theorist Theodore R. Schellenberg called the Dutch Manual "a Bible for modern
archivists,"11 and both he and English theorist Sir Hilary Jenkinson based their
landmark books on this very solid Dutch foundation. Whether directly or
through Jenkinson and Schellenberg, the work of Muller, Feith, and Fruin has
widely influenced our collective theory and practice.
Sir Hilary Jenkinson: the sanctity of evidence proclaimed
Twenty-four years after the Dutch book, Hilary Jenkinson produced the second
[23] major treatise on archival theory and practice. Jenkinson's defence therein
of archives as impartial evidence and his vision of the archivist as guardian of
evidence have justly become clarion calls to the profession. In a passage that
appears in no less than four of his addresses,12 Jenkinson exclaimed:
The Archivist's career is one of service. He exists in order to make other
people's work possible.... His Creed, the Sanctity of Evidence; his Task, the
Conservation of every scrap of Evidence attaching to the Documents commit
ted to his charge; his aim to provide, without prejudice or afterthought, for all
who wish to know the Means of Knowledge.... The good Archivist is perhaps
the most selfless devotee of Truth the modern world produces.
If records were the natural byproducts of administration, the untainted evidence
of acts and transactions, then no post-creation interference could be allowed,
Jenkinson asserted, or their character as impartial evidence would be undermi
ned. If archives were the organic emanation of documents from a record creator,
then severing any record from that organic whole seemed to violate fundamental
archival principles as established by the Dutch. If records were to maintain their
innocence in an archival setting, then any appraisal by the archivist was utterly
inappropriate. Such exercise of "personal judgement" by the archivist, as Jenkin
son knew appraisal must necessarily involve, would tarnish the impartiality of
archives as evidence, as of course would any consideration of saving archives to
meet their actual or anticipated uses by researchers. The archivist's role was to
keep, not select archives. Consistent with such an approach, archivists were
known in Britain as "keepers." While the huge volumes of records generated by
the First World War gave Jenkinson a perspective which the Dutch archivists did
not have, he never felt comfortable, despite some faint-hearted concessions later
in his career, with archivists doing any sort of appraisal or selection.
Jenkinson's solution to this dilemma was to consign to the records creator
the unwelcome task of reducing vast accumulations of modern records, thus
"making the Administrator the sole agent for the selection and destruction of
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his own documents...." Archivists would then take charge of the remnant, in
exactly the same way they cared in Jenkinson's day for medieval and early
modern records, where because of small accumulations no destruction was
necessary in an archival setting. While Jenkinson himself raised the concerns
that these administrators may not destroy enough, or may destroy too much, or
may even create records that consciously have one eye on history as much as
provide unbiased evidence of transactions, he advanced no satisfactory solution
to these dilemmas.
In fairness, it should be noted that Jenkinson did encourage a limited
"archive-making" role for archivists, consisting of articulating standards
whereby administrators could create and maintain high-quality archives in the
future that would bear the characteristics of authentic, impartial evidence that
he [24] thought were invested in past archives. This was hardly a satisfactory
solution to appraisal, although it was a useful step. He admitted the insoluble
dilemma, given his overall approach, that this "archive-making" intervention
would have to distinguish more "important" agencies (and programmes and
activities) from others, and yet these very judgements of importance and value
-which are the foundation of modern archival appraisal- immediately under
mine his impartial archivist, and therefore Jenkinson, always consistent at least,
conceded that "upon this point we have no suggestions to offer"! He does not
seem to have appreciated that even his limited intervention of setting standards
for "archive-making" would also undermine the innocence of records as natural
or pure accumulations that their administrators created, organized, and used
in the normal course of business as they (and not standard-setting archivists)
saw fit.13
American archivist Gerald Ham recently, starkly, but correctly commented
on the central Jenkinsonian dilemma about appraisal: "Allowing the creator to
designate what should be the archival record solves the problems of complexity,
impermanence, and volume of contemporary records by ignoring them."14
Jenkinson's approach to appraisal and, indeed, to the very definition of archives
would (no doubt to his horror) give sanction to record creators such as U.S.
Presidents Richard Nixon or George Bush to destroy or remove from public
scrutiny any records containing unfavourable evidence of their actions while in
office, thus undermining both democratic accountability and historical know
ledge. At its most extreme, Jenkinson's approach would allow the archival legacy
to be perverted by administrative whim or state ideology, as in the former Soviet
Union, where provenance was undermined by the establishment of one state
fonds and archival records attained value solely by the degree to which they
reflected the "official" view of history.15
ARCHIEFWETENSCHAP
11 Cited in Barritt, "Coming to America," Archival Issues, p. 52.
12 "Memoir of Sir Hilary Jenkinson," in J. Conway Davies, Studies Presented to Sir Hilary Jenkinson, C.B.E.,
LL.D., F.S.A. (London, 1957). This "Memoir" is the best biographical sketch of Jenkinson, which can be
supplemented by Richard Stapleton, "Jenkinson and Schellenberg: A Comparison," Archivaria 17 (Winter
1983-84), pp. 75-85.
13 Hilary Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration (London, 1968, a reissue of the revised second
edition of 1937), pp. 149-55, 190.
14 F. Gerald Ham, Selecting and Appraising Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago, 1993), p. 9. Even archivists very
friendly towards Jenkinson opposed his views on appraisal; in a festschrift in his honour, the leading archi
vists of Canada and Australia underlined the difficulties of Jenkinson's approach: see W. Kaye Lamb,
"The Fine Art of Destruction," pp. 50-56, and Ian Maclean, "An Analysis of Jenkinson's 'Manual of
TERRY COOK WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE
Archive Administration' in the Light of Australian Experience," pp. 150-51, both in Albert E.J. Hollaender,
ed., Essays in Memory of Sir Hilary Jenkinson (Chichester, 1962).
15 See Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR: Moscow and Leningrad
(Princeton, 1972), pp. 23-60; and, more pointedly, her recent Intellectual Access and Descriptive Standards
for Post-Soviet Archives: What Is to be Done?, International Research and Exchanges Board preliminary pre
print version (Princeton, March 1992), pp. 9-23. From the 1930s on, she notes (p. 10), archivists had "to
emphasize Marxist-Leninist conceptions of history and to demonstrate the ingredients of class struggle
and the victory of the toiling masses. Archivists were fired for preparing 'objective' or purely factual
descriptions of materials, rather than showing how a given group of documents portrayed struggle against
the ruling class. Archival documents not pertaining to party themes were simply not described or their
inherent nature and provenance not recorded."
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