arnoud glaudemans, rienk jonker and frans smit beyond the traditional bounderies of archival theory: an interview with eric ketelaar EDITORS: Yes, it is a contradiction. But at some moment you need to fixate information; when it ends up in a document, a register etc. Make it persistent through time, in some way. This is one of the problems our liquid (or fluid) times bring us. When you do not do that in some way, then we have no archive at all. ERIC KETELAAR: But does this not contradict the whole idea of liquid times? Do you envision that, although we are in liquid times, we still need persistent representations? EDITORS: Yes! For accountability purposes, for instance. And in a hundred years from now you would want to look back; that is also what an archive is for. It is that simple. ERIC KETELAAR: In his second contribution, Van Bussel stresses that existing models and theories within archivistics have to be complemented, at least by theories from organisation science and information science; and he is focusing on the organisational side. What I like especially is the attention given to the behavioural, cultural aspects of record creation and use. Recordkeeping is not a mere technical process, but there are people involved. Van Bussel is right in stating that my concept of archivalisation has been referred to a lot, but that is has not yet been really tested in a practical situation. I tried to do that in my comparative studies. There is a practical link of this organisational model and the information model of Jonker. This is something that could be addressed further in discussions, for example in a reading group. The essay of Foscarini and Ilerbaig also focuses on the organisational aspects of recordkeeping. The authors agree with Heather MacNeill that diplomatics should be situated within the framework of other - philosophical, disciplinary - perspectives (a view which, by the way, seems not to be accepted by Duranti). Records are taken as communicative events, as forms of social practice, and these are approached through the lens of the structuring function of genres. This is a more 'bottom-up' approach, compared to diplomatics, which is forcing a set of requirements 'top down'. In my view of social and cultural archivistics I rather prefer the 'bottom-up' approach: to really study how people are creating and using records in practice. Archivists, as Foscarini and Ilerbaig rightly stress, should not lose contact with the daily practice of creating and using records. EDITORS: A current (Dutch) example of such a practice would be the 'archiving by design' approach: to 'architecturally' build in the archival functionality in applications used for controlling the environment. These applications are to be used in cooperative networks executing governmental tasks and processes by a large number of governmental organisations and other stakeholders. Here you will also need 'bottom-up' knowledge, otherwise it will never work. ERIC KETELAAR: It also has something to do with what Wanda Orlikowski called the 'duality of technology'; a particular technology shapes the way people are behaving, but the behaviour also shapes technology. One of the most famous examples is text-messaging; it was designed as a means to link the customer to the provider, but then some users discovered it could also be used to communicate with others. As to archival (re-)use, you could or should observe and study, for instance, how people who are actually using search facilities are shaping those facilities and are being shaped (for example: restricting their research to digital records). I have doubts about Smit's use of Timothy Morton's concept of a hyperobject. Is it meant as a metaphor or as reality? Should I take 'hyperobject' as the totality of all records, or of all digital information? EDITORS: The term should be taken as denoting a phenomenon that is so vast that it is difficult or impossible to oversee it and get a grip on it. For instance, Dutch philosopher René ten Bos uses the term to describe bureaucracy. In this vein it denotes our digital environment, a bit metaphorically, and comparable to how archaeologists consider the soil as the 'bodemarchief (soil-archive). ERIC KETELAAR: So, 'hyperobject' denotes the whole of digital data, of which records are a part. Could you not argue then, that because it is a hyperobject, the solution lies in decomposition through focusing on the records part of it? That would 'destroy' or make superfluous the concept of hyperobject, because records would remain approachable and overseeable. EDITORS: In daily practice we are confronted with a way of using and reusing data and records, in which the distinction between the two is blurring to a large extent. For example: how much 'recordness' remains in information when being reused in an open data context? The general problem here is that one, in fact, cannot easily identify the record. This is not only an operational problem, because capturing a record is also a matter of conceptualising. Through analysing, for instance, the aspects of context in the digital environment, you could define how you capture. ERIC KETELAAR: I would agree, for this discussion, that a record becomes a record only when it is captured in a recordkeeping system. The problem lies in the ubiquity of data. What and when data becomes a record, is a policy decision. I once visited a consulting company, whose main assets were their PowerPoints. I told them: forget all definitions of records and from now on capture these PowerPoints into a recordkeeping system. So, what defines 'record' here is the policy; it is not a question of (archival) theory. I like the idea of the archaeological 'bodemarchief but I do not think we need the concept of hyperobject here. As to the arguments about authenticity, and a new way of configuring it - authenticator, authenticating and the informed - is this a challenge for the archivist? EDITORS: In our daily work it is. For instance, through stressing the use and implementation of a metadata scheme for records. This, among other things, safeguards the necessary authenticity. ERIC KETELAAR: So, you capture records in a recordkeeping system, then it is moved to, let's say, the recordkeeping system of an archival institution: and throughout its life there should be a continuous authentication. One could define, in the continuum, certain points at which you have to act - a bit like a time stamp. All this ties in with continuum thinking: records are changing over time, and in retrospect one should be able to follow the chain back to 'version zero', through the metadata. archives in liquid times 302 303

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2017 | | pagina 153