The power of meaning: The archival mission in the postmodern age

American Archivist

Volumn 65, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 42-55

  Greene, Mark A ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 2442606793     PISSN: 03609081     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.17723/aarc.65.1.l914668v881wv19n     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. "Beyond the Screen: The Records Continuum and Archival Cultural Heritage" at (April 30, 2002), 2. Emphasis in original.
2. "Law, Evidence and Electronic Records: A Strategic Perspective From The Global Periphery" at (April 30, 2002), 13-15.
3. That this address was controversial is attested to by the discussion about it on the Aus-Archivists e-mail list (April 30, 2002)
4. beginning 28 November 2000 with a posting by Adrian Cunningham under the subject "Questions from Abroad," and continuing later under the heading "Cook and Harris on the Continuum." 9 Adrian Cunningham, "The Soul and Conscience of the Archivist: Meditations on Power, Passion and Positivism in a Crusading Profession," in Wresting the Archon from the Arkheion - A Question of Right(s) and a Call for Justice to Always Come? A Festschrift Celebrating the Ongoing Life-Work of Verne Harris, ed. Ethel Krieger (Pretoria: National Archives of South Africa, forthcoming), 169.
5. Verne Harris, "Claiming Less, Delivering More: A Critique of Positivist Formulations on Archives in South Africa," Archivaria 44 (Fall 1997): 137.
6. Duranti, "The Concept of Appraisal and Archival Theory," American Archivist 57 (Spring 1994): 336, 333.
7. The other venue cited is: Luciana Duranti, "Commentary, "American Archivist 57 (Winter 1994): 36-37. Duranti is here rebutting NeXT Computer executive Ronald Weissman's assertion that "archival institutions are 'information repositories'" whose most important users are outside researchers building knowledge.
8. Cox, "Re-Discovering the Archival Mission: The Recordkeeping Functional Requirements Project at the University of at the Pittsburgh, A Progress Report," Archives & Museum Informatics 8, no. 4(1994): 294. To be sure, the argument that archives have a purely evidential mission had a strong progenitor in the U.S. in Margaret Cross Norton, who (like Duranti) drew heavily on the work of Hilary Jenkinson in England.
9. Richard J. Cox, Documenting Localities: A Practical Model for American Archivists and Manuscripts Curators (Lanham, Md. & London: The Society of American Archivists and Scarecrow Press, 1996), 150-51.
10. Luciana Duranti, "Archival Universality?" Online postings, May 22 and 24, 1993
11. Archives and Archivists Listserv (April 30, 2002).. Duranti's argument is a complex and subtle one. In the course of these same list postings, in fact, she wrote (on May 24), "The point I am trying to make is that the reason we preserve archives at all, of any kind, is cultural." In the paragraph immediately preceding this quotation, however she defines culture as solely a matter of actions and interactions understood in authentic context. That definition is decidedly different from what most of us mean when we refer to culture. For instance, for most of us recorded oral history would be a perfectly suitable cultural source, but it seems that Duranti would deny this because such sources are not authentic in a recordkeeping sense.
12. Cox, Documenting Localities, viii.
13. See also Cox, "Re-Discovering the Archival Mission," 294: "The preservation of the evidence will provide more than is necessary for historians and others to conduct their research, and this focus on evidence . . . is much more manageable and crucial to the archival mission."
14. See, for example, Luciana Duranti, "Archival Theory," Online posting, October 6, 1993
15. Duranti, "The Records: Where Archival Universality Resides," Archival Issues 19, no. 2 (1994): 83-94;
16. Luciana Duranti and Heather MacNeil, "The Protection of the Integrity of Electronic Records: An Overview of the UBC-MAS Research Project," Archivaria 42 (Fall 1996): 47, 62-63.
17. Margaret Cross Norton, Norton on Archives: The Writings of Margaret Cross Norton on Archival and Records Management, ed. Thornton W. Mitchell (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975), 251.
18. Cox has implied that he rejects the notion of a universal archival theory ["The Documentation Strategy and Archival Appraisal Principles: A Different Perspective," Archivaria 38 (Fall 1994): 12]
19. but he seems to believe that records, at least, have an objective nature-at any rate he believes that the Pittsburgh project has identified a "concept of the record . . . that transcends time, place, and technology." "The Record, Is It Evolving?" Records and Retrieval Report 10 (March 1994): 4.
20. Cox, "Putting the Puzzle Together" (emphasis added). Also, Cox, Closing an Era: Historical Perspectives on Modern Archives and Records Management (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2000), 151:
21. "Archivists and records managers have to be concerned with what might happen to the record, especially for accountability and evidence." Greg O'Shea has said the same thing in almost the same words, in "Grasping the Nettle: The Evolution of the Australian Archives Electronic Records Policy," Reference Service for Archives nd Manuscripts, ed. Laura B. Cohen (New York & London: The Haworth Press, Inc., 1997), 144.
22. Terry Cook, "Who Will Do It if We Don't?: The Cultural Mission of Archives vis-à-vis Electronic Records" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists, Chicago, August 1997).
23. Cunningham, "The Soul and Conscience of the Archivist," 174.
24. Ross, Changing Trains at Wigan: Digital Preservation and the Future of Scholarship (London: National Preservation Office, The British Library 2000), 4, 5. Available on the Web at
25. and at (May 3, 2002).
26. See also, for example, Christine L. Borgman, From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 205, 231-32;
27. Jan Duffy, Harvesting Experience: Reaping the Benefits of Knowledge (Prairie Village, Kans.: ARMA, 1999), 12-14.
28. Bill Proudfit, "Records Managers, Archivists, Document Control Managers and Anyone Else Who Keeps Stuff," Online posting, 1 July 1998, Business Archives List (April 30, 2002).
29. The business archivists on this list also seem fairly united in the belief that the "stuff" of archives is and must be a combination of records, library material, and other "historical" material-just so long as it is "needed" by the company in some way (see the other postings on 1 and 2 July 1998). The importance that nonrecord material in institutional archives has to internal and external clients is also reflected, to some extent, in the responses business archivists gave to a survey asking which types of material were used most frequently and by whom. See Mark A. Greene, "'The Surest Proof': The Use of Business Records and Implications for Appraisal," Archivaria 45 (Spring 1998): 127-69.
30. Duffy, Harvesting Experience, 13. As this article was undergoing final edits, the draft final report for a 30-month NHPRC-funded research project began to be distributed informally. The project aim was "to conduct an analysis of recordkeeping practices in six private-sector environments with the goals of producing case studies, [and] assessing the degree to which functional requirements for electronic recordkeeping are applicable in settings without highly structured business processes." The report, Margaret Hedstrom and David Wallace, "Expanding the Options: Strategies For Preserving Electronic Records of Collaborative Processes" (Draft Final Report, NHPRC Grant Number 97-3265), concludes in part that: While collaborative teams may be rich in knowledge they are relatively poor in their capacity to produce "official records" and ability to adequately capture explicit context meeting . . . archival standards. So, a key challenge for archivists seeking to appraise broader forms and genres of records-such as email, websites, and meeting notes-produced by collaborations is to develop methods for appraising "non-record" or "near-record" documents containing information or evidence that might be appraised as having archival value-and which might conceivably be captured and preserved as a record.
31. Elizabeth Adkins, "Re: Question of the Week," June 11, 1998. Business Archives List. (May 2, 2002).
32. For additional affirmation of the importance of oral history/tradition in modern business, see Thomas A. Stewart, "The Leading Edge; The Cunning Plots of Leadership" Fortune 138 (September 7, 1998), 165ff.
33. Unfortunately, according to Duranti, oral history interviews "are no evidence. . . . Their place is not in archives, and it is not part of the responsibility of archivists to conduct such an activity." Further, "the result of such activity is not archival and cannot be used as evidence of its content by any researcher, no matter how sloppy such researcher is." Luciana Duranti, postings to the Archives and Archivists Listserv, May 22, 1993 and May 24, 1993.
34. For a primer on data warehousing, see Lawrence Fisher, "Along the Infobahn: Data Warehouses," Strategy- Business (Third Quarter 1996) (May 2, 2002).
35. "To optimize performance in such applications, data warehouses structure the data, rather than the query, with various indexing schemes, so that the system can respond rapidly to unforeseeable queries. Data warehouses can be optimized for analytical tasks precisely because they are not called upon to process transactions, and need not maintain the absolute accuracy at any moment in time that O.L.T.P. [on-line transaction processing] systems must." For an archival program that explicitly recognizes both the administrative and archival value of data warehouses, see the Minnesota State Archives' "Trustworthy Information Systems Handbook," (April 30, 2002).
36. The project to digitize the actual film footage is described in a New York Times article, "CNN Video Archives to Become Digital Database," April 23, 2001.
37. Currently, CNN makes catalog records of tens of thousands of its film reels (edited news pieces and b-roll) available to the public at (April 30, 2002).
38. Moreover, information-bits and pieces of disaggregated data-has meaning, increasingly, in the modern world. French archival educator Bruno Delmas argues, in fact, that the "new paradigm" for archives in the twenty-first century is to provide society with access to information rather than to preserve certain kinds of records. This is reality, he insists, and archivists better get used to it. He wrote, "There are no more categories of documents corresponding to identified uses, . . . but a mass of information for unlimited and endless requests." Delmas, "Archival Science Facing the Information Society," Archival Science 1 (March 2001): 30.
39. Contrast this to Cox, Closing an Era, 135-49, where he takes the Web as the focus of an argument that "archives are records not information."
40. Hilary Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration (Oxford: Percy Lund, Humphries1922), 11. In addition to the characteristic of impartiality, Jenkinson identified the characteristics of authenticity (they are created as credible by those who rely on them for action, and maintained inviolate for the same reason), naturalness, interrelationship (that is, context: the significance of every document depends on its relationship to every other), and uniqueness as defining an archival record.
41. The Haworth quote is from "The Principles Speak for Themselves: Articulating a Language of Purpose for Archives" in The Archival Imagination: Essays in Honour of Hugh A. Taylor, ed. Barbara L. Craig (Ottawa: Association of Canadian Archivists, 1992), 94.
42. Luciana Duranti, "The Records: Where Archival Universality Resides," 92.
43. See also Duranti, "The Concept of Appraisal and Archival Theory," 329-37.
44. Ham, "The Archival Edge," American Archivist 38 (January 1975): 5-13.
45. Or, according to Barbara Reed in the influential 1987 first edition of the Australian manual Keeping Archives, ed. Ann Pederson (Sydney: Australian Society of Archivists Incorporated, 1987), 100:
46. "The task of constructing a mirror of society is difficult, but possible, and it is this role which archivists should seek to fulfill." This goal was echoed by documentation strategy advocates of "adequate" documentation of a region, process, or topic. See, for example, Helen W. Samuels, "Who Controls the Past," American Archivist 49 (Spring 1986): 109-24
47. and Richard J. Cox and Helen W. Samuels, "The Archivist's First Responsibility: A Research Agenda to Improve the Identification and Retention of Records of Enduring Value," American Archivist 51 (Winter and Spring 1988): 28-42.
48. The goal of objective documentary completeness was reinforced in 1992 by a query from Gerald George, then executive director of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, who asked whether archivists really had "such a great grip on things that every significant scrap of a manuscript and every significant tape of a conversation-everything that Americans are going to need to understand their history-is truly being saved and made readily available to users." "Maybe the Entire Field is Naked!" Annotations 26 (March 1992): 5.
49. Harris, "Law, Evidence, and Electronic Records," 15.
50. Some scholars have suggested that the only way for postmodernism to survive the threat of complete self-immolation in its own infinite deconstruction and total relativism, is through a combination of practical realism and the philosophy of pragmatism connected to James, Dewey, and more recently Richard Rorty. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 283ff.;
51. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Truth: A History and Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Griffin, 1997), 220-21, provides a more skeptical, but respectful, assessment of pragmatism's ability to render postmodernism more moderate and practical.
52. W. Ross Winterowd, A Teacher's Introduction to Composition in the Rhetorical Tradition (Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994), 114.
53. See also William Grassie, "Postmodernism: What One Needs to Know," Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, 32 (March 1997): 83-94. Available on the Web at: (April 30, 2002).
54. "Instead of asking, what is postmodernism?" one scholar writes, "we should ask . . . what is at stake in its debates? . . . not, what does postmodernism mean?, but, what does it do?" Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 10.
55. The earliest grappling with post-modernism in an archival context of which I am aware is Peter A. Russell, "The Manx Peril: Archival Theory in Light of Recent American Historiography," Archivaria 32 (Summer 1991): 124-37.
56. Russell saw post-modernist theory as a threat to archives. Elisabeth Kaplan has written two of the most accessible and (to my mind) convincing examinations of the compelling need for archivists to understand and acknowledge post-modernist thought: "We Are What We Collect, We Collect What We Are: Archives and the Construction of Identity," American Archivist 63 (Spring/Summer 2000): 143-51;
57. "Practising Archives with a Postmodern Perspective" (paper presented at the University of Michigan Sawyer Seminar on "Archives, Documentation, and the Institutions of Social Memory," January 2001).
58. Rather than cite here the many other archival articles grappling with postmodernism, please see note 13 in Terry Cook's recent "Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts" Archival Science 1 (March 2001): 3-24.
59. Anne Gilliland-Swetland, "Digital Communications: Documentary Opportunities Not to Be Missed," Archival Issues 20, no. 1 (1995): 47.
60. Some archivists on what I would call the cutting edge of the archival paradigm go further, and insist that archivists have responsibility not simply for appraising, preserving, and making accessible a wide range of material with enduring meaning, but also for actively assisting in interpreting that material- actively mediating between user or potential user on the one hand and the meaning or relevance of the material on the other. Appraisal and selection is only part of our role in providing meaningful documentary material, they argue-we should be active mediators, helpers, even interpreters of the material in our care. The concept of mediation here goes far beyond the extent to which we (consciously or unconsciously) mediate between users and archives in the way we promote and describe our holdings. For example, Fran Blouin has written that archivists "will need to become much more aware of our role as mediators, that is, mediators between records creators and records repositories, between archives and users, between conceptions of the past and extant documentation." Francis X. Blouin, "Archivists, Mediation, and the Constructs of Social Memory," Archival Issues 24, no. 2(1999): 111.
61. Others outside the archives profession have noted the importance of our mediating role. "[Your discipline] is about appraising and keeping records of history-making events and the acts spoken by history-makers, and doing that in a way that allows you to be effective partners for those history-makers in their re-membering of the past." (Emphasis added.) Chauncey Bell, "Re-membering the Past: Organizational Change: What is it, and what does it mean for records professionals?" Keynote address to the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Government Archivists and Records Administrators, Sacramento, California, July 17, 1997, (April 30, 2002).
62. Bell was at the time Senior Vice President of Business Design Associates. See also this evocative assessment of human indexers and catalogers (and compare it to the automatic generation of metadata envisioned by theorists of recordkeeping systems): "She interprets. Looks for meaning. Provides context, cross-references, weaves diverse threads into easily searched entries. She digs out concepts. . . ." Clifford Stoll, High Tech Heretic: Reflections of a Computer Contrarian (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 191-92.
63. Ketelaar, "Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives" submitted for publication in Archival Science.