Archives, Archiving

From the Latin arca, orig­i­nally mean­ing a place to store things, a box or chest, ‘archives’ con­notes a per­sonal trea­sure chest of cher­ished arti­facts and mem­o­ries they store for us. Its cur­rent mean­ing is a lit­tle less sen­ti­men­tal, accord­ing to the most recent glos­sary of archival terms pub­lished by the Soci­ety of Amer­i­can Archivists:

Mate­ri­als cre­ated or received by a per­son, fam­ily, or orga­ni­za­tion, pub­lic or pri­vate, in the con­duct of their affairs and pre­served because of the endur­ing value con­tained in the infor­ma­tion they con­tain or as evi­dence of the func­tions and respon­si­bil­i­ties of their cre­ator, espe­cially those mate­ri­als main­tained using the prin­ci­ples of prove­nance, orig­i­nal order, and col­lec­tive con­trol; per­ma­nent records.

A true archives, then, does not need to be inter­est­ing or infor­ma­tive. It doesn’t even need to be accu­rate. It’s pur­pose is evi­dence of action, not infor­ma­tion for pos­ter­ity. In com­mon par­lance, it has come to mean a col­lec­tion of any­thing – movies, jour­nal arti­cles, or even blog posts – that is old and some­what ven­er­a­ble. Yet, it is not sup­posed to be a arti­fi­cial col­lec­tion of mis­cel­la­neous infor­ma­tion, but rather a a con­tex­tu­ally based organic body of evi­dence. As such, archives can be seen as a socially con­structed and maintained:

We use an archives to remem­ber things after they hap­pen. But if we think of the records in archives as points of inscrip­tion, as sites of cul­tural pro­duc­tion, we real­ize that they serve, if not to remem­ber things before they hap­pen, to remem­ber things as they hap­pen. Indeed, the process of ‘archiviza­tion’ makes things hap­pen by allow­ing us to make sense of what is happening.

Of course, the dig­i­tal age also turns this idea of records as evi­dence upside down. It will be inter­est­ing to see how archivists ensure authen­tic­ity of records in elec­tronic form. Can they use tra­di­tional archival meth­ods devel­oped for ana­log records for dig­i­tal records as well? Or will new meth­ods be devel­oped to ensure authen­tic­ity? And how will this affect how we make sense of what is a happening?

Read­ing Lists

• To read
• Rec­om­mended
• You have bet­ter things to do

• Hir­tle, Peter B. (2000). Archival authen­tic­ity in a dig­i­tal age. In Authen­tic­ity in a dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment. http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub92/hirtle.html
• Levy, David M. (2001). Scrolling for­ward: Mak­ing sense of doc­u­ments in the dig­i­tal age.
• Maher, William J. (1998). Archives, archivists, and soci­ety. Amer­i­can Archivist 61(2), 252 – 265.
• Pearce-Moses, Richard (no date). A glos­sary of archival and records ter­mi­nol­ogy. http://www.archivists.org/glossary/index.asp