Reach out
Facilitate
archival role will be increasingly advisory. Client-based records
and archives consulting, similar to the work performed by
lawyers and accountants, will, I believe and hope, become a
mainstream career option. In this age where bits and bytes are
replacing cellulose and ink, the best way to assist records
creators to manage their increasingly chaotic sources of
evidence, and help to ensure that at least some of those
materials find life everlasting as archives, is to engage, actively
and persistently, with our communities. We cannot wait for
them to come to us. We must go to them.
We must reach out to the public, who not only need to
understand the value of records and archives but also, and
more importantly, to participate actively in their care. Instead of
trying to do the job for them, we need to make it easier for them
to do the job themselves. Many, many more of us need to
become facilitators and advisors, consultants and counsellors,
instead of sitting in bureaucratic offices waiting and hoping for
archives to come to us.
But we need to do two other things. First, we need to
raise awareness of the value of records and archives across
society. We need to talk to school children, not just corporate
bosses. Second, we need to participate actively in building
tools that will make records creation and records preservation
- and description and access - much easier for the average
person.
In this regard, I see a direct parallel with the recycling
movement. Today, recycling is a given. Blue bins and compost
buckets are universal. In North America, we have a catch phrase
- 'reduce, reuse, recycle' - that even little children know by heart.
When people in my home town see a little triangle on our plastic
water bottle, on our milk jug, or on our box of printer paper, we
automatically think 'recycle'. How on earth, no pun intended,
did we get from a time when we thought nothing of tossing milk
cartons into the garbage to a time, now, when we instinctively
look for a recycling bin every time we need to dispose of
something from a newspaper to a juice container?
I believe this change happened because the visionaries
of the recycling movement, did two things: one, they raised
awareness of the importance of recycling, and two, they
developed mechanisms to make the job easier. They convinced
people that 'it's good to recycle', and they facilitated the task by
inventing recycling boxes, compost buckets, and recycling
depots. Today, when we see a little plastic triangle, it speaks
volumes to us, as does the deposit on our drinks containers,
and the line so common at the bottom of the emails sent by my
bank and my telephone company, that says 'before printing,
think of the environment'. I want to pursue the same strategy for
the protection of digital records. We need to create a culture
where people understand, implicitly, the importance of the
recordkeeping equivalent of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The
message I want to convey, the words I want children to repeat to
their parents on the way home from school, are these:
Remember, Respect, Record. What if, when you received an
email from your bank or your telephone company, at the bottom
of the message was a line of text? But instead of saying 'before
printing, think of the environment', it said 'before deleting,
think of the future'. How marvelous would that be?
We also need to create the tools to facilitate that preservation
and access. Records and archives professionals have developed
amazing tools for archival description, interpretation, and access.
