arnoud glaudemans, rienk jonker and frans smit beyond the traditional bounderies of
archival theory: an interview with eric ketelaar
the two. On the other hand, there are some conceptions in Floridi's information
philosophy that, we think, are very useful for archival reasons. So, we have to build
bridges knowing the differences.
An important thing Floridi stressed in our last interview was that nowadays
information is very much 'in your face', but that we forget, or have little idea of, the
actual materiality of digital information. An example given was the bit-coin: without
electricity, these coins would simply disappear. Materiality of the digital is also very
much our concern, because it is about preservation.
ERIC KETELAAR: In my keynote speech at the ICA congress in Seoul last year I dealt
with the materiality of the digital, invoking the archives of Salman Rushdie, now in
the Emory Libraries in Atlanta (Georgia). These archives consist of paper, hard
disks, four PC's and some CD-ROMs. These are materials or objects, with
information. You would lose something when you would migrate them to, let's say,
one new medium. So, the library in Georgia made a simulation where you can
simulate being - like Salman Rushdie - behind a Macintosh Performa 5400 (a
computer that was on the market in 1997/1998). I contend that we have to preserve
a lot of these materials, these objects, because only then we can render how
information or records were used in the first place. I contend that every archive in an
archival institution is not the original and authentic archive anymore, because:
what do we do? The archives arrive, in a certain order or disorder, and we start with
unpacking and repacking them in new folders and in acid-free boxes. I would like to
see a simulation of how, let's say, the records of the Staten-Generaal at the National
Archives in the Netherlands, were used in their primary context (the current display
in the National Archives is a laudable effort, but it is not dynamic and not
comprehensive). You know Derrida's 'the mutation in technology changes the
content of the archive'; the assumption that the sender of an email expects an
answer within some seconds, influences what you are writing in your email. In order
to keep knowledge of how these records were created and maintained, we would have
to preserve or to emulate much of the digital infrastructure.
EDITORS: To go back to Floridi: could you not conclude from what he stated in the
last interview, that archives are getting a bit marginal in, let's say, Google-society?
Doesn't this show that, within the government, as is also our personal experience,
we are losing grip on important information with an archival function; so, that
when we keep on going with an 'old school' record-based approach, we might end up
not having the relevant information. That might be a reason to go into a more
'native' way of thinking about digital information - data science, data quality, etc. -
through which you could do better capturing of the algorithmic functions used in
government or in governmental processes. The alternative of 'getting marginal'
would certainly be a bad and scary thing, so maybe you should ask other questions.
ERIC KETELAAR: I agree, but it is important to note that I am not interested
primarily in the archival objects. I am interested in the archive as a process. When
you look at the process, you automatically go to where the archive process starts.
Which, in government, is at the desk of the civil servant, or the minister. So, we have
to move our focus to the beginning of the process. Take the MH17 airplane-crash in
Ukraine in July 2014: 'the MH17 archive', as members of parliament want it to be,
will not consist of a big archive, constructed ex post. It is rather an intertextual body
of records created and still being created by various record creating agencies. The
National Archives cannot sit still and wait until at some point in the future those
records will be transferred to the archives: their task is to act proactively to safeguard
the creation, maintenance and accessibility of that body of records.
Coming back to the post-truth tweets: archivists might meet Floridi, in a way. Not so
much because we are concerned about whether or not the tweet is true, but because
we are concerned about the government's accountability through its tweets as well
as other records. It is the accountability issue that is the most important point, and
for that you need context. The context is all: context is the most important,
essentially archival, principle, or concept. That is our strength; and we should make
it clear to the information professionals and information philosophers, that in their
quest for trustfulness of information they should pay attention to context, and even
more: they should adopt our concept of records created within a particular context,
with an archival bond. Only then can we, or anyone, trust information. Of course,
in the digital age, that is the so-called fluidity, things are changing. The principle of
provenance, for instance, as applied in the paper age is still valid, I think, provided
you adapt the concept and make it usable in the new environment.
Maybe you know there already are a number of proposals for a so-called
'participatory model' for appraisal, access, etc. I would go one step further, and say it
is not so much the user you have to account for, no: the user is part of the process.
The record's subjects (for example, a citizen) are still seen by government as the
object, or the destination, instead of seeing them as co-creator. Take appraisal:
luckily in the Netherlands we involve non-archival experts in our procedures, but I
have never heard of, for instance, any student being involved in the establishment of
appraisal schedules for universities. In a participatory model, any process starts with
an individual, somewhere. I could quote a lot of historical examples here. How did
recordkeeping by the cities start? Citizens asking city government to authenticate
their transactions (and of course, by making lists of taxpayers and by preserving and
copying the city charters).
EDITORS: The authors in this book address concepts, principles, models and ethical
issues. Could you reflect on their contributions?
ERIC KETELAAR: In his first contribution, Van Bussel delivers a critical overview
of archival theory since the nineties, which he denotes as a time of 'archival
renaissance' - a term that I like. In general, I find his criticism of the records
continuum model a bit too negative; to a large extent I agree with his critique of
diplomatics. I believe Van Bussel is right in assessing that, in the archival renaissance
of the nineties, the question of what is archive, and how the archive is created,
maintained and managed, got less attention than it should have had. This is
discussed in Van Bussel's second paper.
Ernst's first paper I found difficult, but it provides a very important acquaintance
with media archaeology. The second on audiovisual media is a bit more practical.
Archivistics could learn a number of methodologies from media archaeology, but we
have to keep in mind that we are dealing with two different disciplines here. To a
certain extent both disciplines meet in the materiality - as discussed before - of
archives in liquid times
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