r
Reach out
'We must reach out to
the public. Instead
of trying to do the job for
them, we need to make
it easier for them to do
the job themselves.'
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 move
ment. 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
'Paper waits for you. Digital runs away and leaves you in the dust' (photo: Population Register, Stadsarchief Rotterdam).
nummer 1 2015 35
