r
Evidence
'People think of records
as new and archives as old.'
A wild west
Uncle Frank
mobile devices to create and share documents, from photographs
to videos to blog posts to tweets. The average person spends
more than 11 hours a week dealing with email. Over 100 hours
of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. As of last
week, Queen Elizabeth has a twitter handle. The world has
come a long way from a computer named Baby.
These digital products - these documents, records, and archives
- are eternally changeable. That is their joy and their curse.
As David Fricker, Director General of the National Archives of
Australia and President of the International Council on Archives,
has said, paper is patient; digital is not. I would say that paper
is quiet, digital is noisy. Paper waits for you. Digital runs away
and leaves you in the dust.
So if people in society are documenting themselves, and if what
they document is ever-changeable, the archivist can no longer
wait for records to be created and used and then to 'become'
archives sometime later, so that they can be acquired and
preserved. We let wine age in the cellar for ten years; we
cannot do the same with digital records. What then is the role
of the archivist?'
'Well, I'm still not ready for the question yet. Let us first consider
not the role but the goal. What are archivists trying to do? What
is our vision, our mission? I suggest that our goals is to protect
documentary evidence - not information, but evidence - in
order to support accountability, foster identity, and nurture
individual and collective memory. Our goal is to ensure that
records are preserved - somewhere; that the records are authentic
and reliable; and that enough of them - the aggregations - are
preserved in order to provide society with a measure of truth:
the truth that is captured in the who, what, where, when, and
how. It is then up to society to interpret and reinterpret that
evidence to decide their own truth about why.
So, to achieve that goal in the digital age, when everyone is his
or her own record maker and record keeper, what is the
archivists' role? Or, really, what are the archivists' roles, for there
can be many. In order to distinguish those roles, we need to
start by looking at the records themselves in a new light.
I believe that we need to define records not only by who
created them, what they are about, or where they are stored
but also, and perhaps more critically, by their measure of
accountability and enduring value.
Some records have high, enduring accountability and enduring
value. To me, these are, for example, the records of governments,
educational institutions, nuclear power plants, oil and gas
producers, or regulatory agencies. These records were created
by bureaucracies - one can say they were OF bureaucracies - but
they are ABOUT the people, and they 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
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