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Foreword
Hogeschool van Amsterdam Archiefschool
Faculteit Digitale Media en Creatieve Industrie
Hogeschool van Amsterdam
DEVENTit B.V.
Developers Sc Inventors in IT
Doxis Informatiemanagers
Karmac Informatie Innovatie B.V.
Picturae
DE REE archiefsystemen
PICTURAE
DE REE
-
Erg goed in Erfgoed
Almost two decades ago, in an article in The American Archivist, I argued that
research in archivistics (or: archival science) would save the archival profession,
because research is the instrument for experimenting, inventing, changing, and
improving - and a profession that is not involved in "The endless cycle of idea and
actionendless inventionendless experiment" (T.S. Eliot) is doomed (Ketelaar, 2000).
Often, archive professionals do not realize that many if not all managerial or
practical questions can be solved more fundamentally when one allows for some
theoretical and methodological reflection. "Research," Barbara Craig (1996) wrote,
"cultivates a habit of examining received notions for their continuing pertinence and
relevance." (p. 110) Such a habit is essential for the archival professional who has to
be equipped to deal with the constant change in his or her environment, effecting
changes in records creation, preservation, communication, and use. As Arnoud
Glaudemans and Jacco Verburgt declare in the first sentence of their essay in this
volume: "Any account of present-day archives should not only address practical,
operational or managerial issues but also explicate the relevant theoretical issues
regarding the specific nature and societal impact of digital information - if only because
practical, operational or managerial issues, important as they obviously are, always
presuppose some underlying theoretical framework."
Archivistics offers such a theoretical framework, drawing on concepts like context,
authenticity, findability, and access. In researching the ontological and
epistemological archive(s), archivistics applies the archival method that is specific
for the discipline, but it also adopts methods from other disciplines. This is evidenced
by the various chapters in the recent book Research in the Archival Multiverse
(Gilliland, McKemmish, Lau, 2016). But not only in methods: archivistics is
increasingly profiting from what other disciplines can offer in conceptual and
theoretical understanding of archival phenomena. So, for example, in performance
studies dance may be understood as "the choreographic activation of the dancer's body
as an endlessly creative, transformational archive" (Lepecki, 2010, p. 46). This
resounds archivistics' concern with the fluidity of the archive as keeping former
instantiations of a record 'in reserve', to be released not as exact copies but as
re-enactments. And just as "the originating instantiation" of a dance keeps
possibilities for later re-enactment in reserve, so gets each activation of a record along
the records continuum extra significance in the light of subsequent activations.
Other 'archival turns' are also relevant to the theory, methodology and practice of
archivistics. This volume shows what is brought to the archivistics' table from fields
like media archaeology, speech act theory, information science, data science,
philosophy, semiotics, genre studies, and organization science. At the same time,
several essays in this volume indicate how archival theory and methodology can
enrich other disciplines. In this way Archives in Liquid Times tries to cross disciplinary
boundaries which so often keep scholarly and professional communities locked in
their own discourse.
Eric Ketelaar
This publication has been made possible by:
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