Evidence
Today, access generally happens first, before description. And
description may not happen at all. How many of us have a dozen
or more different digital photographs, downloaded at various
times from our cameras onto our computers, several of which
share the same auto-generated title - DSC-011 or IMG-002?
Further, in this digital world, preservation may not be a conscious
act of setting aside but instead the result of digital multiplication
and mass dissemination. Storage in and access through an
archival repository may in fact never happen at all.
Let me illustrate the reality. It is estimated that the number
of cell phones in the world will read 7.3 billion this year. This
means that there will be more cell phones in use than there are
people on the planet. I cannot argue that statistic. My two-person
household alone contributes five phones to the count. And we
don't just use those cell phones to talk, do we? Individuals, in
their work and home lives, are using the multiplicity of apps and
tools on their cell phones and other mobile devices to create and
share documents, from photographs to videos to blog posts to
tweets. The average person spends more than 11 hours a week
dealing with email. Over 100 hours of video are uploaded to
YouTube every minute. As of last week, Queen Elizabeth has a
twitter handle. The world has come a long way from a computer
named Baby.
These digital products - these documents, records, and
archives - are eternally changeable. That is their joy and their
curse. As David Fricker, Director General of the National Archives
of Australia and President of the International Council on
Archives, has said, paper is patient; digital is not. I would say that
paper is quiet, digital is noisy. Paper waits for you. Digital runs
away and leaves you in the dust.
So if people in society are documenting themselves, and
if what they document is ever-changeable, the archivist can no
longer wait for records to be created and used and then to
become archives sometime later, so that they can be acquired
and preserved. We let wine age in the cellar for ten years; we
cannot do the same with digital records. What then is the role of
the archivist?
Well, I'm still not ready for the question yet. Let us first consider
not the role but the goal. What are archivists trying to do? What
is our vision, our mission? I suggest that our goals is to protect
documentary evidence - not information, but evidence - in order
to support accountability, foster identity, and nurture individual
and collective memory. Our goal is to ensure that records are
preserved - somewhere; that the records are authentic and
reliable; and that enough of them - the aggregations - are
preserved in order to provide society with a measure of truth:
the truth that is captured in the who, what, where, when, and
how. It is then up to society to interpret and reinterpret that
evidence to decide their own truth about why.
So, to achieve that goal in the digital age, when everyone
is his or her own record maker and record keeper, what is the
archivists' role? Or, really, what are the archivists' roles, for there
can be many. In order to distinguish those roles, we need to start
by looking at the records themselves in a new light. I believe
that we need to define records not only by who created them,
what they are about, or where they are stored but also, and
perhaps more critically, by their measure of accountability and
enduring value.
Some records have high, enduring accountability and
enduring value. To me, these are, for example, the records of
governments, educational institutions, nuclear power plants,
oil and gas producers, or regulatory agencies. These records
were created by bureaucracies - one can say they were
OF bureaucracies - but they are ABOUT the people, and they
