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'Computers, the Internet, and social media networks are more than tools, and their impact is more than technological.
when he was buried. And I found a digital image of the
confirmation of inscription, showing that his mother Minnie
requested that his headstone be inscribed with 'Blessed Are
They Who Die in the Lord'.
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 sweet
heart. 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 recordkeepers,
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
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
34 2015 nummer 1