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Lone Arrangers
In my search, I found records ABOUT Frank, but I did not find any
evidence OF Frank. I found the records that Canadian and
imperial bureaucracies created to manage Frank the soldier, but
what I have not found, yet, are the records that Frank and
his family created as part of the life of Frank the man. I am sure he
must have written letters home to his mother. Perhaps he took
photographs with his comrades. Maybe he wrote to a
sweetheart. I can see Frank's handwriting on the digital copy of
the Army forms, and I can see his signature on the attestation
page, but in the language of diplomatics, he may have been the
writer, but he was not the author. I cannot see anything that
reveals Frank the man.
It is the tragedy of my family that I do not know if such
personal records might have existed, let alone where to look for
them today. I am truly grateful to Library and Archives Canada for
performing its custodial duty - to protect the bureaucratic
evidence, unchanged, of Frank the soldier. But I am also deeply
grateful to a billion dollar corporation - Ancestry.com - and to
the people who work so diligently, many of them volunteers
pursuing a calling to history, for making it possible for people
like me to find records like these, to make the connections to
our personal and community stories, because while Library
and Archives Canada kept the records and digitized the records,
Ancestry built the linkages from the known to the unknown,
linkages that would not be possible without computer
technologies.
The success of Ancestry, the success of other digital access
and preservation tools, will be built not on the work of solitary
archivists in small, isolated repositories - the Lone Arrangers, as
we call them in North America - but on the combined efforts of
large, complex, and integrated teams of specialists in areas as
diverse as information management, computer programming,
auditing, security, privacy, and business administration. This team
will be joined by the public - what American National Archivist
David Ferriero calls the citizen archivist - who are perhaps the
most important part of the group. In my vision of an archival
future, this integrated team will come together to protect and
make available the records of society, so that people like me can
find evidence not only of what we know - about my grandfather,
perhaps, but also of what we do not already know - such as
about the life, and death, of my Great Uncle Frank.
In the future, there may well be no analog records for
Library and Archives Canada to digitize and Ancestry to index.
In the digital world, archivists must work as part of this team, not
as Lone Arrangers, to ensure that the born digital records of
today are preserved made accessible in the future, so that my
brother's grandchildren can find me, Great Aunt Laura, a century
from now. And this is not a hypothetical utopia. I have a great
niece already. She is two and a half, her name is Claire, she is
adorable beyond belief, and she lives in Germany - talk about
the irony of that.
Archivists must participate in the creation and preservation
of digital records from the beginning - as corporate record
keepers, information managers, knowledge managers - I don't
care what they are called as long as they know what they are
doing to preserve authentic and reliable evidence. When
archivists can help from the start, as part of a diverse team of
experts, we have a much better chance of achieving the future
I envision.
A large part of this work will not be to control archives in
custody but to support the creation and management of records
in the distributed, digital world of today, which means the