Category: Archives

Wanted: an underpinning model of organisational truth for the digital realm

Every so often I am privileged to spend a day in the company of fellow archivists and records managers to discuss fascinating topics that matter to our professional field. This happened recently at the University of Westminster Archives. Elaine Penn and Anna McNally organised a very good workshop on the subjects of appraisal and selection, especially in the context of born-digital records and archives. Do we need to rethink our ideas? We think we understand what they mean when applied to paper records and archives, but do we need to change or adapt when faced with their digital cousins?

For my part I talked for 25 mins on a subject I’ve been reflecting on for years, i.e. early interventions, early transfer, and anything to bridge the “disconnect” that I currently perceive between three of the important environments, i.e. the live network, the EDRMS or record system, and digital preservation storage and systems. I’m still trying to get closer to some answers. One idea, which I worked up for this talk, was the notion of a semi-current digital storage service. I’m just at the wish-list stage, and my ideas have lots of troubling gaps. I’d love to hear more from people who are building something like this. A colleague who attended tells me that University of Glasgow may have built something that overlaps with my “vision” (though a more accurate description in my case might be “wishful thinking”).

When listening to James Lappin’s excellent talk on email preservation, I noted he invoked the names of two historical figures in our field – Jenkinson and Schellenberg. I would claim that they achieved models of understanding that continue to shape our thinking about archives and records management to this day. Later I wondered out loud what is it that has made the concepts of Provenance and Original Order so effective; they have longevity, to the extent they still work now, and they bring clarity to our work whether or not you’re a sceptic of these old-school notions (and I know a lot of us are). They have achieved the status of “design classics”.

I wonder if that effectiveness is not really about archival care, nor the lifecycle of the record, nor the creation of fonds and record series, but about organisational functions. Maybe Jenkinson and Schellenberg understood something about how organisations work; and maybe it was a profound truth. Maybe we like it because it gives us insights into how and why organisations create records in the first place, and how those records turn into archives. If I am right, it may account for why archivists and records managers are so adept at understanding the complexities of institutions, organisations and departments in ways which even skilled business managers cannot. The solid grounding in these archival principles has led to intuitive skills that can simplify complex, broken, and wayward organisations. And see this earlier post, esp. #2-3, for more in this vein.

What I would like is for us to update models like this for the digital world. I want an archival / records theory that incorporates something about the wider “truth” of how computers do what they do, how they have impacted on the way we all work as organisations, and changed the ways in which records are generated. My suspicion is that it can’t be that hard to see this truth; I sense there is a simple underlying pattern to file storage, networks and applications, which could be grasped if we only see it clearly, from the holistic vantage point where it all makes sense. Further, I think it’s not really a technical thing at all. While it would probably be useful for archivists to pick up some basic rudiments of computer science along with their studies, I think what I am calling for is some sort of new model, like those of Provenance and Original Order, but something that is able to account for the digital realm in a meaningful way. It has to be simple, it has to be clear, and it has to stand the test of time (at least, for as long as computers are around!).

I say this because I sometimes doubt that we, in this loose affiliation of experts called the “digital preservation community”, have yet to reach consensus on what we think digital preservation actually is. Oh, I know we have our models, our standards, systems, and tools; but we keep on having similar debates over what we think the target of preservation is, what we think we’re doing, why, how, and what it will mean in the future. I wonder if we still lack an underpinning model of organisational truth, one that will help us make sense of all the complexity introduced by information technology. We didn’t have these profound doubts before; and whether we like them or not, we all agree on what Jenkinson and Schellenberg achieved, and we understand it. The rock music writer Lester Bangs once wrote “I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis”, noting the diversity of musical culture since the early days of rock and roll. Will we ever reach accord with the meaning of digital preservation?

What does an archivist do?

This post is a response to a Tweet from Judith Dray seen recently. The plea was for a “cool, interesting, and accessible way to describe what an archivist does”.

I worked as a “traditional” archivist for the General Synod of the Church of England for about 15 years. When I say traditional, I mean I worked with paper records and archives. I could easily describe what I did in the usual terms, involving cataloguing, indexing, arrangement, description, and boxing of materials and putting them on shelves. In so doing, I would probably confirm the clichéd view that an archivist is a solitary hermit who loses themselves in the abstruse rules of provenance and original order.

But that misses the bigger picture. The work of an archivist only has any value if we put it in context. This context involves tangible things like other people, organisations, and the work and life of other people; and also involves abstract ideas, like culture, meaning, and history.

Below, I have written seven Tweetable responses to Judith Dray. But I had to unpack each Tweet into a paragraph of prose. I may have resorted to some hyperbole and rhetoric, but I like to think there is still a grain of truth in my ravings and fantasising. For this post, I have thought myself back into the past, and temporarily forgotten whatever I might know about digital preservation.

1. An archivist brings order to chaos.

Just give an archivist a random-seeming mess of unsorted papers and see how quickly that mess is transformed into an accessible collection. This is because archivist is applying sorting skills, based on their knowledge of parent collections, parent organisation, and former owners. Colleagues at the Synod sometimes assumed I was just “doing the filing”, but I think there’s more to it.

2. An archivist reflects the truth of an organisation.

If you want to know the core meaning, truth or essence of any organisation – from a business to a school to a textile factory – the archive holds the authoritative version of it. The archivist brings out that truth, through adhering to the fundamental principles of provenance (where the papers came from) and original order (how they were kept). These two principles may sound musty and boring, yet have proven surprisingly robust as a reliable method for reflecting the truth.

3. An archivist has the holistic view.

A good archivist isn’t just there at the end of the life of a record, but is there right at the start; they know the creators and understand precisely why they create the records that they do. In this way, they connect to and engage with the creating organisation in ways that surpass even the most diligent executive officer or auditor. The development of records management in the 20th century only served to strengthen this inherently archival virtue. At one stage in the 1990s, commercial companies tried to harness that rare skill and monetise it, turning it into something called “Knowledge Management”. Naturally, this failed!

4. An archivist engenders trust in their depositors.

The real value of an archivist’s role has to be seen in the context of people and agencies who use archives. Among these people, the depositors, creators and owners of the resources are key. Over time the “culture” of archives has created and diligently nurtured a trust bond, a covenant if you will, that enables depositors to place their faith in a single archivist or an entire memory institution. That trust has been hard won, but we got there through applying effective procedures for due diligence, managing and documenting every stage in the transfer of content in ways that ensured the integrity of the resource, informed by the “holistic” skill (see above).

5. An archivist enables use and re-use of the archives.

A second key group of archive users comprises the researcher, the scholar, the historian, the reader. In today’s impoverished world the beleaguered archivist has been obliged to reframe “readers” as “customers”, seeing them as an income stream, but the cultural truth is much richer. Archives don’t change; but the historian’s interpretation of the source keeps evolving all the time. If any historian seeks to validate or challenge the interpretation of another, the archives are there – waiting silently for consultation. The same resource can be used to research multiple topics, depending on the “lens” the researcher chooses to apply; there is a well-known archival resource which began life as a land survey, yet in its lifetime it has been used as statistical evidence for population studies, income distribution, place names, family history, and more.

6. An archivist can beat Google hands-down.

In our insatiable lust for faster and deeper browser searches, we sometimes tend to overlook the value of structure. Structure is something an archivist has hard-wired into their genetic code, and it’s what makes archival cataloguing a superior way of organising and presenting information concisely and meaningfully. It’s not about sticking obstinately to the arcane rules of ISAD(G) or insisting on the Fonds-Series-Item hierarchy to the point of madness, but about understanding the structure of meaning, the way that one piece of information “belongs” to another, and how we can use these relationships to bring out the inner truth of the collection. Compared to this deep understanding, any given Google search return may give the user a quick hit of satisfaction, yet it is severely fractured, lacking in context, and disconnected from the core.

7. An archivist makes history manageable.

Any given archive probably represents a very small percentage of the actual records that were created at the time; this is especially true of any 20th century collection. Archivists are able to select the core 5% from this abundance, and yet still preserve the truth of the organisation. We don’t keep “everything”, to put it another way; we keep just the right amount. The skills of appraisal and selection are among the most valuable tools we have for any society that wants to manage its collective memory, yet these skills are taken for granted and under-valued, even by archivists themselves. We can feasibly scale this up to address the challenge of digital content. At a time when the world is creating more digital data than we can store or contain, let alone preserve, the skills of selection and appraisal will be needed more than ever.