting the archives to
achieve knowing. Not a century ago, though, arrangement by pertinence or
chronology was the prescription. Another calls on the archivist to make
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choices as to value—deciding what should and should not, will and will not
become part of the documentary record of society. Still another calls the
archivist to hold himself or herself as far from affecting the context in which
the user finds the documentation as possible. Yet as humans maintain their
papers and records in greater or lesser conditions of order, to bring disordered
documentation to a level of arrangement that facilitates navigation between
and among the units of documentation of an archives requires the archivist to
make decisions he or she can make only by engaging his or her judgment—
best professional judgment to be sure, but his or her judgment nonetheless.
Inherent in the work we prescribe as appropriate or inappropriate,
ethical or unethical in the conduct of preservation and transmission of
knowledge lies another fundamental question, the answer to which is the most
important of all. It is this: in our role contributing to the continuation of
knowing, are we archivists mediators of meaning—middlemen or
middlewomen, servants of those who make meaning—or manufacturers of
meaning, substantially affecting the options open to those who come to the
documentation in our repositories so as to make their own meaning? How
much of the change in daddy is of our doing and how much of the doing of
others? The answer cannot help but be: some of both. Principally in
appraising and selecting archives and secondly in the methods employed to
preserve and transmit the singular resource of records information, archivists
occupy a position in which they both influence and strive as much as possible
to avoid skewing the meaning those who come to archives derive from using
the documentation. As great as the challenge may be in terms of the ethics of
any action, at least the ethics to which we ascribe are a matter of record and
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thus always available for reference. Where the problem looms largest is in
the mindset of the times in which we live—that unconscious outlook that
influences if not guides our decisions. The most important personal job of the
archivist must be always to ask these questions and then to try to get outside
of himself or herself to answer them from as detached a position as any
human could achieve.
If civilization is fashioned from the collective experience of human
beings, then archives, which document experience as it was gained, must be
principal to it. Playing a role supporting civilization can be daunting as well
as invigorating. Which is the greater of the two is the decision of each
archivist. But, as they say, somebody has to do it—has to play the role—for
without it, civilization ceases to exist. For me, there is no more significant
role to be played. In other words, if I were an artist, I would have done just as
Peter Hurd did when the two brothers came to him. I would paint away!
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