Archival 'grocery stores' great grandfather, Thomas Morrison Millar, as well as my great grandmother Minnie, who I think must have suffered so much. This genealogical experience - or experiment, perhaps - taught me a valuable lesson, not only about life, and about the importance of communicating family histories so that your children and grandchildren can connect with their past, but also, and more pertinent to today's discussion, a lesson about the role, the power, and, I hope, the rewards, of archivists in a digital age. I want to reflect on that lesson today, as I consider the question posed to me: what is the role of the archivist in documenting society in a society that is increasingly documenting itself? To answer that question, we must first consider the traditional role of archivists as custodians. As all archival studies students learn by heart, the essence of archival service is to acquire, preserve, and make available the documentary evidence of society's communications, actions, and transactions. That documentary evidence was, for centuries, a tangible entity: a physical item that had to be managed in a particular geographic location. The uniqueness of the item was intricately connected to its placement within an aggregation of materials, all of which were bound together by the integrity of their collective content, context, and structure. Archivists do not collect single items; we acquire accumulations of materials, ideally through some formal process of transfer from creating agency to storage room. To provide this physical service, traditional archivists brought these aggregations of archival materials into a repository, arranged and described them, perhaps copied some of the content, then invited researchers to access the holdings either in person or remotely. This process was not just custodial, it was linear: acquisition before preservation, preservation before description, description before access. I have in the past described these physical repositories as like archival 'grocery stores', where archivists managed and made available documentary goods, rather like butchers, grocers, or bakers managed and sold meat, vegetables, or bread. There is an important distinction, though, in the different 'goods' held in these repositories. Institutional or agency archives are the products of a particular organization, often a bureaucracy: the records of monarchs, churches, governments, or businesses. They come into existence to help their creators remember facts and acts. Reports, memoranda, financial ledgers, registers - registers of the dead, perhaps; registers of soldiers buried in cemeteries across Europe. Evidence of officialdom, of deliberation and decision-making, the documentary remains of actions and transactions. Another type of archival good is less bureaucratic, more personal. Diaries, letters, family photographs, memoirs - these records are created deliberately, not as innocent by-products but as conscious creations. They help people remember, just as official records help bureaucrats remember, but that latter remembering is more personal, intended not to capture facts and acts but to memorialize experiences and memories. Photographs show families at Christmas or on summer holiday; letters tell husbands or wives or mothers about life on a particular day in a particular place; diaries capture events and emotions, to be recalled later, with pleasure, perhaps, or perhaps not. Regardless of whether archival materials are categorized as official or personal, the reality is that, for centuries, they could only really live in one place. Copies might be generated, but the originals were unique, irreplaceable, and singular. Possessing them was the only way to preserve them, viewing them in person the only way to access them.

Periodiekviewer Koninklijke Vereniging van Archivarissen

Schetsboek | 2015 | | pagina 25