The promise and threat of digital options in an archival age

Archivaria

Volumn 47, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 114-135

  Koltun, Lilly ^a  

^a National Archives of Canada   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0007075272     PISSN: 03186954     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. See Terry Cook, "What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift, " Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997), pp. 17-63.
2. To explore the connection between history and semiotics, see Brooke Williams, "What Has History To Do with Semiotic?" Semiotica 54, nos. 3 & 4 (1985), pp. 267-333, available revised with index and bibliography as History and Semiotic 4, (Summer 1985), published by the Toronto Semiotic Circle, Victoria College, University of Toronto.
3. Databases are entering the terabyte (1 trillion byte) and petabyte (1000 terabytes) size.
4. "Tremendous Influence of the Movies, " Sherbrooke Daily Record (30 December 1925), a journalist repeating the comments of Charles Merg of Harper's Magazine.
5. The film thanked thirty-three archival and private family sources, and interspersed interviews with seven prominent personalities who were not actors with interviews with fourteen characters who were actors and voice-overs from five actual announcers from past news services.
6. Respecting archival authoring, see Tom Nesmith, "Seeing with Archives: The Changing Intellectual Place of Archives, " paper presented at the annual conference of the Association of Canadian Archivists, Ottawa, 6 June 1997 (publication forthcoming).
7. See Allan Sekula, "Photography Between Labour and Capital, " in Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Robert Wilkie, eds., Mining Photographs and Other Pictures 1948-1968 (Halifax, 1983), pp. 193-268, particularly "Introduction: Reading an Archive, " pp. 193-202.
8. Simon Caulkin, of the London Observer Service, "The case for open-book management, " Toronto Globe & Mail (28 June 1999).
9. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish, The Birth of the Prison Alan Sheridan, trans. (New York [1975], 1995).
10. For example: "The Australian Oceanographic Data Centre recently advertised in a marine science newsletter in an attempt to root out hidden treasure held by individual scientists. Centre head Ben Searle estimates that 70 to 80 per cent of the marine and coastal data that has been collected in Australia 'resides in filing cabinets and on personal computers, and its existence is unknown to all but the owners'. " Tony Reichhardt, "It's sink or swim as a tidal wave of data approaches, " Nature 399 (10 June 1999), p. 518.
11. See David Bearman, "Archival Strategies, " American Archivist 58 (Fall 1995), pp. 380-413 and, for a critical perspective, Paul Marsden, "When is the Future: Comparative Notes on the Electronic Record-Keeping Projects of the University of Pittsburgh and the University of British Columbia, " Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997), pp. 158-73.
12. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Sincerely Yours, " (1982) in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England, 1996), p. 181. This is a companion article to an earlier essay, "The Originality of the Avant-Garde, " (1981), reprinted in the same volume, pp. 151-70. There, Krauss is aware of the relevance of her argument not only for visual art, but for historical enquiry: "The theme of originality, encompassing as it does the notions of authenticity, originals, and origins, is the shared discursive practice of the museum, the historian, and the maker of art. And throughout the nineteenth century all of these institutions were concerted, together, to find the mark, the warrant, the certification of the original" (p. 162). It is worth noting how heavily archives rely upon the notion of themselves as repositories of unique records to justify their sponsorship, even while collecting heavily among the compound media.
13. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in Hannah Arendt, ed. Illuminations (New York, 1968), pp. 217-51. Paper originally published in 1936.
14. The term is used, for example, in Alison Bullock's concise, plain language résumé, titled "Preservation of Digital Information: Issues and Current Status, " No. 60 (May 1999), in the Network Backgrounder series of internal documents of the National Library of Canada. Most issues of this internal series are translated and made available as Network Notes and Flash Réseau on the National Library of Canada website: Network Notes: http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/pubs/netnotes/netnotes.htm.
15. The credits to Natural Born Killers list some sixteen sources of archival footage, from film libraries and archives to news and magazine sources, as well as quotations from seven previous fictional television films and broadcasts.
16. See Bill Holm and George Irving Quimby, Edward S. Curtis in the Land of the War Canoes: A Pioneer Cinematographer in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle, c.1980).
17. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris, 1957).
18. The evident and surreal montage of archival records in the film directed by Stone acknowledges overtly the complicit act of consumer viewing which docudramas and traditional documentaries attempt to hide or overcome from their position of supposed seamless and impersonal narrative. It acknowledges that the audience for popular culture products is defined differently from previous observers.
19. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1965) and Culture and Society (Harmondsworth, 1963).
20. Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster (St. Louis, 1975). Original French publication, 1973.
21. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976). Original French publication, 1967.
22. An instance of how this worked for Natalie Zemon Davis, including a nice distinction from the "radical grammatology" of Derrida's theory of deconstruction, is explored by Richard Brown in his review article "The Value of 'Narrativity' in the Appraisal of Historical Documents: Foundation for a Theory of Archival Hermeneutics, " Archivaria 32 (Summer 1991), pp. 152-56. He was reviewing Davis' Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, 1987). As follow up, see Richard Brown, "Records Acquisition Strategy and Its Theoretical Foundation: The Case for a Concept of Archival Hermeneutics, " Archivaria 33 (Winter 1991-92), pp. 34-56.
23. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester, 1989). Original French publication, 1979.