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).

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 1999 | | pagina 34