in both cases encompassing all media. Like Booms, Cook, and Samuels, the
Canadian approach therefore reflects a wider vision of archives, one sanctioned
in and reflective of society at large rather than one shaped primarily by powerful
interest groups of either users or creators, or the state. In the rather inspired
words of Canadian archivist Ian Wilson, the Canadian "total archives" tradition
focuses more on the records of governance rather than on those of government.
"Governance" includes cognizance of the interaction of citizens with the state,
the impact of the state on society, and the functions or activities of society itself,
as much as it does the governing structures and their inward-facing bureaucrats.
The archival task is to preserve recorded evidence of governance, not just of
governments governing. The "total archives" perspective may be threatened with
marginalization, the late Shirley Spragge stated in an emotional parting call to
her colleagues, only if Canadian archivists overlook or abdicate their own
traditions.46
No one better represents the new "societal" rather than "statist" paradigm
than Canada's Hugh Taylor. Himself a key architect of the "total archives"
concept at the National Archives of Canada, Taylor came to Canada from
England in 1965 and was influenced early on by the communications and media
theories of Canadians Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Taylor soon began
blending together an acute awareness of the transforming character of new
audio-visual and electronic recording media and the immense power of world
wide communication technologies, with deep ecological, holistic, and spiritual
perspectives. With this potent mixture, he pulled many Canadian and inter
national archivists out of their "historical shunt" of looking after old records
and placed them firmly in the Information Age of electronic records, global com
munications networks, and local community heritage concerns and bio-regional
initiatives. Through it all, he exuded a revitalized sense of the contextuality (or
provenance) of records by exploring the rich interconnections between society
and the documentary record, between the act and the document. In a long series
of speculative, probing essays, Taylor challenged archivists to see the archival
connections in the evolution from the ancient to the medieval to the industrial
to the information society, and from the oral to the written to the visual and to
the electronic record. Moreover, Taylor discerned, in our new world of interactive
electronic transactions and communications, "a return to conceptual orality,"
that is to say, a return to the medieval framework where words or documents
gained meaning only as they were "closely related to their context and to actions
arising from that context." In that oral tradition, meaning "lay not in the
records themselves, but [in] the transactions and customs to which they bore
witness as 'evidences."' Given the centrality of [35] these "evidential" or contex-
tualized actions both to the very definition and even existence of the record in
the Information Age and to any subsequent understanding of it, Taylor encour
aged archivists to adopt "a new form of 'social historiography' to make clear how
and why records were created...." Archivists need to do this, in Taylor's view,
because, faced with incredible information overloads and technological transfor
mations, they need to concentrate less on "dealing with individual documents
and series" and more on "the recognition of forms and patterns of knowledge
which may be the only way by which we will transcend the morass of infor
mation and data into which we will otherwise fall...."47 Not surprisingly, Taylor's
thoughtful speculations also explicitly challenged archivists not to remain
isolated in their professional cloisters or behind disciplinary walls.
By combining in his own person the European and North American tradi
tions, by enhancing rather than undermining the archival traditions of his
adopted country, by ranging imaginatively from medieval orality to the "global
village," by welcoming rather than shunning the new electronic and visual
record, by searching for patterns and connections in place of fragmentation and
compartmentalization, and by linking archives to their social, philosophical, and
technological contexts, Taylor demonstrated that archivists could still serve
society well as its new "chip monks," rather than simply as allies (or minions)
of the powers of the state.
Provenance refreshed: Canada and Australia
Hugh Taylor's work led North American, and especially Canadian, archivists to
what Canadian archival educator Tom Nesmith has called "a rediscovery of
provenance."48 In many ways, of course, provenance had not been lost. But until
the later 1970s, North Americans limited their use of the concept of provenance
to a narrow range of arrangement and description activities. Even here they
allowed compromises such as the Schellenbergian record group to weaken the
contextualizing power of provenance. While provenance was never openly
rejected, therefore, and theoretical lip-service was paid to the concept, all too
often in practice it was either ignored or actually undermined. Following
Schellenberg's widespread influence, knowledge of the historical subject content
ARCHIEFWETENSCHAP
46 See Ian E. Wilson, "Reflections on Archival Strategies," American Archivist 58 (Fall 1995), pp. 414-29; and
Shirley Spragge, "The Abdication Crisis: Are Archivists Giving Up Their Cultural Responsibility?",
Archivaria 40 (Fall 1995), pp. 173-81. The reasons for the growing threat to "total archives" are studied in
detail and with subtlety by Laura Millar, in her already-cited doctoral thesis: "The End of 'Total Archives'?:
An Analysis of Changing Acquisition Practices in Canadian Archival Repositories." For a complementary
analysis of other reasons for this threat, see Joan M. Schwartz, "'We make our tools and our tools make
us': Lessons from Photographs for the Practice, Politics, and Poetics of Diplomatics," Archivaria 40 (Fall
1995), pp. 40-74. Robert A.J. McDonald puts the case exactly right in "Acquiring and Preserving Private
Records: Cultural versus Administrative Perspectives," Archivaria 38 (Fall 1994), pp. 162-63, by stating that
those undermining "total archives" either fail to understand the essence of the Canadian archival tradi
tion or lack the imagination or nerve to recast "total archives" to flourish in economically difficult times.
Merely doing what we think our sponsors want or need regarding their own institutional records, or what
we think will please them and show that we are being good corporate "players," is, as Shirley Spragge says,
too easy an abdication of the archivist's mission and responsibilities.
47 Hugh A. Taylor, "Transformation in the Archives: Technological Adjustment or Paradigm Shift," Archivaria
25 (Winter 1987-88), pp. 15, 18, 24; "The Collective Memory: Archives and Libraries As Heritage,"
50
TERRY COOK WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE
Archivaria 15 (Winter 1982-83), pp. 118, 122; "Information Ecology and the Archives of the 1980s,"
Archivaria 18 (Summer 1984), p. 25; and "Towards the New Archivist: The Integrated Professional," paper
delivered at the annual conference of the Association of Canadian Archivists, Windsor, June 1988, manu
script, pp. 7-8. Other important statements in a large and continuing body of work are Hugh A. Taylor,
"The Media of Record: Archives in the Wake of McLuhan," Georgia Archive 6 (Spring 1978), pp. 1-10; "'My
Very Act and Deed': Some Reflections on the Role of Textual Records in the Conduct of Affairs," American
Archivist 51 (Fall 1988), pp. 456-69; "Recycling the Past: The Archivist in the Age of Ecology," Archivaria 35
(Spring 1993), pp. 203-13; and "Some Concluding Thoughts," to a special theme issue of the American
Archivist 57 (Winter 1994), pp. 138-43, devoted to the future of archives. The fullest analysis of Taylor's
thought is Tom Nesmith's, "Hugh Taylor's Contextual Idea for Archives and the Foundation of Graduate
Education in Archival Studies," in Craig, The Archival Imagination, pp. 13-37. Most of the essays in this fest
schrift reveal inter alia the profound impact of Hugh Taylor's ideas on an entire generation of archivists in
Canada and elsewhere.
48 Tom Nesmith, "Introduction: Archival Studies in English-Speaking Canada and the North American
Rediscovery of Provenance," in Nesmith, Canadian Archival Studies, pp. 1-28; see p. 4 regarding Taylor's
leadership in this rediscovery.
51
