1
Eric Ketelaar
The Archive as a Time Machine
The ICT-industry and public sector partnership: to promote the preservation and
accessibility of the European archival heritage
Closing Speech of the DLM-Forum 2002
Barcelona, 8 May 2002
Published in: Proceedings of the DLM-Forum 2002. @ccess and preservation of electronic
information: best practices and solutions. Barcelona, 6-8 May 2002, INSAR European
Archives News, Supplement VII (Luxembourg 2002) 576-581.
Abstract
Preserving and making accessible the archival heritage means: offering people the possibility to
create memories and to experience “the” past, by using the archive as a time machine To enable a
time travel back and forth, archivists and administrators in the public and the private sector, in cooperation with the ICT-industry, have to care about the future.
In our “age of access” record keeping systems and archival institutions are moving from providing
physical documents to providing access to the collective memory. In most organizations the
boundaries between records and non-record material, and those between personal and institutional
memory are blurring. This causes fragmentation and individualization of the organizational
memory. What the risks are of an organizational memory being dependent on what individuals
have stored on their laptops and PC’s, has been dramatically shown by the September 11
tragedies. Therefore organizational record keeping systems should ensure that individual and
organizational memories blend together.
Many of the artefacts that in the public perception are considered to be archives, function in
societal processes of accountability and evidence, just like records and archives-proper. Archives
by birth and archives by baptism are not opposites, but should be seen in a perspective view,
where both, at the foreground and in the background, serve to understand the past.
In the past two days we have been introduced to best practices and solutions for access
and preservation of electronic information. In a remarkable way the three rapporteurs
have summarized what has been achieved in the parallel sessions. The conclusions the
chairman just read, are a concise summary of the DLM Forum 2002 achievements. The
papers presented were a source of inspiration and will continue to stimulate and enrich
theory, methodology and practice. We likewise benefitted from the demonstrations in the
exhibition. We now depart to return to our research, development, and implementation in
different institutional, national and international settings. But before we adjourn I ask
your attention for the broader cultural framework of the partnership between the public
sector at all levels and the ICT-industry. A public-private partnership reinforced at this
DLM-Forum 2002, with the common goal of the preservation and accessibility of the
European archival heritage.
***
When, more than 30 years ago, I started as a civil servant in the ministry of Culture of
The Netherlands, I was taught that, before setting to work on a case, one had to ask for
the file to be retrieved from the archives. The file contained the minutes, memoranda,
record copies and other records of the history of the matter. It was a source of useful
precedents. The archive, the memory of the ministry, formed by generations of
predecessors, had to be consulted before one could undertake any new action. In those
2
days, one phoned to the records office downstairs and after a few minutes a messenger
or a records official knocked on the door, bringing the file.
But with the passage of time, in the seventies, the interval between the phone call to the
records office and the moment the file arrived on the civil servant’s desk, became longer
and longer. When I began my career, the norm was three to five minutes, lateron this
increased to ten, fifteen minutes, even more. It was then (but also later) that I found a
pattern which I will now present to you as “Ketelaar's law”. We measure the interval
between the request for the file from the archives and the moment the file can be
actually consulted. If that interval averages 20 minutes, then - according to Ketelaar's
law - civil servants start creating their personal file. By that I mean what the Germans
call Handakten - literally ‘handy records′, near at hand. In French they are called “papiers
personnels de fonction”, in English “working copies”, “semi-official records” or
“convenience files” - according to the Dictionary of Archival Terminology of the
International Council on Archives: “documents or copies thereof, papers and/or
publications kept by or for officials for their private or personal use, relating directly or
indirectly to their official duties.”
This definition makes it clear that in a semi-official file are assembled all sorts of papers
which are not regarded as official records. A semi-official file does not belong to the
official organisational memory, but to a twilight zone: it is neither strictly private, nor
strictly official.
But practice is more stubborn than doctrine. Some official records do not even end up in
the official file, but in the convenience file kept near at hand for use by the civil servant.
The official file is thus less complete and less authentic. In the convenience file official
records can be found among documents which archival theory does not consider official
records, and with documents that archivists and records managers regard as non-record
material. Creators and users of the file do not bother about the official definition of
records. The convenience file with its varied content is an extension of a person's
memory, forming the link between his or her memory and the organisational memory.
Sometimes the semi-official files have become so important that the official files can no
longer give an authentic and reliable representation of what happened. During the recent
investigation (commissioned by the Dutch government) of the 1995 tragedy in Srebenica
(where Dutch soldiers under UN command had the “mission impossible” to control a safe
area), researchers came across the semi-official convenience files on the whole case,
kept by a high-ranking official in the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This collection
yielded essential information not to be found elsewhere.
Daily practice in public and private organisations shows a blurring of the demarcation
between records and non-record material. Secondly, it shows a blurring of the
boundaries between personal and institutional memory. Ketelaar‘s law is an expression of
a widely felt need to have one‘s paper memory close at hand. Each of these factors
influences the creation, management, and use of the archival heritage of individuals,
communities, societies - indeed, the European archival heritage.
***
Everything is archive is a chapter in Je pense donc j’archive (I think, therefore I archive),
a recent book by a French archivist, Marie-Anne Chabin.1 What is an archive as perceived
by society? The popular perception is that archives are cold, musty, dusty places that
hold old records. Old records or, as in Webster’s dictionary, public records or historical
documents. But archives are not only history. As articles in the press clearly demonstrate
these days, society considers everything an archive – books, papers, artifacts, sound,
images, geological samples – that is serious and reliable information, put in storage to be
retrieved when you need it: a backup that saves what may be of value in the future.
Ask any search engine the term ‘archives’ and it will yield millions of hits (Google on 16
August, 2001 24,3 million, on 21 April 2002 33,2 million - in eight months an increase
with 37%!), most of which are no archives or records in the archivists’ terminology, but
3
which are an expression of the value society attaches to keeping account of its present
for its future.
Archiving, then, is not about history, but about the future. People want to get hold of
the future. For many people, Anthony Smith argues
the only guarantee of preservation of some form of identity is in the appeal to
‘posterity’, to the future generations. . . .only the appeal to a collective
posterity offers hope of deliverance from oblivion.2
This explains why in our archiving society we see the compulsive creation of private
records and archives, connecting the living history of individuals and families to national
history.3 Records and archives in a broad sense, just as in a convenience file. More
memory, than archive: the record as memory - “O! that record is lively in my soul”, to
quote Shakespeare (Twelfth Night, Vi,1, 256). Marie-Anne Chabin proposes to distinguish
archives by birth from archives by baptism, the former corresponding to records and
archives in the archivists’ terminology, the latter meaning those documents having no
primary record status or value, which have survived and are recognized as having a
value to retain a memory (or: memories).4
A remarkable program in the United States, sponsored by the National Endowment for
the Humanities and the White House Millennium Council, promotes the creation of public
archives by private people, connecting their history to that of America. Collective
memory, Susan Crane wrote, is ultimately
located not in sites but in individuals. All narratives, all sites, all texts remain
objects until they are ‘read’ or referred to by individuals thinking historically. 5
This fits in with the conception of the man who can be regarded as the father of the
notion of collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs. According to Halbwachs there is no
individual memory dissociated from collective memory. He was also the first sociologist
to stress
that our conceptions of the past are affected by the mental images we employ to
solve present problems, so that collective memory is essentially a reconstruction
of the past in the light of the present.6
In collective memory it is not the facts that count, but remembrance of the past:
historical facts are being transformed into myths.7 Earlier memory metaphors, like
“photographic memory”, assumed that perceptions are stored in memory as immutable
traces. More recently, people use the computer as a metaphor for human memory. Both
the computer and human memory allow for replacing old data by new information and for
altering stored information. The human memory does not store an exact reproduction,
but filters incoming information which is coded into a representation of reality. Memory
not as passive storage, but as an active power. In this respect collective memory acts
just like an individual‘s memory.
Uptil now I referred to “the” collective memory, but evidently there are as many
collective memories as there are collectives and social groups. Even within one
community there is interaction between various different memories. 8 What we regard as
collective memory, is what the members of a group, an organisation or a society want to
remember. That is more than what the elite of that group appropriates as collective
memory or what it enforces the group, through “politics of memory”, to view as collective
memory.9
***
The past is re-created and re-lived in commemorative practices, monuments, ceremonies
and other “theatres of memory”, like traditional sports and pastimes, costume parades,
“retrochic” and the heritage industry- so beautifully parodied in Julien Barnes’ England,
4
My England. 10 What they all have in common is that they allow the individual to relate
directly to what he or she regards as “the” past: a personal immediacy.
But what is the past? Halbwachs opposed the mémoire collective to the mémoire
historique. For Halbwachs history begins where living collective memory ends. But in
history the past also lives, because, as the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga said, the past
is not photographed, but re-imagined.11 History is a social construction, it is, in fact, a
special form of collective remembrance. Instead of opposing memory and history, Aleida
Assmann distinguishes two modes of remembering: Funktionsgedächtnis and
Speichergedächtnis - functional memory and storage memory.12 The storage memory
forms the perspective background for the functional memory:
It holds additional knowledge which as memory of memories can ensure that
really existing functional memories can be evaluated critically and, when
necessary, be renewed or changed.13
The collective storage memory, according to Aleida Assmann, does not constitute
collective identity as such, as functional memory does. The ever expanding storage
memory keeps more information and different information which may be taken out by
functional memory, and restructured and recomposed into stories, into meaning,
constituting collective identities. Storage memory can be regarded as a reservoir for
future functional memories, as a corrective for current functional memories. Therefore,
Assmann writes, it is necessary to keep the boundaries between the two memories
permeable, allowing the storage memory to act
as a context for different functional memories, more or less as their outer horizon
from where the narrowed perspectives of the past may be analyzed, criticized,
and, not the least, changed. 14
It is time to draw a preliminary conclusion. Neither collective memory nor history are
petrified fossils, but active forces, driven by preoccupations with the present. Italo Svevo
used a beautiful metaphor when he wrote that the present is the conductor of an
orchestra which is the past.15 This can easily be grasped by current post-modern society,
sometimes even more easily than by some historians and archivists. In our time people
no longer believe in all-embracing ideologies and grand narratives, but in a kaleidoscope
of pluralistic stories. Stories replacing histories.
***
But what about the archival heritage, you may ask. Halbwachs is rather vague about the
question how collective memory is transmitted from one generation to another. Paul
Connerton, on the other hand, deals with this question in his book How Societies
Remember. He says that what Halbwachs calls social memory, is in fact communication
between individuals: “To study the social formation of memory is to study those acts of
transfer that make remembering in common possible.”16
Transfer is not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about an archive, with its
immediate connotation of storage, a connotation reinforced by Aleida Assmann’s concept
of “storage memory”. Nevertheless archiving - all the activities from creation and
management to use of records and archives - has always been directed towards
transmitting human activity and experience through time and, secondly, through space.
A storage memory transmits information to some later point in time. It is this quality of
the archive as a time machine, that I want to stress because it is so essential in
promoting the preservation and accessibility of the European archival heritage
For many people, keeping records is identical to cleaning one’s desk, sorting and
throwing away and putting one’s papers in a folder or a box. People who work on a
computer save their files and make back-ups. But why do, and did, people keep their
papers and computer files? Letters, bills, insurance papers and contracts all reflect an
5
activity. In a business or organisation, paper documents and digital records are used to
support the management and control of the work process. Instructions for man and
machine, the enhancement of the organisation’s products and services, reporting - they
all form part of the “process-bound information”, as it is called in archival science. It is
the information generated by work processes that are all connected. The information is
structured and recorded by these processes in such a way that it may be accessed from
the context of the work processes.17
Records are also used as a basis to account for the results of a business. They document
transactions and relations - between supplier and client, editor and author or between
the committee of a society and its members. They are kept to serve as an account of
these transactions or relations, and as evidence. Evidence not only in the legal sense, but
also from a historical point of view, to demonstrate what has been.
These two qualities of records fit into Aleida Assmann’s scheme of the two modes of
memory. The functional memory contains process bound information, while the storage
memory serves the evidential function:
Archives can be organised as functional or as storage memory. The former
contains those documents and records that safeguard the legitimizing basis of
existing power relations, the latter stores potential sources forming the basis of
the historical knowledge of a culture.18
Archives and records as potential sources of historical knowledge, as a bridge to
yesteryear or the past. That bridge is built equally by records in the professional records
manager’s sense, as by other “memory-retaining objects”. Both are to be found in the
civil servant’s convenience file, or in any person’s memory box. Everything is archive not something old and forgotten, but something of value in the present and in the future.
Shouldn’t we try to connect to that public perception, rather than to impose on society
what archivists believe to be true? I am not suggesting to neglect the specificity of
records and archives as intrinsic process information or to dispose of the evidential
quality of records and archives in favour of their cultural value. But we have to take into
consideration that many of the artefacts that in the public perception are considered to
be archives function in societal processes of accountability and evidence, just like records
and archives-proper. Archives by birth and archives by baptism are not opposites, but
should be seen - like Assmann’s modes of memory - in a perspective view, where both,
at the foreground and in the background, serve to understand the past.
***
And what about Ketelaar’s law? Is it still applicable in a digital environment? Civil
servants continue to create semi-official records which are not part of the organization’s
record keeping system. Personal computers, laptops and notebooks throughout an
organization store databases, email and other applications kept by staff members for
their personal use while carrying out functions for their employer. Several of these
systems are created and used by one individual only, just as in the paper age the official
kept his or her personal notes, drafts and documentation in a convenience file. Many
systems on these PC’s and laptops are outside the purview of any organizational systems
management and control. Many are, however, not private, but official records. So,
Ketelaar’s law may be expanded with the proposition - yet to be tested - that if a civil
servant (or any administrator) sitting at his or her desktop, needs to click seven times
before getting access to a centrally maintained application, he or she will start creating a
personal record keeping system. In doing so, the organizational memory will be further
fragmented and individualized. What the risks are of an organizational memory being
dependent on what individuals have stored on their laptops and PC’s, has been
dramatically shown by the September 11 tragedies.
What are the solutions? Here is some food for thought while you are preparing your
journey back home: six building blocks for possible strategies.
6
In the first place it is essential that organizational record keeping systems take into
account semi-official recordkeeping by individual members of the organization:
recordkeeping in the broader sense as “everything is archive”. 19 Individual and
organizational memories blending together into one distributed memory.
Secondly, we have to rethink what the use of records and archives, as functional and
storage memories, really is. In the past, staff kept the file close at hand, for immediate
access. Access to the file meant: having the file in your hands. But in the digital age
physical access is replaced by virtual access.
In his book The Age of Access Jeremy Rifkin points to the transformation from a goodsproducing to a services performing and experience-generating economy.20 No longer do
we buy a product, we buy access to services. “Services are being reinvented as longterm multifaceted relationships between servers and clients.” 21 Information technologies
are used as relationship technologies. A cellular phone is given away for free, as an
inducement to use the telecom services. The physical container becomes secondary to
the unique services contained in it. The Oxford English Dictionary or the Encyclopedia
Britannica have dematerialized into an on-line service. Books and journals on library
shelves are giving precedence to access to services via the Internet. 22
Likewise, in record keeping systems the files may conceptually be replaced by providing
a service, that is: access to a distributed archival memory. Thus making the records
manager into a records relations manager or a “memory relations manager”.
Thirdly, archival institutions are moving from providing physical documents to providing
access23, from counting visits to the search room to counting hits on their website, from
issuing a reader’s card as a ticket to enter the search room to issuing a customer’s card
as the start of a multi-faceted relationship between client and service-providing
institution. At Amazon.com’s website I am welcomed with recommendations for books
and CD’s, based upon my browsing history and customer profile. Why doesn’t the
website of my library offer such a service? Why don’t the archives use their users’
statistics and the Internet pro-actively to keep researchers informed - individually and
tailormade - of new acquisitions, new finding aids, new publications, discounts and
services which may interest them?
But consumers don’t ask themselves as often “What do I want to have that I don’t have
already”; they are asking instead, “What do I want to experience that I have not
experienced yet?” 24 In such an “experience economy”, as described by Joseph Pine and
James Gilmore,25 companies produce memories, not goods.26 Memory has become one of
the objects of the consumer society that sell well, wrote Jacques le Goff twenty years
ago.27
This leads to my fourth proposition. Preserving and making accessible the archival
heritage means: offering the possibility to create memories. 28 Archival institutions should
present these memories as a historical experience, evoking a historical sensation. A small
museum in Terhorne, in Friesland, The Netherlands, calls itself Ervarium, “experiencium”.
There and elsewhere - I am thinking of the Yarvik museum in York where the visitor even
experiences the smell of the past - a historical sensation is evoked: re-enacting, re-living
the past.29 The archive is - or should be - a place for such a re-enactment as well, a place
where the gout d’archive (the taste of archive)30 functions as a Proustian madeleine.
Archives are - and this is my fifth point - time machines enabling man to carry his
thoughts, experiences and achievements through time. The archives of British Columbia
present a “BC Time Machine” on Internet, but it only allows a ride back into the past. The
archival time machine which I propose, rides into the future and back from the future.
To enable a time travel back and forth, archivists have to care about the future. Not only
archivists: the DLM-Forum - from the first one in 1996 throughout this DLM-Forum 2002
- demonstrates clearly that the concern for digital longevity is shared by archivists and
administrators in the public and the private sector. We can only achieve this effectively
and efficiently through industry-standard hardware and software. That is why the
7
contribution of the ICT-industry - called to arms by the DLM-Forum in 1999 - is so
essential to ensure travel into future’s “deep time”.
Mankind requires such time machines because they offer an escape from a world in
which, as Rifkin writes,
the marketing experts, advertisers, and cultural intermediaries will be ready and
waiting at the gateways, offering up access to all sorts of meaningful new cultural
commodities and lived experiences for the price of admission. They will prospect
local cultures for fresh fragments of cultural experience that can be mined and
commodified. They will make their way back into history in search of story lines
for creating exciting and entertaining new experiences. 31
To such commodification and usurpation of private and public memories, a countervailing
power must be found. Access to information and knowledge will be that countervailing
power. And this is my sixth and final point. Access to the collective knowledge and
wisdom, as a prerequisite for civil education which is “an essential tool in re-establishing
a balanced ecology between culture and commerce.” 32 This means: equal access to
information, in the context of the cultural diversity of our world, empowering citizens,
enabling people to use the archive as a time machine in the present, the past and the
future.
***
This DLM Forum 2002 was the third in a series, starting in 1996. I believe it is
appropriate to recognize the outstanding achievement of the man who inspired and
organized the three DLM Forums: Dr. Hans Hofmann.
At the opening of the second DLM-Forum, 18 October 1999, the audience was challenged
by the Secretary General of the European Commission
to continue seeking ways to preserve past, present and future information,
electronic and on multimedia, in a viable and accessible form. 33
This is as true today, as it was three years ago. It is as true, as the opening words of the
first DLM-Forum, 18 December 1996, that I repeat now as my final conclusion:
The digital era could well depend for its development and innovation on the
memory which you've brought here today and intend to carry forward to the
future.34
8
1
Marie-Anne Chabin, Je pense donc j’archive (L’Harmattan, Paris and Montréal 1999).
Anthony D. Smith, “Towards a global culture?”, in: Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global
Culture. Nationalism, globalization and modernity (Sage, London, Thousand Oaks and
New Delhi 1990) 182 = Anthony D. Smith, “Towards a Global Culture?”, Theory, Culture
& Society 7 (1990) 182.
2
Pierre Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire. La problématique des lieux,” in Pierre Nora
(ed.), Les lieux de mémoire. I. La République (Gallimard, Paris 1984), XXVII-XXVIII
(English editions: Pierre Nora, “Between memory and history. Les lieux de mémoire,”
Representations 26 (Spring 1989) 13-14; Realms of memory: rethinking the French past
[on the jacket: The construction of the French past] I. Conflicts and divisions (Columbia
University Press, New York 1996) 8).
3
4
Chabin, Je pense donc j’archive, 67-68.
Susan A. Crane, “Writing the individual back into collective memory”, American
Historical Review 102 (1997) 1381.
5
Lewis A. Coser (ed.), Maurice Halbwachs, On collective memory (University of Chicago
Press, Chicago 1992) 34.
6
Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in
frühen Hochkulturen (C.H. Beck, München 2000, 3. Aufl.).
7
Alon Confino, “Collective memory and cultural history: problems of method”, American
Historical Review 102 (5) (December 1977) 1386-1403, esp. 1399-1403.
8
Confino, “Collective memory”, 1393-1399. Unlike Confino, I do not restrict 'politics of
memory' to Politics: any power in any community uses politics of memory.
9
Raphael Samuel, Theatres of memory. Volume I: Past and present in contemporary
culture (Verso, London/New York 1994); David Lowenthal, The heritage crusade and the
spoils of history (Free Press, New York 1996).
10
Johan Huizinga, Verzamelde werken VII (H.D. Tjeenk Willink & zoon, Haarlem 1950)
12.
11
Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen
Gedächtnisses (C.H. Beck, München 1999) 130-142.
12
Assmann, Erinnerungsräume, 136: “Es hält ein Zusatzwissen bereit, welches als
Gedächtnis der Gedächtnisse dafür sorgen kann, daß real existierende
Funktionsgedächtnisse kritisch relativiert und gegebenenfalls erneuert oder verändert
werden können.”
13
Assmann, Erinnerungsräume, 141: “als Kontext der verschiedenen
Funktionsgedächtnisse gewissermaßen deren Außenhorizont, von dem aus die verengten
Perspektiven auf die Vergangenheit relativiert, kritisiert, und nicht zuletzt: verändert
werden können.”
14
15
Assmann, Erinnerungsräume, 17.
16
Connerton, 39.
9
Theo Thomassen, “A first introduction to archival science”, to be published in Archival
science 2 (2002); Frederick C.J. Ketelaar, “The benefit of archives”, Annual report 2001
Koninklijke Brill NV (Brill, Leiden 2001) 59-60.
17
Assmann, Erinnerungsräume, 409: “Archive können sowohl als Funktions- wie als
Speichergedächtnis organisiert sein; im einen Falle enthalten sie jene Dokumente und
Beweisstücke, die die Legitimationsgrundlage bestehender Machtverhältnisse absichern,
im anderen Falle bergen sie potentielle Quellen, die die Grundlage des historischen
Wissens einer Kultur ausmachen.”
18
Thomas A Finholt, “The electronic office”, in: Cary L. Cooper - Denise M. Rousseau
(eds.), Trends in organizational behavior 4 (Wiley, Chichester 1997) 29-41.
19
Jeremy Rifkin, The age of access. The new culture of hypercapitalism where all of life is
a paid-for experience (Tarcher/Putnam, New York 2000).
20
21
Rifkin, The age of access, 85.
22
Rifkin, The age of access, 76-93, 100.
Angelika Menne-Haritz, “Access - the reformulation of an archival paradigm”, Archival
science 1 (2001) 57-82.
23
24
Rifkin, The age of access, 145.
Joseph B. Pine - James Gilmore, The experience economy. Work is theatre and every
business a stage (Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge MA 1999).
25
26
Rifkin, The age of access, 145.
Jacques Le Goff, Histoire et mémoire (Gallimard, Paris 1988) 170: “la mémoire étant
devenue un des objets de la société de consommation qui se vendent bien.”
27
28
Menne-Haritz, “Access”, 59.
Simulating the past can have negative effects as well: Kevin Walsh, The representation
of the past. Museums and heritage in the post-modern world (Routledge, London and
New York 1992).
29
30
Arlette Farge, Le goût de l'archive (Editions du Seuil, Paris 1989).
31
Rifkin, The age of access, 217.
32
Rifkin, The age of access, 254-255.
Proceedings of the DLM-Forum on electronic records. European citizens and electronic
information: the memory of the Information Society. Brussels, 18-19 October 1999,
INSAR Supplement IV (2000) 15.
33
Proceedings of the DLM-Forum on electronic records. Brussels, 18-20 December 1996,
INSAR Supplement II (1997) 16.
34