The past that archives keep: Memory, history, and the preservation of archival records

Archivaria

Volumn 51, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 48-80

  Brothman, Brien ^a  

^a Rhode Island State Archives and Records Administration   (United States)

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EID: 41549150299     PISSN: 03186954     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (148)

1. Georg Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York, 1956), p. 6.
2. Michael Oakeshott, "History and the Social Sciences," The Social Sciences (London, 1936), pp. 71-81.
3. Early usages of the term "memory" in archives discourse were based on assumptions about its meaning more than on rigorous conceptual analysis and understanding. This nonchalance remains widespread today. However, a number of archival scholars have recently begun to probe more deeply into the notion of memory and its implications for the keeping of records. Among the first to turn to the investigation of memory in an archival context was Terry Cook. See, for example, "Beyond the Screen: The Records Continuum and Archival Cultural Heritage," paper delivered at the Australian Society of Archivists Conference, Melbourne, 18 August 2000; "Archives, Evidence, and Memory: Thoughts on a Divided Tradition, Archival Issues 22 (1997), pp. 177-182. The University of Michigan's Sawyer Seminar 2000-2001 dealt with "Archives, Documentation, and the Institutions of Social Memory." There, Cook presented an excellent discussion paper on archives-memory issues: "Remembering the Future: The Role of Archives in Constructing Social Memory." Elsewhere, Richard Cox, for example, writes that "time, memory, and durability" are intimately connected.
4. This may be a valid statement, but unless its terms are explained, it is impossible to say what it means, let alone decide whether it is true or not. "Searching for Authority: Archivists and Electronic Records in the New World at Fin de Siécle [sic]," First Monday 5, no. 1 (2000).
5. Cox, "The Concept of Public Memory and Its Impact on Archival Programming," Archivaria 36 (Autumn 1993), pp. 122-135.
6. Space limitations preclude consideration here of the implications of the concept of evidence for our memory argument. For numerous reasons, the record-keeping community has recently invested very heavily in the notion of evidence. Along with Terry Cook, Verne Harris, Mark Greene, and others, my view is that record-keepers need to revisit the position of "evidence" in archival practice. Elsewhere, I argue that record-keepers' business is to keep records of business transactions and past events, not to keep or ensure "evidence." On the contrary, the emergence of evidence involves the retrospective (re)construction of a documentary universe by later users for myriad purposes. It is not possible to trick time by creating evidence in anticipation even as one creates records. Thus, record-keepers and records managers, as their professional titles suggest, keep and manage records, not evidence. Once having been created and kept, records may be placed into evidence; evidence cannot be pre-emptively placed in records. The creation of records and the construction of evidence involve different social practices, each occurring at different times. This view is developed more extensively in Brien Brothman, "Afterglow: Some Concepts of Record and Evidence in Archival Discourse," submitted for publication.
7. For a classic statement, see William Saffady, "The Document Life Cycle: A White Paper," prepared for the Association for Information and Image Management, 1997. Available at http://www.documentconversion.com/news.htm.
8. For example, Jay Atherton's often-cited repudiation of the life cycle and advocacy of continuum management partly represented a strategic attempt to resolve an organizational issue concerning the respective professional roles of archivists and records managers at the National Archives of Canada at the time. Jay Atherton, "From Life Cycle to Continuum: Some Thoughts on the Records Management-Archives Relationship," Archivaria 21 (Winter 1985), pp. 43-51.
9. See also Matti Pulkkinen, "Turning Informational Value to Business Value A Holistic Approach of [sic] Records Management in the Information Age," DLM Forum'99, Electronic Records http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/dlm/fulltext/full_pulk_en.htm.
10. For an example of the repudiation of the governing biological metaphor in organization studies, see Barbara Czarniawska, Narrating the Organization (Chicago, 1997).
11. Lewis J. Bellardo and Lynn Lady Bellardo, comps, A Glossary for Archivists, Manuscript Curators, and Records Managers (Chicago, 1992), p. 3. The authors present this as an older, alternative usage.
12. On the long tradition of thought about the idea of cycles in history, see Robert A. Nisbet, Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development (London, 1969), passim.
13. See also geographer Yi-fu Yuan Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception: Attitudes and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1974), p. 148.
14. The American Heritage Dictionary defines "cycle" as follows: "1. A time interval in which a characteristic step, esp. a regularly repeated, event or sequence of events occurs. 2.a. A single complete execution of a periodically repeated phenomenon." Interestingly, the National Archives of Australia's draft of its DIRKS Manual (Design and Implementation of Recordkeeping Systems Manual for Commonwealth Agencies Part 1, Exposure Draft, February 2000) describes its continuum approach as "cyclical." http://www.naa.gov.au/Govserv/techpub/DIRKSman/Part_1.html
15. Sue McKemmish, "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: A Continuum of Responsibility," Proceedings of the Records Management Association of Australia 14th National Convention, 15-17 September 1997, RMAA, Perth, Australia, 1997 http://www.sims.monash.edu.au/rcrg/publications/recordscontinuum/smckp2.html.
16. Glenda Acland, Kate Cummings, and Sue McKemmish, "The End of the Beginning. The SPIRT Recordkeeping Metadata Project," paper delivered at the Australian Society of Archivists Conference, 1999.
17. For a similar characterization of the continuum model, see Cook, "Beyond the Screen: The Records Continuum and Archival Cultural Heritage," p. 12.
18. Gerdien Jonker, The Topography of Remembrance: The Dead, Tradition and Collective Memory in Mesopotamia (Leiden, 1995), p. 14. There is a body of literature dealing with the dating of the rise of linear history and its displacement of other ways of ordering the relationship between past and present. See
19. Mark Salber Phillips, "Reconsiderations on History and Antiquarianism: Arnaldo Momigliano and the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain," Journal of the History of Ideas 57, no. 2 (1996), pp. 297-316.
20. Diane Elam, "Postmodern Romance," in Bill Readings and Bennet Schaber, eds., Postmodernism Across the Ages: Essays for a Postmodernity that Wasn't Born Yesterday (Syracuse, 1993), pp. 217-228
21. David Harvey, "Postmodernism," The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, 1989), pp. 58-59
22. Peter Stearns, Meaning Over Memory: Recasting the Teaching of Culture and History (Chapel Hill, 1993).
23. Matt K. Matsuda, The Memory of the Modern (Oxford, 1996), p. 166.
24. Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record (Cambridge, MA, 1993)
25. Jack Goody, "Writing and Its Social Effects," in Goody, ed., Literacy in Primitive Societies (Cambridge, 1968). On external storage systems, see note 22.
26. Benedetto Croce supplied a classic argument for history as inevitably centred on the living present rather than on the dead past, and argued that all history is "contemporary history." Benedetto Croce, Theory and History of Historiography, Douglas Ainslie, trans. (London, 1921).
27. One is also reminded of J.H. Plumb lament in The Death of the Past (London, 1967). The word "distanciation" comes from Paul Ricoeur.
28. Paul Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation," in John B. Thompson, ed., Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 131-144. For a discussion of identity and difference and the difference between diachrony and history
29. Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, 1972), pp. 123-129.
30. On memory's overcoming of historical time, see Kerwin Lee Klein, "On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse," Representations 69 (Winter 2000). Klein speculates on the social and psychological reasons why memory has recently been overshadowing history as the means by which this generation prefers to relate to the past.
31. Steven Knapp, "Collective Memory and the Actual Past," Representations 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 123-149.
32. The literature on the relations between history and memory has grown dramatically in volume and complexity over the last half of this past century. Much of the literature focuses on whether and when history has prevailed over memory and memory over history. Apart from Nietzsche (On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, 1873)
33. Freud, Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York and London, 1951)
34. chapter 2 remains required reading, as does Frederic Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge, 1964).
35. Some of the significant works marking more recent developments of the field include Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966)
36. the special issue on memory in the Journal of American History 75, no. 4 (1989)
37. David Lowenthal, "The Timeless Past: Some Anglo-American Historical Preconceptions," pp. 1263-1280
38. the periodical History and Memory from Indiana University Press
39. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York, 1989)
40. Elizabeth Deeds Ermath, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton, 1991)
41. John Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ, 1994)
42. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, Volume I: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London, 1996)
43. Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Clamon, trans. (New York, 1992)
44. Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (New England, 1993)
45. Marcel Detienne, "Comparative Historicities," South Atlantic Quarterly 98, nos. 1/2 (Winter/Spring 1999)
46. Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, 1994)
47. Matsuda, Memory of the Modern, passim. The Holocaust has spawned many studies on individual and collective memory.
48. Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed., Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Cambridge, MA, 1994)
49. Dominick La Capra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, 1998)
50. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, 1999)
51. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1982)
52. James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London, 1993)
53. Eric L. Santner, "History Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma," in Saul Friedlander, ed., Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington, 1993). Germany and France have been especially active in engendering a renewed interest in memory and history. Pierre Nora suggests that the currency of memory studies is a symptom of the disappearance of the places of memory in the face of a growing stockpile of written archives feeding history's approach to the past.
54. Les Lieux de Mémoire (3 vols.) published by Gallimard, 1984. A concise account of Nora's important work on memory is available in his article "Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire," Representations 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 7-25.
55. Henry Rousso, The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France (Philadelphia, 2001)
56. Rudy Koshar, Germany's Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill and London, 1998)
57. Robin Regine, Berlin Chantiers (Paris, 2001)
58. Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA and London, 1988). For an examination of an earlier manifestation of a similar dynamic between memory and history, in which, for various reasons having to do with professional prestige and influence, lawyers reasserted memory's "custodial moment" over history
59. see Robert J. Ross, "The Memorial Culture of Early Modern English Lawyers: Memory as Keyword, Shelter, and Identity," Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 10, no. 2 (Summer 1998), pp. 229-326.
60. See John Bender and David E. Wellbury, eds., Chronotypes: The Construction of Time (Stanford, CA, 1991). On the multiple chronologies that historians may uncover in their analysis of a single historical document or set of co-occurring documents, see also
61. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London, 1969), introduction.
62. Richard Whipp, "Creative Deconstruction: Strategy and Organizations," in Stewart Clegg, Cynthia Hardy, and Walter Nord, eds., Handbook of Organization Studies (London, 1996), p. 270.
63. There are several archaeological and anthropological studies of the historical evolution and social, cognitive, and symbolic value of maintaining distinct sites for the storage and permanent preservation of a society's externalized symbolic expression. See Julia Herndon, "Having and Holding: Storage, Memory, Knowledge, and Social Relations," American Anthropologist 102, no. 1 (March 2000), pp. 42-53.
64. On the relation between social and cognitive evolution and the advent of external symbolic storage, see Colin Renfrew and Chris Scarre, eds., Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage (Cambridge, 1999)
65. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA, 1991), chap. 8.
66. Denise Schmandt-Besserat, How Writing Came About (Austin, 1997).
67. This may be no accident. Some have noticed that the explosion of interest in memory during the 1980s has resulted in the resurrection of some obsolete definitions. See, for example, Klein, "On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse," p. 127.
68. On pre-modern notions of memory, see also Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1993)
69. Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge, 1992)
70. David Farrell Crell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge (Bloomington, 1990).
71. The latter two titles are heavy going. A more accessible, succinct history of ideas of memory in Western thought is Jeffrey Andrew Barash, "The Sources of Memory," Journal of the History of Ideas 58, no. 4 (October 1997), pp. 707-717.
72. As Foucault writes: "History is one way in which a society recognises and develops a mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked." The Archaeology of Knowledge, introduction. On the pastness of the past, see
73. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 193.
74. On the medieval view of time and the past, see also Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," in W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., On Narrative (Chicago, 1981), pp. 1-23.
75. Walter Ong observed that "De-plotted narrative forms part of the electronic age." Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982), p. 159.
76. Edith Wyschogrod, The Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Oth, 26 Edith
77. Wyschogrod, The Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others (Chicago, 1998). For a discussion of the reverse process, where the rise of print portended the displacement of memory as custodian of the past bygone and gave rise to an historicist sensibility that unflattened time
78. Ross, "The Memorial Culture of Early Modern English Lawyers," pp. 320-321. For a discussion of a similar horizontal effect of electronic networks on contemporary law
79. M. Ethan Katsh, "Looking Ahead Into the Past," Government Technology 14, no. 3 (February 2001).
80. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (New York, 1980), p. 70.
81. Ermath, Sequel to History, p. 22 and passim. For a history of ideas of temporal location and early modern challenges to absolute, dateable time
82. Donald J. Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time (Chicago, 1987). Archivists, for example, have not been immune from a "spatializing" propensity. Increasingly, archivists are prone to mine the history of archival practice for information that variously supports the construction of ahistorical theories of, and arguments for, an archival science. Thus, seemingly historical information loses its chronological significance and takes the form of another memory resource available for incorporation into the construction of a contemporary scientific paradigm of archival methodology and consciousness.
83. William J. Clancey, "Review of Rosenfeld's The Invention of Memory," Artificial Intelligence 50, no. 2 (1991), pp. 241-84.
84. Marya Schechtman, in John Sutton, ed., Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge, 1998).
85. Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl's Origins of Geometry: An Introduction is an extended critique of language as the spacial suppression of time and difference.
86. Richard Terdiman Study describes the nineteenth-century reaction to the crisis of memory and the "failure of diachronocity." He discusses the effects of history as a new form of memory in Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, 1993).
87. Nora, "Between Memory and History," p. 8.
88. This phrase is taken from Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, p. 201.
89. See, for example, Annie Brooking, Corporate Memory: Strategies for Knowledge Management (1998)
90. Mark Ackerman, "Answer Garden: A Tool for Growing Organizational Memory," Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Office Information Systems, 1990, pp. 31-39
91. James P. Walsh and G.R. Ungson, "Organizational Memory," Academy of Management Review 16, no. 1 (1991), pp. 57-91
92. E.W. Stein, "Organizational Memory: Review of Concepts and Recommendations for Management," International Journal of Information Management 15, no. 2 (1995), pp. 17-32.
93. Finally, see L.J. Bannon and K. Kuutti, "Shifting Perspectives on Organizational Memory: From Storage to Active Remembering," Proc. HICSS'96: 29th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii (January 1996), (IEEE 1996), pp. 155-166. Since the mid-1990s many more articles and books dealing with organizational memory have appeared, both in print and on the Internet.
94. A related area of organizational studies focuses on the role of narrative production in shaping organizational culture. See Barbara Czarniawaska-Joerges, A Narrative Approach to Organization Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1998)
95. Barbara Czarniawska-Joerges, Narrating the Organization: Dramas of Institutional Identity (Chicago, 1997)
96. David M. Boje, "Organizations as Storytelling Networks: A Study of Story Performance in an Office-Supply Firm," Administrative Science Quarterly 36 (1991), pp. 106-126
97. Gladys L. Symons, "Récits pour construire une mémoire organisationnelle: les directeurs se souviennent, Sociologie et Société 29, no. 2 (Autumn 1997), pp. 65-76.
98. It is interesting to note that, in the new information technology-based discipline of "memory management," the term "memory" includes two (actually more) meanings, neither of which specifically refers to informational or data content. To memory managers, memory can refer to open available computer memory not occupied by data, or to information. Memory is empty, available storage space.
99. Crell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing, p. 87. On the relationship among artificial intelligence research, neurobiology, and psychoanalysis
100. Clancey, "Review of Rosenfeld's The Invention of Memory," pp. 241-284.
101. For a critique of the view of memory as a storage place for descriptive structures, see Israel Rosenfeld, The Invention of Memory: A New View of the Brain (New York, 1988.)
102. Along similar lines, A. Iran-Nejad explores Bartlett's related notion of schema in "The Schema: A Long-Term Memory Structure or a Transient Functional Pattern," in R.J. Tierney, P.L. Anders, and J.N. Mitchell, eds., Understanding Readers' Understanding: Theory and Practice (Hillsdale, 1987). In memory research circles, the storage and retrieval paradigm is also known as "proceduralism."
103. Robert Crowder, Systems and Principles in Memory Theory: Another Critique of Pure Memory (East Sussex, 1993), pp. 139-161.
104. Finally, see Bannon, Kuutti, "Shifting Perspectives on Organizational Memory," passim.
105. Endel Tulvig, "Organization of Memory: Quo Vadis?" in Michael Gazzaniga, ed., The Cognitive Neurosciences (Cambridge, 1995).
106. See also Vernon B. Mountcastle, "Brain at Century's Ebb," Daedalus 127, no. 2 (Spring 1998), pp. 19-31.
107. K. Anders Ericsson and Walter Kintsch, "Long-Term Working Memory," Psychological Review 102 (1995), pp. 211-245. Also available at http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Py104/ericsson.long.html
108. Neal J. Cohen and Howard Eichenbaum, Memory, Amnesia, and the Hippocampal System (Boston, 1995), p. 64.
109. The Nobel Prize-winning neurologist, Gerald Edelman, says much the same thing: "Building a Picture of the Brain," Daedalus 127, no. 2 (Spring 1998), pp. 37-70.
110. Ibid., p. 52
111. Edelman writes more elusively: "I stress time in my definition [of memory] because of its ability to recreate an act separated by a certain duration from the original signal set that is characteristic of memory. And in mentioning a changing context, I pay heed to a key property of memory in the brain: that it is, in some sense, a form of recategorization during ongoing experience rather than a precise replication of a sequence of events." See also Edelman, The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness (New York, 1989).
112. This was one of F.C. Bartlett's central arguments in his milestone work. Rosenfeld, for whom Bartlett is important, writes: "There are no specific recollections in our brains; there are only the means for organizing past impressions. Memories are not fixed but are constantly evolving generalizations recreations of the past, which give us a sense of continuity, a sense of being, with a past, a present, and a future. They are not discrete units that are linked up over time but a dynamically evolving system." Rosenfeld, The Invention of Memory, p. 76.
113. Rosenfeld explains that "Memory... is not a set of stored images that an independent 'I' remembers; memory is an evolving set of procedures."
114. Israel Rosenfeld, "Memory and Identity," New Literary History 26, no. 1 (Winter 1995), p. 202.
115. Hubert Dreyfus similarly underlines the evolving rather than fixed nature of memory's content: "Neural networks provide a model of how the past can affect present perception and action without needing to store specific memories at all. It is precisely the advantage of simulated neural networks that past experience, rather than being stored as a memory, modifies the connection strengths between the simulated neurons. New input can then produce output based on past experience without the net having to, or even being able to, retrieve any specific memories. The point is not that neural networks provide an explanation of association. Rather they allow us to give up seeking an associationist explanation of the way past experience affects present perception and action. Hubert Dreyfus, "The Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Embodiment," Electronic Journal of Analytical Philosophy 4 (Spring 1996).
116. See Crell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing, passim.
117. On change and chronology in the concepts of history and memory, see Detienne, "Comparative Historicities," p. 15.
118. George Allan, "Traditions and Transitions," in Patricia Cook, ed., Philosophical Imagination and Cultural Memory: Appropriating Historical Traditions (Durham, 1993), pp. 24-25.
119. According to one legal scholar, mistaken "epistemological" preconceptions about "the corporation as a knowledgeable entity" have resulted in the imposition of unfair demands on corporate memory during legal discovery and deposition processes. See Kent Sinclair and Roger Fendrich, "Discovering Corporate Knowledge and Contentions: Rethinking Rule 30(b)(6) and Alternative Mechanisms," Alabama Law Review 50, no. 3 (Spring 1999), pp. 651-699.
120. Geoffrey C. Bowker, "Lest We Remember: Organizational Forgetting and the Production of Knowledge" at http://weber.ucsd.edu/~gbowker/forget.hml.
121. One author envisions organizational "knowledge analysts" who will develop "intelligent user interfaces," and, much like "library archivists," "index, structure, and maintain the webs of information and expertise [and] provide the most effective guidance to staff." It is these skills "that often make the difference between success and failure in organizational memory." Simon Buckingham Shum, "Balancing Formality with Informality: User-Centered Requirements for Knowledge Management Technology," AAAI Symposium on Artificial Intelligence in Knowledge Management, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, 24-26 March 1997 http://kmi.open.ac.uk/~simonb/org-knowledge/aikm97/sbs-paper1./html last visited January 2000.
122. Terry Cook's plea many years ago for archivists to look beyond information gathering to knowledge formation gains in significance at a time when "knowledge management" has been taking the managerial and corporate world by storm. Terry Cook, "From Information to Knowledge: An Intellectual Paradigm for Archives," Archivaria 19 (Winter 1984), pp. 28-49.
123. Daniel L. Schacter, Mieke Verfaellie, Michael D. Anes, and Carrie Racine, "When True Recognition Suppresses False Recognition: Evidence from Amnesiac Patients," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 10, no. 6 (November 1998), pp. 668-679.
124. Federal Computer Weekly (September 2000), available at http://www.fcw.com/cio/s2000 surveyreportsummary.asp
125. In record-keeping discourse, "risk" crops up in discussions of two kinds of situations: the risks of loss involved in keeping and migrating records in electronic file formats, and the corporate legal and financial risks of not keeping good records.
126. John McDonald, formerly with the National Archives of Canada, has been at the forefront of conceptualization of electronic record-keeping on the desktop. See National Archives of Canada, Information Standards and Practices, "Electronic Work Environments Vision" (May 1996), p. 3.
127. Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor (Minneapolis, 1995), p. 211.
128. For the notions of "triggers" and "placeholders," see Alan Dix, Julie Wilkson, and Devina Ramduny, "Redefining Organizational Memory: Artifacts and the Distribution and Coordination of Work." Ultimately, this research concerns the human-computer interface design of the workspace. Archival information must occupy a higher visibility in the workspace through attention to issues of electronic desktop design http://www.hiraeth.com/alanpapers/artefacts98.
129. The thrust of this research recalls the mnemonic arts that go back to ancient times. In some of these schemes the effectiveness of memory depended on the allocation of mental images to real or imagined architectural spaces. The classic study is Yates's 1962 work, The Art of Memory. Today, information scientists talk about cognitive architecture. An article that draws together the ancient, spatially oriented "art of memory" and contemporary human-computer interface design issues is
130. Janine Wong and Peter Storkerson, "Hypertext and the Art of Memory," Visible Language 31, no. 2 (1997) http://www.id.itt.edu/visiblelanguage/Feature%20Articles/Artofmemory.
131. For a critique of the computer as a limiting factor in human cognition, however, see Tor Norretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down To Size (n.p., 1998).
132. On the notion of technological transparency, see Susan Star and Geoffrey Bowker, "Transparency At Different Levels of Scale: Convergence between Information Artifacts and Social Worlds," at http://weber.ucsd.edu/~gbowker/converge.html.
133. The design of a workspace that makes archival records more conspicuous, accessible and integrated might be part of HCI (Human-Computer Interface) work. See Andreas Abecker, et al., "Towards a Well-Founded Technology for Organizational Memories," at http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~ksi?AIKM97/abecker/OM.html (last visited December 1999).
134. On the technological design of embedded rules bringing organizational memory to bear on work, see also Christine Moorman and Anne S. Miner, "Organizational Improvisation and Organizational Memory," Academy of Management Review 23, no. 4 (October 1998), pp. 698-723. Prospective memory studies, which one finds in psychology and archaeology, concern the effective operation of memory in anticipation of future needs and uses. Archaeological research on prospective memory interprets monuments as objects for the future rather than as objects from the past. Thus, what makes monuments monumental is their performance and scale, and their constant visibility.
135. Cornelius Holtorf, "Towards a Chronology of Megaliths: Understanding Monumental Time and Cultural Memory," Journal of European Archaeology 4 (1996), pp. 119-52
136. Gerdien, The Topography of Remembrance, passim.
137. There is a growing body of technological research that promises to incorporate documentary memory into business processes. See Pulkkinen, "Turning Informational Value to Business Value," passim.
138. Here, a case is made for the use of records for business purposes. Work is already well underway on the development of desktop memory agents. This software is being designed to maximize the timely identification and retrieval of relevant historical records for operational purposes. See, for example, Yvonne Wren, "Collective Learning and Collective Memory for Coping with Dynamic Complexity," Co-Tech Workshop at ECSCOW 95, http://www.cwi.nl/~steven/sighi/bulletin/1996.3/waern.html
139. Alan Wexelblat and Patti Maes, "Footprints: History-Rich Tools for Information Foraging," CHI 1999 at http://www.media.mit.edu/people/wex/CHI-99-Footprints.html
140. Alan Wexelblat, "History-Based Tools for Navigation," IEEE 32nd Hawaiian International Conference on Systems Science at http://wex.www.media.mit.edu/people/wex/HICSS-32.html
141. Andrew Garland and Richard Alterman, "Multiagent Learning through Collective Memory," at http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~aeg/aaaiss96/aaaiss96.html
142. Bradley Rhodes and Thad Starner, "Remembrance Agents: A Continuously Running Automated Information Retrieval System," in Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi Agent Technology, PAAM'96 (pp. 487-495)
143. Bradley J. Rhodes and Patti Maes, "Just-in-time Information Retrieval Agents," MIT Media Laboratory 39, nos. 1/2 (2000) at http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/393/part2/rhodes.html
144. Bradley J. Rhodes, "Margin Notes: Building a Contextually Aware Associative Memory," Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, New Orleans, LA (January 2000)
145. Richard Salter, "A Client-Server Architecture for Rich Visual History Interfaces," Human Computer Interaction Laboratory Technical Report No. 99-22 (September 1999) at http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil
146. On autopoesis, see Ken Slocum, Georg Von Krogh and Johan Roos, "An Essay on Corporate Epistemology," Strategic Management Journal 15 (Special Issue) (Summer 1994), pp. 53-71. Information modelers are beginning to recognize the dynamic nature of information objects as they take shape through multiple context associations over time.
147. Pieter Wisse, Metapatterns: Context and Time in Information Models (Boston, 2001).
148. Discussion of this issue draws on the work on neural networks, also known as connectionism and parallel distributed processing (PDP). This work involves training a given information system to adapt by implementing learning rules that serve to alter the strength of connections among units as new inputs arrive. The best-known rules are the Hebbian Rule and the Delta Rule. They best capture associations or discover regularities within a set of patterns; where the volume, number of variables or diversity of the data is very great; the relationships between variables are vaguely understood; or, the relationships are difficult to describe adequately with conventional approaches. Other concepts and approaches dealing with the adaptive evolution of information objects, classifications, and systems include adaptive clustering, contextual reasoning, and schema evolution. This work may have implications for automated records classification and the capturing of the history of logical database architectures (including metadata) as they evolve over time.