Archives in a wider world: The culture and politics of archives

Archivaria

Volumn 52, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 1-25

  Tyacke, Sarah ^a  

^a THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 84880644372     PISSN: 03186954     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (61)

1. Terry Cook used this phrase "from the basement to the boardroom" in one of his presentations to English records managers and archivists at a conference of government records managers in Manchester, October 1996. For the appearance of "archiving" as a general cultural phenomenon, note the London International Film Festival of Theatre (29 June-1 July 2001), where they performed "Dialogues on archiving" by having conversations staged between artists, philosophers, cultural historians, filmmakers, information technologists, and archivists. The subject was the culture of archiving and the archiving of culture. A similar project was staged in Hamburg in September 2000.
2. For a brief discussion of some of the physical and other changes to the Public Record Office as an institution, see Sarah Tyacke, "From the Strong-box of Empire to the Pavilions of the People: Archives Direct 2001," in J.M. Barker, ed., Proceedings of the International Conference, Old Institutions - New Images, Freemantle, Western Australia, 29 July-1 August 1997 (Perth, 1997), pp. 111-117.
3. See Martha Cooley, The Archivist (London, 1998), p. 246.
4. T.S. Eliot's letters to his friend Emily Hale are kept at Princeton University. A more recent manifestation of this merging of language is a note in the London newspaper Metro, "Tate launches a library for the arts." This is quite clearly a research centre which includes material from such luminaries as Barbara Hepworth, Stanley Spencer, et. al. The library is then described as "the archive relating to the nation's art since 1900, as well as the Tate's own records."
5. Roger Ellis and Peter Walne, eds., Selected Writings of Sir Hilary Jenkinson (Gloucester, 1980), p. 237.
6. Also, "the problems of nomenclature in archives," p. 352.
7. For the continuing debate on whether records and archives mean the same thing, see the general introduction in Judith Ellis, ed., Keeping Archives (Port Melbourne, 1993) and more recently the work of Frank Upward,
8. "In Search of the Continuum: Ian Maclean's 'Australian Experience,' Essays on Recordkeeping," in Michael Piggott and Sue McKemmish, eds., The Records Continuum. Ian Maclean and Australian Archives First Fifty Years (Sydney, 1994).
9. The re-emergence of Jenkinson into this debate has been made by Sarah Flynn who points out that Jenkinson viewed the distinction between records in a current system and those in an Archive as an artificial one, a view that many of us share. See Sarah Flynn, "The Records Continuum Model in Context and Its Implications for Archival Practice," Journal of the Society of Archivists 22, no. 1 (2001), pp. 88-89.
10. It is here that Jenkinson's views and PRO practice were not the same. Nicholas Cox pointed this out to me (communication, 25 July 1996) and see Nicholas Cox, "National British Archives: Public Records," in A. Seldon, ed., Contemporary History: Practice and Method (Oxford, 1988).
11. This point was made to me by Michael Moss, and certainly it would seem to be an element in Jenkinson's thinking as well as for his desire to ensure the archive was selected by the creators and thus deliberately not selected under the influence of passing historical trends.
12. "Record" is the older established term from the medieval period onwards and meant a report or evidence. Classical Latin "recordor" to recall, remember, ponder over. "Archive" was the place where records were kept and in England dates from the mid-seventeenth century. Elizabeth Hallam-Smith tells me that the medieval Latin word "arca" (Medieval Latin word list) was a chest or trunk, as in "arks and hutches" of the Treasury of receipt in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Having said that, the term "record office" goes back to the early seventeenth century as well, and "rolls" and "records" were used to denote both current and historical records. In the French tradition, the word "archives" means records from creation to archiving, as we in England use the words "record" or "archive" interchangeably to cover the continuum. The American tradition has divided the life of records into two broad stages: current records management, when the records are with the creators and used, or sometimes used, followed by the archiving of the historic record.
13. The effect of the data protection and freedom of information legislation in the English-speaking world has tended to require auditable record-keeping in some areas and the destruction of some records at due time, which is different from the previous administrative regimes where records about people, for example, were often open in people's lifetimes. In some regimes this is still the case, so there is a no man's land here in terms of what societies think is acceptable, e.g., census records being destroyed or being opened at seventy-five years or at 100 years.
14. See a provoking article on this by Anne Lockyer, "Should Archivists be Professionals?" in Margaret Proctor and C.P. Lewis, eds., New Directions in Archival Research (Liverpool, 2000), pp. 118-44.
15. My perception is that libraries and museums collect and Archives appraise and receive.
16. See an earlier brief account of the differing structures of archival systems in England and elsewhere in Sarah Tyacke, "Continuous History or History by the Yard: Archives in the Year 2001," Archives XXIII (April 1998), pp. 3-18.
17. See Eric Ketelaar, "The Difference Best Postponed? Cultures and Comparative Archival Science," Archivaria 44 (Fall 1997), pp. 142-48.
18. This comparison with the record-keeping tradition on the continent was raised by Michael Moss and seems to me to be valid across a number of archiving issues between the Englishspeaking world and continental Europe.
19. Richard Brown, "Death of a Renaissance Record-Keeper: The Murder of Tomasso da Tortona in Ferrara, 1385," Archivaria 44 (Fall 1997), pp. 1-43.
20. See Susan Healy, "Freedom of Information: An Introduction," Metropolitan Lines 53 .
21. This thirty-year time span relates to the length of career of civil and other public servants. There is no reason why it should not alter, and indeed some exemptions under FOI will continue for longer as they do at present (2001).
22. The Diaries of Wedgewood-Benn spring to mind here, where the clear intention was to publish them and to archive them and other papers specifically for the public. The archive is to be deposited in tape form and paper form with the British Library.
23. There is also a 1980 Swedish Secrecy Act which lists some exceptions to this freedom of information regime, but all the documents which are not open to public inspection are specified in this special act. See Ministry of Justice, Public Access to Information and Secrecy with Swedish Authorities (Sweden, 1981).
24. I am indebted to Susan Healy for this reference. The nature of the challenge is well summed up in a recent article by Heather MacNeil, "Providing Grounds for Trust: Developing Conceptual Requirements for the Long-Term Preservation of Authentic Electronic Records," Archivaria 50 (Fall 2000), pp. 52-78.
25. Heather MacNeil, "Providing Grounds for Trust: Developing Conceptual Requirements for the Long-Term Preservation of Authentic Electronic Records," Archivaria 50 (Fall 2000) pp. 52-78, which is an account of the work of the International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems (InterPARES) project set up in 1999.
26. See Michel Duchein, "The History of European Archives and the Development of the Archival Profession in Europe," American Archivist 55 (1992), pp. 14-25.
27. This point has been raised more clearly by Michael Moss. Many North Americans would argue that there is also a tension between historians and archivists, especially regarding pragmatism and professionalism - and especially as the two disciplines diverge. For example, his-torians frequently adopt a "we-know-best" attitude regarding acquisition and appraisal, and there is still a lingering tendency to regard archivists as the handmaidens of history.
28. See, for example, an account in the Sunday Times (25 March 2001) where a French historian, Alexandre Gady, is reported as secretly photographing decaying archives in the Hotel de Soubise building of the French National Archives to bring to the public's attention the critical state of the archives.
29. Jose Sarramago, All the Names (London, 2000), p. 5+181-82.
30. See J.B. Harley, "Deconstructing the Map," Cartographica 26 (Summer 1989), pp. 1-20.
31. The influence of Roland Barthes's Elements of Semiology (1968) in particular is evident in the conception of the History of Cartography project as envisaged by J.B. Harley and David Woodward in 1982.
32. In this field the author has written a number of books, catalogues, and articles about maps and charts and has therefore had to deal first hand with the context and meaning of these particular artefacts or texts and their wider interpretation and significance beyond the linear history of the mathematical and cartographical development of conventional maps and charts. See for example S. Tyacke, ed., English Map-Making 1500-1650 (1983)
33. "Describing Maps," in Peter Davison, ed., The Book Encompassed. Studies in Twentieth-Century Bibliography (London, 1992), pp. 130-41.
34. Brien Brothman, "Declining Derrida: Integrity, Tensegrity and the Preservation of Archives from Deconstruction," Archivaria 48 (Fall 1999), pp. 64-88.
35. Terry Cook, "Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts," Archival Science 1 (2001), pp. 3-27.
36. Here he summarizes much of what he and others have said since 1996 and suggests links between postmodernism and archival science especially in respect of provenance in appraisal, made on the basis of what is the role and significance of the body in society whose records you might select, and virtual distributed archives, already embraced in some English-speaking countries.
37. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression, Eric Prenowitz, trans. (Chicago, 1998).
38. M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, England 1066-1307 2d ed. (Oxford, 1993), p. 231.
39. For examples of this see Adam Fox, "Remembering the Past in Early Modern England: Oral and Written Tradition," TRHS IX (1999), pp. 233-56
40. Andy Wood in the same volume, "Custom and the Social Organisation of Writing in Early Modern England," pp. 257-69.
41. For the implications of this for history see Richard Evans, In Defence of History, p. 95
42. for an account of the implications of this theory on bibliography and texts see D.F. Mckenzie, "Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts," The Panizzi Lectures 1985 (British Library, 1986) in particular the chapter on non-book texts, pp. 23-43.
43. This is also evident from the recent series of Sawyer seminars on archives, documentation, and the institutions of social memory, held September 2000-April 2001 at the Advanced Study Center, The International Institute, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States. The seminar discussed such themes as "National archives and the artifice of memory," "Archives: intermediaries in the production of knowledge," "Archival appraisal: creating the past" (appraisal as a determining process for historical consciousness; appraisal as a determinant of social memory), and "Archival politics in dissolving states: the post soviet region" and so on. Apart from the historian Patrick Wright there were no English presenters, as far as I can tell.
44. Danielle Lacasse and Antonio Lechasseur, The National Archives of Canada, 1872-1997 (Ottawa, 1997).
45. See also the article by Bruce Montgomery elsewhere in this issue of Archivaria.
46. The accumulation of records often duplicated across the regions and states is a feature of the record-keeping of the former USSR. It seems to be the result of fear by the bureaucrats themselves that if all the files were not kept then they would be held to account by their superiors. A "just in case" mentality was institutionalized in the bureaucracy which also kept the records under close control and normally secret for the state's own use, not the public's.
47. See Seymour M. Hersh, "Nixon's Last Cover-Up: The Tapes He Wants the Archives to Suppress," The New Yorker (14 December 1992).
48. Verne Harris, "Claiming Less, Delivering More: A Critique of Positivist Formulations on Archives in South Africa," Archivaria 44 (Fall 1997), pp. 132-41.
49. Ibid., pp. 135-36.
50. See where there is an example of an acquisition policy which notes that such a policy needs to take account the opinions of the present users, academics, families and local historians, etc. It states that "Any selection decision is an assessment made at one point in time about what is important about the past."
51. In taking those decisions today, it seems appropriate to draw on a value system which is relevant to contemporary preoccupations, rather than those of the 1950s, i.e., when the Public Record Act was passed. Particular operation selection policies have been expanded, covering, e.g., industrial policy (pp. 1974-83), the use and conservation of the countryside for recreational purposes (pp. 1974-83), as well as acquisition policies for departments in the traditional man
52. U-571 (Universal Films, 2000). This is, of course, a common film-making phenomenon where filmmakers are more concerned to attract (in this case) American audiences than to keep to the record, if even they recognize there is one. See .
53. The historian David Irving, well known for his extremist views, sued Deborah Lipstadt and her publishers, Penguin Books, in a libel trial heard in the High Court in London, 11 January 2000, for remarks about his use and misuse of records in her book, Denying the Holocaust. The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1994). He lost.
54. Andrew McDonald and Greg Terill, Open Government. Freedom of Information and Privacy (Basingstoke, Hampshire, 1998), p. 155.
55. "Early Equity Judges: Keepers of the Rolls of Chancery 1415-1447," The American Journal of Legal History XXXVI, no. 4 (October 1992), pp. 441-65.
56. Robert D. Hume, Reconstructing Contexts. The Aims and Principles of Archaeo-Historicism (Oxford, 1999), p. 192.
57. I am indebted to Ian Willison for drawing Robert Hume's work to my attention. I would rather not be described as a Maginot line and certainly not be behind it in view of what happened, but I know what he means!
58. See Evans R, In Defence of History, p. 275.
59. Michael Moss, "The Scent of the Slow Hound and the Snap of the Bull-Dog: The Place of Research in the Archival Profession," in Margaret Proctor and C.P. Lewis, eds., New Directions in Archival Research (Liverpool, 2000), pp. 7-19.
60. P.K. O'Brien, "An Engagement with Post-Modern Foes, Literary Theorists and Friends on the Borders with History," Reviews in History (). Cited in Moss.
61. R.H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1912), p. 121.