What are Archives?

Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives: a reader

Louise Craven

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754673101
• eBook ISBN: 9781134759804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection of essays breaks new ground in archival studies in the UK where professional archival texts have traditionally concentrated on the how, not the why, of archival work. Studies of the theoretical role of, for example, the archive and the text or the archive and political power, have meanwhile been undertaken in other academic disciplines where there is an established forum for the discussion of related issues. This book invites the archivist to join that arena of debate, whilst appealing to all those interested in archives from other disciplines; the authors encourage archivists to step away from the practicalities of keeping archives to consider what it is they actually do in the cultural context of the early 21st century. The wider context of technological innovation and the internet form the backdrop to this collection. The book explores change and continuity in the archival paradigm, the textual nature of archives and asks if views of manuscripts and personal papers are changing; it looks at specific developments in community archives, at concepts of identity and culture in archives and it presents the fruits of innovative studies of users of archives. Taken together, these essays, written by leading experts in the field, provide a new understanding of the role of the archive today.

Theme I
Continuity and Change in the Archival Paradigm

Chapter 1

From the Archivist’s Cardigan to the Very Dead Sheep: What are Archives? What are Archivists? What do They Do?

Louise Craven

Introduction¹

The first chapter in this collection of essays introduces the reader to notions of change and continuity in the world of the archivist. It looks at five specific areas which have experienced transformation or significant development in the past ten or so years. It explores the nature and impact of these developments and asks what, if anything, the archival profession might do in response.

Walk into a record office today and what do you notice? How busy it is! Computer terminals, microfilm readers, racks of popular historical journals, posters and notices for all kinds of societies and activities, ‘email here’, signs to the café, the local history room and the shop; but most of all, it’s the sheer number of visitors and the buzz of activity which surrounds them which is striking.

In Britain today, the general functions of a record office might be said to be those of custodianship and storage of records which have been selected for permanent preservation, together with the provision of a public service. These general functions of course incorporate all those specialized ones of helping the public find what they want, cataloguing and the creation of finding aids, preservation and conservation, and the wider outreach roles of developing education, supporting local history and reaching new audiences. Like the theory which governs our profession, these functions are very much rooted in the second half of the twentieth century.

Compare the professional certainties of those decades with the developments of recent years which have affected archivists, archives and record offices in profound ways: technological advances and the popular use of the Internet; developments in the cultural and heritage sectors; a media profile which has made ‘archives’ a household word; electronic records whose usage is assured by a Modernising Government (Cm 4310 1999) agenda; and just becoming visible and audible are some debates in the academic world of an multidisciplinary nature which perceive archives in a wholly different way.

Technological Change

Firstly then, technological changes have brought new archives and led to a new way of thinking about archives. Whilst it is not quite true to say that everything has changed because of the Internet and Google, almost everything has: the Internet has changed what we do, what we talk about, how we go about finding things; it has changed our way of thinking and it has changed everyone’s expectations. In a wider context, we now look on a world in which theories of knowledge and ownership of knowledge have irrevocably shifted. The individual and the community, not the organization or the government, are the significant units now: our world and our place in it changed beyond all expectation since the coming of the World Wide Web.

Other contributions to this book address specific aspects of the changes which new technology, community software and social software have brought, and some of the challenges of electronic records are discussed later in this chapter. Here, then, I want to look in a general way at the changes which those technological advances have made to the record office itself and to the demands upon the archivist.

For the archivist, in a purely practical sense, all these developments in cyberspace mean that an online catalogue and a website are now standard requirements of every record office, and an Internet connection is expected. It means that the archivist now needs to be skilled in old and new techniques, familiar on the one hand with medieval diplomatic documents and on the other with the requirements of searching for genealogical and historical information on the Web. What we noted above about the ambience of the record office brings its own pressures on record office staff: sheer numbers of visitors with huge expectations. Shifts in post-war demographic patterns and the huge growth in pension provision in the last three decades of the twentieth century mean that the majority of visitors to record offices in Britain (actual or virtual) are over 60, with leisure time to pursue meaningful activities. These meaningful activities are mainly educational, probably family history or local history, and overwhelmingly of a wider heritage and cultural nature.

Changes in the Context of Heritage and Culture

The notion that archives are about identity, heritage and culture is certainly a prominent one: it is shared by government, by policy makers, by funding bodies and by umbrella archival organizations in the UK. The report of the Archives Task Force (ATF) Listening to the Past, Speaking to the Future (2004) and the report of the Mayor’s Commission on African and Asian Heritage (MCAAH) Delivering Shared Heritage (2005) both made specific recommendations to help archivists develop and present their collections in ways synonymous with a diverse, vibrant and thriving multicultural Britain.

Underpinning the re-thinking of archive collections in this context is CASBAH² (Caribbean Studies for Black and Asian History) which identified sources for black and Asian history in archives, libraries and media collections in the UK (Fig. 1.1). The CASBAH Project was funded by the Research Sector for Libraries Programme (RSLP) and was active in the years 2000–2002.

Figure 1.1 Homepage for the CASBAH website (by courtesy of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies)

A major outcome of the CASBAH project was its Survey Tool which advocated the revisiting of collections already catalogued to find sources of relevance to black and Asian studies (CASBAH 2002, Aims 2). Research underlying the Survey Tool led to the conclusion that there were indeed a great many sources for black and Asian history in the archives and libraries surveyed for the project, sources which might not at first glance appear to be relevant. Family and estate collections, for example, were found in many cases to reveal a great deal about landholding in the West Indies, about the ownership of slaves and about trade. These findings have been taken forward recently by the Museums Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) in a pilot project called Revisiting Archive Collections which is aimed at developing a methodology for capturing and incorporating new and hidden information into archive catalogues (Newman and Reilly 2007). This in itself signals a significant departure in archival theory and practice: though the Revisiting Archive Collections project is in its early stages, its very existence indicates a recognition that the role of the archivist is changing. The study of archives, like the study of history, is coming to be recognized as a dialogue between the present and the past. In the same way, then, as the historian undertakes revisionist research of topics previously investigated, the archivist will uncover and present new views of archival collections in response to critical issues which shape today’s cultural landscape.

Outside the confines of this specific project, and as part and parcel of the developing awareness of archives as a resource for diverse cultures and heritage, archivists have been urged by funding bodies, by government and by their own parent organizations to develop audiences in the light of the identity, heritage and culture of potential user communities.³ However, it is not altogether clear what this means. Take the concept of identity, for example: it is not at all evident that archivists have a shared understanding of what the concept means in relation to archives. In 2006, research carried out at the School for Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS) at the University of London showed that there had been little work done on archives and identity overall (Flinn et al. 2006); and two research seminars held in 2007 have not yet changed these circumstances.⁴ Moreover, the education of archivists in Britain today does not really equip them with a knowledge or understanding of identity in any detailed or specific sense. Indeed, different definitions of identity are to be found in the chapters below. It might help here if we try to define terms: what after all is identity about and what does it really mean? Though the ATF report and that of the Mayor’s Commission are both very helpful in defining heritage and culture for archivists, identity remains a difficult concept: topical, contentious, problematic. It seems that we may need to look to other disciplines for guidance.

For the sociologist Steven Miles, identity is about consumption (1996). For Anthony Easthope in Englishness and National Culture (1999), identity is about language (see his preface); for J.E. Toews in Cultural Reference and Public Memory identity is about memory and the built environment (2004). For some, of course, identity is perceived to be a political tool (Anderson 1983; Mann 2005; Arel and Ruble 2006). For the historian Jacques Le Goff, identity is about memory and the past (1992) whilst Stuart Hall, writing about the meaning of identity to members of the West Indian community, talks about a process of negotiation with dialogues of post-colonialism (Hall 1990, 225). By contrast, for the archivist Jeannette Allis Bastian, identity is about collective memory and history (Bastian 2003, 3). Others feel that identity is about place; a sense of place being fundamental to personal identity and health, bestowing psychological well-being (Young 1992, 15; Etherton 2006, 227).

Clearly, no general consensus as to the meaning of identity emerges. Perhaps colleagues in other sectors of the heritage and culture domain can help. Andrew Newman, lecturer in Museum Studies at the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, found in his recent research on identity that an individual’s identity is constructed and multifaceted, and that it changes in response to information, experience and circumstance (Newman 2006). He examined the use of museums in addressing problems of social exclusion and found that museums contribute to social inclusion through their key role in facilitating identity construction. And he found that the way in which exhibitions are themselves constructed can exclude or include individuals.⁵ In his research Newman used a standard circuit of culture model based on representation, production, consumption, regulation and identity, developed by Paul Du Gay (Du Gay et al. 1997, 3).

Du Gay’s work is central to any understanding of the significance of culture and the cultural, and explains to us why the study of culture has come to occupy a much enhanced role, not only in the social sciences but in the economy and in society in the UK in general. No longer seen as an inferior to, and merely reflective of, economic and political processes, cultural processes are recognized to be constitutive of the social world in general and, most significantly, to be the producer of social meanings. These social meanings regulate the functioning of all social practices we see around us; an understanding of the cultural conditions of all social practices is recognized to be essential to inform any understanding of how culture and society work. The study of culture is thus crucial for understanding all forms of production and consumption, as well as of the media, of film, of narratives of every kind, of all cultural and heritage institutions, of museums and of archives.

Newman’s research and Du Gay’s methodology are not generally known in the archives sector but their application to archives is immediately useful in generating questions like: do archive exhibitions and events facilitate or inhibit identity construction in the same way? If so, what might we do about this? Does this mean that an exhibition of, let’s say, any kind of archival document, excludes as well as includes visitors? and so on.

Decades of research into critical aspects of the role of museums in society and the perception and use of museums by members of the public have established the museums sector in the UK at the forefront of knowledge and understanding of the country’s heritage and culture. As a result, museum professionals have a great deal to tell the archival profession in the UK and archivists have a great deal to learn.

The Report from the Mayor’s Commission on African and Asian Heritage (MCAAH) made only too clear the crucial role which archives play in lending understanding and intelligibility to the UK’s shared heritage. In this context, the archival profession needs to think about how it can collaborate with other heritage professionals, how it can gain an understanding of those crucially important cultural concepts, and how that understanding might shape practice enabling it to deliver audience development in the light of identity, heritage and culture.

Archives and the Academic Context

The acid test of any theoretical innovation is the question ‘What new fields and types of action does the theory open up to us that we did not or could not see before?’ (Bennet 1987, 64)

In recent decades, the UK’s archives sector has not been noted for its academic research. The historian-archivist of the mid-twentieth century has disappeared: chased away by Jenkinsonian notions that passive archivists are good archivists on the one hand, and by increasing practical demands from access, use, collection development and management on the other. By contrast, the discussion of, and discourses about, archives in other academic disciplines have attained a new profile in recent years.

Recommendations of the MCAAH Archives Diversification Subcommittee concerning academic research in the archives sector, together with the established research centre at the School of Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow, the recently developed Archives and Records Management Research Network (ARMReN) at SLAIS and that taking shape at the Centre for Archive and Information Studies at the University of Dundee, indicate that change is on the way, but it might be useful here to consider briefly the debates around archives within other academic disciplines.

Archives and Archaeologists

Record-keeping has long been recognized as an indicator of the development of civilization by archaeologists and anthropologists. David Keightley has shown us in astonishing detail the use of oracle bones as records in Bronze Age China (Keightley 1978). At the end of the nineteenth century J.P. Mahaffy explained to us the archive activities of the ancient Greeks (Mahaffy 1877, 391, 395). More recently, new techniques of epigraphical analysis have brought greater understanding of archive functions of late Roman and Byzantine inscriptions (Roueche 1989).

Archives and Historians

Historians have of course discussed documents, sources and archives from the foundation of their discipline. Recent Unleashing the Archives conferences have given new ideas about archives a prominence amongst some historians: we see how archives may be presented as evidence, as myth, as personal statement, as construction and manipulation.⁶ Many historians, though, prefer to discuss archives in a routine sources-and-methods sort of way, which has been standard down the decades. A theoretical analysis of ‘what is history’ accompanied by ‘how to do historical research’ for undergraduate and post-graduate students has been a recognized historiographical contribution from the great historians of very different persuasions since Sir Herbert Butterfield’s Whig Interpretation of History in 1931. R.G. Collingwood’s The Idea of History (1946), E.H. Carr’s What is History? (1961), Sir Geoffrey Elton’s The Practice of History (1967) and Richard Evans’s In Defence of History (1997, 2004) are noted landmarks in this long historiographical tradition.

Ian Anderson’s work on academic users of archives (Anderson 2004) is of a different order, engaging with archivists to better provide historians and other academics with what they need: this dialogue is unusual, for historians’ discussion of sources has traditionally been detached from archivists.

Recently, the archive has also been at the centre of a lively discussion between social historians and cultural historians in debate about theories, methods and perceptions. It is to this discussion that the cultural historian Carolyn Steedman refers when she talks about the new politics of the archive (2002, 2–3), of which more below.

Archives and Literature

Records and archives are intertwined through the narratives of modern English and European literature like a golden thread. Records are found in Chaucer’s ‘Prologue’ to The Canterbury Tales and in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 2; archivists are described in Cervantes’ Don Quixote and archives by Sterne in Tristram Shandy. Patents generate Swift’s Drapier’s Letters; wills and deeds determine fate in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Theme I Continuity and Change in the Archival Paradigm
• Theme II The Impact of Technology
• Theme III The Impact of Community Archives
• Theme IV Archival Use and Users
• Index