A wild west
document decisions that may significantly affect the lives, health,
and welfare of those people. Society relies on those records to
hold those agencies to account for their actions and decisions,
on behalf of the people.
The archivist responsible for these high-risk records may
serve as custodian or controller, applying what I believe should
be strong and enforceable regulatory requirements not just
for keeping good records but for making good records, helping
to hold the agency to account by ensuring that it meets its
obligation for accountability and transparency.
Other records present a lower risk, but they may still have
enduring value. The records of service industries, community
groups, and professional or social organizations come to mind.
Again, these are the records OF corporate agencies, but they are
ABOUT people. The risks that they reflect may be lower, and the
enduring value of the evidence may be as much social and
cultural as legal and regulatory. The role of the archivist would be
to manage those records, on behalf of the creating agency, for
both their evidential and informational value. If that agency
ceased to exist, the materials should find their way into another
repository - one that commits to collecting and acquiring
archives as evidence for posterity.
Still other records creators, while undoubtedly important to
society, are not high-risk entities. Individuals and families, artists
and academics create records that speak volumes about their
lives and times. Their records are OF them and they are ABOUT
them. These records may live outside of traditional institutions, in
a wild west of personal or community recordkeeping systems.
Preserving these materials in collections-oriented repositories
may be an option if the creators do not choose to manage those
records themselves. But more and more, the role of the archivist
in this scenario is not to wait for the materials to make their way
to custodial care but to intervene, actively, in the process of
records creation and management, in order to help the creator
ensure that these very personal records are protected with their
authenticity intact.
You will notice, perhaps, that I am speaking more of
records than archives, and of recordkeepers as well as archivists.
I believe that the division constructed by our profession -
between records (by which we suggest 'current') and archives
(by which we imply 'historical') - simply does not work in a digital
age. In truth, people think of records as new and archives as old.
If archivists keep talking about archives and do not explain the
link with records, people will assume the focus is on dusty, old,
and archaic 'stuff', not on valuable documentary evidence of
actions and transactions.
People do value archives, as evidenced by the
overwhelming surge of interest in genealogy, family history, and
community heritage. But they do not clearly understand the
link between current records and historical archives. They do not
fully appreciate that in a digital age, the electronic records
they are making today will be lost if they are not protected now.
It is the loss of the personal, not the bureaucratic, that I fear the
most.
When I discovered the records of my great uncle Frank,
who lies in a grave 300 kilometres from here, I found the records
of bureaucracy. I found digital copies of his official attestation
papers showing that he joined the Canadian Over-seas
Expeditionary Force on January 6, 1915. I found copies of
ledgers from the Imperial War Graves Commission showing
where and when he was buried. And I found a digital image of
the confirmation of inscription, showing that his mother Minnie
requested that his headstone be inscribed with 'Blessed Are
They Who Die in the Lord'.
