Archival 'grocery stores'
great grandfather, Thomas Morrison Millar, as well as my great
grandmother Minnie, who I think must have suffered so much.
This genealogical experience - or experiment, perhaps -
taught me a valuable lesson, not only about life, and about the
importance of communicating family histories so that your
children and grandchildren can connect with their past, but also,
and more pertinent to today's discussion, a lesson about the
role, the power, and, I hope, the rewards, of archivists in a
digital age. I want to reflect on that lesson today, as I consider
the question posed to me: what is the role of the archivist in
documenting society in a society that is increasingly
documenting itself?
To answer that question, we must first consider the
traditional role of archivists as custodians. As all archival studies
students learn by heart, the essence of archival service is to
acquire, preserve, and make available the documentary evidence
of society's communications, actions, and transactions. That
documentary evidence was, for centuries, a tangible entity:
a physical item that had to be managed in a particular
geographic location. The uniqueness of the item was intricately
connected to its placement within an aggregation of materials,
all of which were bound together by the integrity of their
collective content, context, and structure. Archivists do not
collect single items; we acquire accumulations of materials,
ideally through some formal process of transfer from creating
agency to storage room.
To provide this physical service, traditional archivists brought
these aggregations of archival materials into a repository,
arranged and described them, perhaps copied some of the
content, then invited researchers to access the holdings either in
person or remotely. This process was not just custodial, it was
linear: acquisition before preservation, preservation before
description, description before access. I have in the past
described these physical repositories as like archival 'grocery
stores', where archivists managed and made available
documentary goods, rather like butchers, grocers, or bakers
managed and sold meat, vegetables, or bread.
There is an important distinction, though, in the different
'goods' held in these repositories. Institutional or agency
archives are the products of a particular organization, often a
bureaucracy: the records of monarchs, churches, governments,
or businesses. They come into existence to help their creators
remember facts and acts. Reports, memoranda, financial ledgers,
registers - registers of the dead, perhaps; registers of soldiers
buried in cemeteries across Europe. Evidence of officialdom, of
deliberation and decision-making, the documentary remains of
actions and transactions.
Another type of archival good is less bureaucratic, more
personal. Diaries, letters, family photographs, memoirs - these
records are created deliberately, not as innocent by-products but
as conscious creations. They help people remember, just as
official records help bureaucrats remember, but that latter
remembering is more personal, intended not to capture facts
and acts but to memorialize experiences and memories.
Photographs show families at Christmas or on summer holiday;
letters tell husbands or wives or mothers about life on a particular
day in a particular place; diaries capture events and emotions,
to be recalled later, with pleasure, perhaps, or perhaps not.
Regardless of whether archival materials are categorized as
official or personal, the reality is that, for centuries, they could
only really live in one place. Copies might be generated, but the
originals were unique, irreplaceable, and singular. Possessing
them was the only way to preserve them, viewing them in person
the only way to access them.