030 n 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

Periodiekviewer Koninklijke Vereniging van Archivarissen

Schetsboek | 2015 | | pagina 29