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
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