ancestry, a
r
Archivists in digital age
Archival 'grocery stores'
'Computers changed
the game. Computer
technology has
transformed the nature
of communications and
information.'
Computer technology
Imagine my surprise - shock would be a better word - to
discover that not only had my grandfather, Thomas Annandale
Millar, served in the First World War, but so had his three
brothers - I didn't even know he had three brothers - as well
as their father, my great-grandfather. My great grandmother,
Minnie Constance Millar, born Minnie Constance Taylor in
Marylebone, London, in 1865, was left alone in Edmonton,
Alberta, Canada, for I don't know how many years, waiting for
news of her husband and four sons - her entire family - who
were at war so far away. And I learned that one of her sons,
Frank Galt Millar, was killed on August 5th, 1916, aged 27, a
month after his brother, my grandfather, joined up, and that
Great Uncle Frank was buried at the Railway Dugouts Burial
Ground, near Zillebeke, Belgium. I had no idea that he had died.
I had no idea that he had lived.'
'Ancestry.ca introduced me to my great uncle Frank, because
this digital tool had aggregated records preserved and digitized
by repositories such as Library and Archives Canada, and
because it had created indexes and crosswalks and search tools
that allow users like me not only to find out about the people
we knew existed - like my grandfather Thomas Annandale - but
also about the people we did not know existed - like my great
uncles Frank Galt, Hugh Stanley, and Reginald Morrison Millar,
and my great grandfather, Thomas Morrison Millar, as well as
my great grandmother Minnie, who I think must have suffered
so much.
This genealogical experience - or experiment, perhaps - taught
me a valuable lesson, not only about life, and about the
importance of communicating family histories so that your
children and grandchildren can connect with their past, but also,
and more pertinent to today's discussion, a lesson about the
role, the power, and, I hope, the rewards, of archivists in a
digital age. I want to reflect on that lesson today, as I consider
the question posed to me: what is the role of the archivist in
documenting society in a society that is increasingly documenting
itself?
To answer that question, we must first consider the traditional
role of archivists as custodians. As all archival studies students
learn by heart, the essence of archival service is to acquire,
preserve, and make available the documentary evidence of
society's communications, actions, and transactions. That
documentary evidence was, for centuries, a tangible entity:
a physical item that had to be managed in a particular
geographic location. The uniqueness of the item was intricately
connected to its placement within an aggregation of materials,
all of which were bound together by the integrity of their
collective content, context, and structure. Archivists do not
collect single items; we acquire accumulations of materials,
ideally through some formal process of transfer from creating
agency to storage room.'
'To provide this physical service, traditional archivists brought
these aggregations of archival materials into a repository,
arranged and described them, perhaps copied some of the
content, then invited researchers to access the holdings either
in person or remotely. This process was not just custodial, it was
linear: acquisition before preservation, preservation before
description, description before access. I have in the past
described these physical repositories as like archival 'grocery
stores,' where archivists managed and made available documentary
goods, rather like butchers, grocers, or bakers managed and
sold meat, vegetables, or bread.
There is an important distinction, though, in the different
'goods' held in these repositories. Institutional or agency
archives are the products of a particular organization, often a
bureaucracy: the records of monarchs, churches, governments,
or businesses. They come into existence to help their creators
remember facts and acts. Reports, memoranda, financial
ledgers, registers - registers of the dead, perhaps; registers of
soldiers buried in cemeteries across Europe. Evidence of
officialdom, of deliberation and decision-making, the documentary
remains of actions and transactions.
Another type of archival good is less bureaucratic, more
personal. Diaries, letters, family photographs, memoirs - these
records are created deliberately, not as innocent by-products but
as conscious creations. They help people remember, just as
official records help bureaucrats remember, but that latter
remembering is more personal, intended not to capture facts
and acts but to memorialize experiences and memories.
Photographs show families at Christmas or on summer holiday;
letters tell husbands or wives or mothers about life on a
particular day in a particular place; diaries capture events
and emotions, to be recalled later, with pleasure, perhaps,
or perhaps not.
Regardless of whether archival materials are categorized as
official or personal, the reality is that, for centuries, they could
only really live in one place. Copies might be generated, but the
originals were unique, irreplaceable, and singular. Possessing
them was the only way to preserve them, viewing them in
person the only way to access them.'
'As we all know, computers changed the game. Computer
technology has transformed the nature of communications and
information. We all hear the stories of terabytes of data in cloud
computing systems, of billions of text messages sent and
received, and of the constant presence of smartphones in
society. In 1948, the year my husband was born, the first
stored-program computer, nicknamed Baby, was built in
Manchester, England, and it filled an entire laboratory. Today,
my husband and I own two desktops, two laptops, two iPads,
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