What is a collection?

Archivaria

Volumn 58, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 131-146

  Currall, James ^a   Moss, Michael ^a   Stuart, Susan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 82455189967     PISSN: 03186954     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. JISC Information Environment Architecture - Collection Description Service, available at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/collection-description.
2. "Creating reusable collection-level descriptions," Collection Description Focus, Guidance Paper 1, available at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/guides/gp1.
3. Dr. E.V. Brack, David Palmer, and Bridget Robinson, "Collection Level Description - The RIDING and Agora Experience," D-Lib Magazine (September 2000), available at: http:// www.dlib.org/dlib/september00/09brack.htm
4. rd issue (University of Oxford), p. 4, available at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslf/model
5. Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), Blue Book, January 2002, section 4.2.2.7.
6. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever - A Freudian Impression (Chicago, 1966), p. 4, fn. 1.
7. "The AIC organizes a set of AIPs along a thematic hierarchy." Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS).
8. "Maintaining collection-level descriptions," Collection Description Focus, Guidance Paper 2, available at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/guides/gp2
9. "Reusing data and avoiding unnecessary duplication," Guide to the SCONE database, available at: http://scone.strath.ac. uk/service/Guide/gReuse.cfm
10. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690, Oxford, 1975);
11. Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)
12. Andrew Motte, trans. (1729), available at: http:vorlon.ces.cwru.edu/~ames/principia
13. Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World (London, 1914)
14. Herbert Feigl, "Physicalism, Unity of Science, and the Foundations of Psychology," In P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (La Salle, IL, 1963);
15. A.J. Ayer, "My Mental Development," In L.E. Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of A.J. Ayer (La Salle, IL, 1992).
16. George Berkeley, Essay Toward a New Theory of Vision and Other Writings (London, 1910);
17. George Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge (London, 1937).
18. Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, p. 6.
19. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith, trans. (London, 1929).
20. Michael Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas (London, 1978)
21. Michael Dummett, The Seas of Language (Oxford, 1993).
22. John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York, 1995).
23. Carolus Linnaeus, Species Plantarum: exhibentes plantas rite cognitas, ad genera relatas, cum differentiis specificis, nominibus trivialibus, synonymis selectis, locis natalibus, secun-dum systema sexuale digestas (Stockholm, 1762); and Systema naturae per regna tria naturae, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synony-mis, locis (Vol. 1) (Stockholm, 1758).
24. Sanford Berman, Prejudices and Antipathies: A Tract on the LC Subject Heads Concerning People (Metuchen, NJ, 1971)
25. Geoffrey Bowker and S.L. Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (Cambridge, MA, 1999).
26. Berman, Prejudices and Antipathies.
27. Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out, p. 15.
28. Wendy M. Duff and Verne Harris, "Stories and Names: Archival Description," Archival Science 2, nos. 3-4 (2002), pp. 263-85.
29. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality.
30. More practical considerations of how this thinking affects both traditional and digital collections will be the subject of a paper entitled "Why Privileging Information is Inevitable" forthcoming in Archives and Manuscripts, 2005.
31. One of the best comic examples of the perpetual flux of boundaries is Polonius' attempt to categorize the types of acting the traveling players perform: The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral; scene individable, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men.
32. W. Shakespeare, Hamlet (Middlesex, 1980), Act II, Scene 2, lines 395-401.
33. This issue is addressed by Terry Eastwood, "Putting the Parts of the Whole Together: Systematic Arrangement of Archives," Archivaria 50 (Fall 2000), p. 7.
34. Hilary Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration (London, 1922).
35. Jenkinson was later dismissive of Schellenberg's concept of artificial collections in his famously dismissive review of Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques (1956), reprinted in Selected Writings of Sir Hilary Jenkinson (Gloucester, 1980), pp. 339-42, in which he set the tone by using the latin tag "ex America semper alaquid novi": "to make the fact that Archives have been subject to selection. an essential part of Archives quality is to mask the sad conclusion that our generation is bringing Archives a long step nearer to the status of those artificial "Collections" to which Dr. Schellenberg a little later assigns, in agreement with me, an inferior quality as evidence; and that in doing so it surrenders one of the most valuable Archival Characteristics - their impartiality." This seems to us more a dig at the American obsession with breaking up important European archives in the post-war than an attack on the concept of a collection itself.
36. T.R. Schellenberg, The Management of Archives (New York, 1965).
37. Bureau of Canadian Archivists, Rules for Archival Description (1990, revised 2003), Appendix D, Glossary, available at:http://www.cdncouncilarchives.ca/rad_ part1_revised_Dec2003. pdf
38. Rules for Archival Description; Eastwood, "Putting the Parts of the Whole Together," p. 97
39. Duff and Harris, "Stories and Names," pp. 272-73.
40. Duff and Harris, "Stories and Names," p. 274.
41. An excellent example of the intellectual coherence of commercial collecting is given in Miles Harvey's 2001 interview with the collector Gilbert Bland.
42. A Miles Harvey, The Island of Lost Maps - A True Story of Cartographic Crime (London, 2001).
43. Sarah Tyacke, "Archives in a Wider World: The Culture and Politics of Archives," Archivaria 52 (Fall 2001), pp. 1-25.
44. Michael Buckland, Redesigning Library Services: A Manifesto, available at: http://sunsite. berkeley.edu/Literature/Library//Redesigning/supp lement.html
45. Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out;
46. Duff and Harris, "Stories and Names."
47. Marilyn Strathern, Virtual Society? Get Real!, available at: http://virtualsociety.sbs.ox.ac.uk/ GRpapers/strathern.htm
48. This is precisely the reason given in the OAIS model
49. Gerald Benoit, "Toward a Critical Theoretic Perspective in Information Systems," Library Quarterly 72, no. 4 (2002), pp. 441-71.
50. Schellenberg, The Management of Archives.
51. In other senses it equates more to an archive in that the items are unique objects rather than an "edition."
52. Buckland, Redesigning Library Services.
53. Heaney, An Analytical Model of Collections, pp. 12-13.
54. Benoit, "Toward A Critical Theoretic Perspective."
55. Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration, "Supplement to Chapter 6," p. 6.
56. W.E. Tate, The Parish Chest, A Study of the Records of Parochial Administration in England (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 35-42.
57. Buckland, Redesigning Library Services.
58. Derrida, Archive Fever.
59. Schellenberg, The Management of Archives.
60. A Berman, Prejudices and Antipathies.