The fourth theme to emerge from our collective history over the past hundred
years is related to the previous three. Because of the now-required active inter
vention by the archivist in record-keeping processes in order to ensure that the
properties of reliable evidence exist for records, because of the need to research
and understand the nature of function, structure, process, and [46] context and
to interpret their relative importance as the basis for modern archival appraisal
(and description), the traditional notion of the impartiality of the archivist is no
longer acceptable -if it ever was. Archivists inevitably will inject their own values
into all such activities, as indeed they will by their very choice, in eras of limited
resources and overwhelming volumes of records, of which creators, which
systems, which functions, which transactions, which descriptive and diffusion
mechanisms, indeed which records, will get full, partial, or no archival
attention. Archivists have therefore changed over the past century from being
passive keepers of an entire documentary residue left by creators to becoming
active shapers of the archival heritage. They have evolved from being, allegedly,
impartial custodians of inherited records to becoming intervening agents who
set record-keeping standards and, most pointedly, who select for archival
preservation only a tiny portion of the entire universe of recorded information.
Archivists have become in this way very active builders of their own "houses of
memory." And so, each day, they should examine their own politics of memory
in the archive-creating and memory-formation process. By doing so, with
sensitivity and some historical perspective, archivists may better balance which
functions, activities, organizations, and people in society, through their records,
are to be included and which are to be excluded from the world's collective
memory.
The fifth and final theme is that archival theory should not be seen as a set of
immutable scientific laws disinterestedly formed and holding true for all time.
The leading archival thinkers in this century have imaginatively reinvented the
concept of archives in ways that very much reflected, sometimes unconsciously,
sometimes consciously, the dominant strains of public discourse in their time
and place. Archival theory has reflected, and has evolved through, several such
broader societal phases: from nineteenth-century European Positivism to
American New Deal managerialism, onward to the media-focused McLuhanism
of the 1960s and to more recent postmodern historicism. If recognized, this
changing nature of archival theory over time becomes a professional strength,
not a weakness. Indeed, the best archival theorists have usually been those able
to recognize and articulate broad, often radical changes in society, in organiza
tional structure, and in record-keeping technologies, and then integrate the
impact of these changes into archival work and archival thought. If Hugh Taylor
and Tom Nesmith rightly urge archivists to undertake a new scholarship to study
the very rich links between the authoring context and the resulting record, a
similar research focus is needed for the profession concerning the relationship
between the archivist and his or her contemporary society, both now and in the
past.
And, finally, an important qualifier. The history of archival theory, despite the
foregoing simplified presentation because of space constraints, is not a linear
evolution, with exclusive schools of thinkers, neatly ascending in some cumula-
64
tive process to the glorious Archival Theoretical Consensus of the [47] present
day. Archival history is instead a rich collage of overlapping layers, of contradic
tory ideas existing simultaneously or even blended together, of thinkers exhibi
ting differences of emphasis more than of fundamental ideas, of individual
thinkers changing their ideas in light of new circumstances, of old ideas appe
aring in new guises in new places. The pendulum of thought swings back and
forth, as one generation solves its predecessor's problems, but thereby creates
new problems for the next generation to address, with ideas having their day,
being discarded, and then even being revitalized in modified form in later work.
And so it should be.
Conclusion II: What is the prologue from our past?
Where, then, do we go in future? After surveying the archival ideas of the
century, I believe that we are gradually developing a new conceptual or theoreti
cal framework for our profession. In the new century ahead, I think that archi
vists will continue to shift their emphasis from the analysis of the properties and
characteristics of individual documents to an analysis of the functions, proces
ses, and transactions which cause documents to be created. Appraisal will there
fore continue to change from being an assessment of records for their potential
research value to becoming a macroappraisal analysis of the creator's key func
tions, programmes, activities, and interactions with clients, which the records
subsequently selected for continued preservation should most succinctly mirror.
Arrangement and description will concentrate less on physical record entities
and media, and develop instead enriched "value-added" contextual understan
dings of the information systems that create records and of related system docu
mentation and computer metadata. The role of archives within at least public
administrations and corporate bodies may change from being a supplicant
agency hoping for cooperation from record-creating entities in the transfer of old
records to becoming an auditing agency that monitors creators' performance in
maintaining and servicing certain categories of archival records left under the
creator's control.80 Reference and outreach services may accordingly change
when archives gradually evolve from being primarily sites for the storage of old
records that researchers visit to becoming instead virtual archives where archi
vists, from their contextualized postings to the Internet, will facilitate access by
the public anywhere in the world to thousands of interlinked record-keeping sys
tems both under the control of archives and those larger, more complex systems
left in the custody of their creators. Preservation will certainly shift its focus
from discardable physical storage formats to safeguarding through repeated
migrations the structure and contextual functionality of the information itself.
65
ARCHIEFWETENSCHAP
TERRY COOK WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE
80 For a discussion of these categories and related circumstances that permit an archives to leave records with
their creators for an open-ended period of time without threat, see Terry Cook, "Leaving Archival
Electronic Records in Institutions: Policy and Monitoring Arrangements at the National Archives of
Canada," Archives and Museum Informatics 9 (1995), pp. 141-49. The footnotes in that article refer readers
to the original 1990 debate, subsequently published in David Bearman, ed., Archival Management of
Electronic Records (Pittsburgh, 1991), between David Bearman and Ken Thibodeau, moderated by Margaret
Hedstrom, on the advantages and disadvantages of this strategy, a debate enjoined again by the contrasting
conclusions of the projects at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of British Columbia on elec
tronic records, and articulated anew by Luciana Duranti, Terry Eastwood, Frank Upward, and Greg O'Shea
and David Roberts, in a special theme issue of Archives and Manuscripts 24 (November 1996).