Engaging with Records and Archives : Histories and theories 9781783301607, 9781783301591

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Engaging with Records and Archives histories and theories

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Every purchase of a Facet book helps to fund CILIP’s advocacy, awareness and accreditation programmes for information professionals.

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Engaging with Records and Archives histories and theories

Edited by

Fiorella Foscarini, Heather MacNeil, Bonnie Mak and Gillian Oliver

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© This compilation: Fiorella Foscarini, Heather MacNeil, Bonnie Mak and Gillian Oliver 2016 The chapters: the contributors 2016 Published by Facet Publishing, 7 Ridgmount Street, London WC1E 7AE www.facetpublishing.co.uk

Facet Publishing is wholly owned by CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. The editors and authors of the individual chapters assert their moral right to be identified as such in accordance with the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Except as otherwise permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, with the prior permission of the publisher, or, in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of a licence issued by The Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to Facet Publishing, 7 Ridgmount Street, London WC1E 7AE. Every effort has been made to contact the holders of copyright material reproduced in this text, and thanks are due to them for permission to reproduce the material indicated. If there are any queries please contact the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78330-158-4 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-78330-159-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-78330-160-7 (e-book) First published 2016

Text printed on FSC accredited material.

Typeset from editors’ files by Facet Publishing Production in 10/14pt Palatino Linotype and Myriad Pro. Printed and made in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY.

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Contents

Editors and contributors .....................................................................................................vii Editors’ introduction ..............................................................................................................xi Fiorella Foscarini, Heather MacNeil, Bonnie Mak and Gillian Oliver PART 1 RETHINKING HISTORIES AND THEORIES......................................1 1 Moving the margins to the middle: reconciling ‘the archive’ with the archives .......................................................................................................................3 Jeannette A. Bastian 2 Organisms, skeletons and the archivist as palaeontologist: metaphors of archival order and reconstruction in context................................................21 Juan Ilerbaig 3 ‘Records in context’ in context: a brief history of data modelling for archival description......................................................................................................41 Jonathan Furner 4 Mapping archival silence: technology and the historical record ................63 Marlene Manoff 5 Hidden voices in the archives: pioneering women archivists in early 20th-century England .................................................................................................83 Elizabeth Shepherd PART 2 ENGAGING RECORDS AND ARCHIVES ......................................105 6 The use and reuse of documents by chancellors, archivists and government members in an early modern republican state: Genoa’s Giunta dei confini and its archives ........................................................................107 Stefano Gardini 7 The bumpy road to transparency: access and secrecy in 19th-century records in the Dutch East Indies ...........................................................................127 Charles Jeurgens

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8 archival ethics and indigenous justice: conflict or coexistence?..............147 Melanie Delva and Melissa Adams 9 History and development of information and recordkeeping in Malawi ............................................................................................................................173 Paul Lihoma 10 History of community archiving in Poland .......................................................195 Magdalena Wiśniewska 11 Reflecting on practice: artists’ experiences in the archives.........................211 Sian Vaughan Index........................................................................................................................................233

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Editors and contributors

Editors

Fiorella Foscarini PhD is an associate professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. She taught at the University of Amsterdam from 2014 to 2016. Prior to joining academia in 2010, she worked as senior archivist for the European Central Bank in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She is coeditor in chief of the Records Management Journal. Heather MacNeil PhD is a professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto where she teaches courses on archival concepts and issues, the arrangement and description of archival documents, and crossdisciplinary perspectives on record trustworthiness. Her recent research and publications have focused on archives and archival finding aids as cultural texts and archival description as a rhetorical genre. She was one of the founding organizers, along with Barbara Craig and Philip Eppard, of I-CHORA. Bonnie Mak PhD MMS BAH is an associate professor at the University of Illinois, jointly appointed in the iSchool and the Program in Medieval Studies. Her first book, How the Page Matters, was published in 2011. She was Senior Fellow of the Center for Humanities and Information at The Pennsylvania State University from 2015 to 2016. Gillian Oliver PhD is an associate professor in Information Management at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. From 2008 to 2016 she taught at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She is the co-author of Records Management and Information Culture (Facet, 2014) and Digital Curation, 2nd edition (Facet, 2016) and is co-editor in chief of Archival Science.

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Contributors

Melissa Adams MAS is a member of the Nisga’a Nation from the House of Wisin Xbil’tkw of the Gisk’aast (Killerwhale) tribe. She is the librarian and archivist at the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs where she supports the organization’s work representing and advocating for Indigenous interests, rights and title. This includes managing the library collection, institutional archives and digital resources, as well as providing reference services and training support to both members of Indigenous communities and the wider public. Jeannette A. Bastian PhD MPhil is a professor at the School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College where she directs their Archives Management concentration. Formerly territorial librarian of the United States Virgin Islands she completed an MPhil in Caribbean literature at the University of the West Indies, and a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. Her books include West Indian Literature: a critical index, 1930-1975, Owning Memory: how a Caribbean community lost its archives and found its history (2003), Community Archives: the shaping of memory, edited with Ben Alexander, and Archives in Libraries: what librarians and archivists need to know to work together, with Megan Sniffin-Marinoff and Donna Webber. Melanie Delva BA MAS is archivist and privacy officer for the Anglican Diocese of New Westminster and Provincial Synod of BC and Yukon, located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Melanie was deeply involved in the discovery and production of archival records for the Canadian Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She has delivered papers nationally and internationally, with her particular area of interest being the intersections of archives, social justice and reconciliation – especially in the context of justice for Indigenous peoples of Canada. Jonathan Furner PhD MSc MA is a professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He studies the history and philosophy of cultural stewardship, and teaches classes on the representation and organization of archival records, library materials, and museum objects. He has published over 50 papers on these and related topics, frequently using conceptual analysis to evaluate the theoretical frameworks, data models, and metadata standards on which information access systems rely.

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Stefano Gardini PhD is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Genoa, Italy, where he currently teaches Archival Science. His research interests focus primarily on forms of archival sedimentation, with particular regard to the organization of government funds in the Republic of Genoa during the 18th and 19th centuries in the context of administrative and historiographical developments. Another area of interest involves the study of ancient topographical maps of the Genoa State Archives as archival records. Juan Ilerbaig PhD MISt teaches courses in archival science as well as the history of biology at the University of Toronto. His research interests are at the intersection of archives, history and biology, including epistemological and methodological issues common to those disciplines, as well as the recordkeeping and data practices in the sciences. Charles Jeurgens PhD is a professor of Archival Studies at Amsterdam University and adviser to the National Archives in The Hague. He has published on the subject of archives and information policy in the former Dutch East Indies. He also has a strong interest in appraisal and selection issues and in understanding memory functions in the digital era. Paul Lihoma PhD MSc is director of National Archives of Malawi, where among other responsibilities, he advises the government of Malawi on archives, records and information management policy issues. He is also an adjunct lecturer in Library and Information Science at Mzuzu University. His research interest is in information management and open government. Marlene Manoff PhD MLS is an independent scholar in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She was formerly senior collections strategist at the MIT Libraries in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her research interests include archival theory and digital culture. Elizabeth Shepherd PhD FRSA is a professor of Archives and Records Management in the Department of Information Studies (DIS) at University College London (UCL). She teaches on the MA course in Archives and Records Management at UCL, and supervises doctoral students and MA students. She is currently director of research for DIS. Her research interests are in the history of archives and archivists in 20th-century England and in the management of records and information in an era of open government and information access rights.

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Sian Vaughan PhD is keeper of archives and a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media at Birmingham City University. She is an art historian by training, with research interests in the interpretation and mediation of engagement with art through the modalities of the archive, public art and creative research practices. Magdalena Wiśniewska MA is a graduate in archival science and records management and a PhD candidate in history at the Faculty of Historical Sciences of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. Her research interests are community archiving, private archives, archival theory, oral history in archives, and preserving digital cultural heritage. She is the leader of a two-year research project entitled Community Archives In Poland – a Multiple Case Study, funded by the National Science Centre, Poland.

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Editors’ introduction

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Fiorella Foscarini, Heather MacNeil, Bonnie Mak and Gillian Oliver

a selection of papers from the Seventh International Conference on the History of Records and Archives (I-CHORA 7), which took place in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, from July 29 to 31, 2015. I-CHORA was established in 2003 as a biennial conference series to encourage and promote interdisciplinary research into the history of records, recordkeeping practices and recordkeeping institutions. Conferences to date have taken place in Toronto; Amsterdam (twice); Boston; Perth, Australia; London; and Austin, Texas, each attracting between 100 and 130 scholars and professionals from around the world. According to the organizers of the first I-CHORA, ‘the impetus for the conference came from the archives community’, which felt the ‘need for greater sophistication in conceiving the history of records to address the issues of human communicative practices and the artefacts themselves as material and social products’ (Craig et al., 2005, 2–3). It was evident from the outset that investigating the origins and evolution of archival ideas and practices, documentary forms and structures, and recordkeeping methods and technologies not only supported archival work and archival thinking but also had a much broader and all-encompassing relevance in that the history of archives is the history of culture. Thus, throughout the years, the conference series has increasingly been promoting an interdisciplinary approach to the study of record making and keeping in different historical contexts. By entitling this book Engaging with Records and Archives: histories and theories, which was also the theme of I-CHORA 7, we wanted to emphasize another characteristic of this conference series; that is, the strong belief shared by all conference organizers and participants that engaging in scholarly research around histories and theories of archives and records is essential to HIS BOOK OFFERS

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‘develop the maturity and self-awareness of those who work with records’ (Craig et. al., 9). Today, more than ever before, this suggests that everyone, not only archives specialists, would benefit from a deeper and better informed engagement with archival objects and practices as they become increasingly engrained in our daily lives, from the pervasiveness of archival materials on the web, to the use of archive-based knowledge in all sciences, to the uncertainty about the preservation of our digital memories that we may all experience sooner or later. The 11 essays selected for inclusion in this book explore different ways of historicizing and theorizing record making, recordkeeping and archiving practices from a range of disciplinary perspectives and through the eyes of creators, custodians and users. The book is organized into two parts. The essays in Part 1, ‘Rethinking histories and theories’, challenge different concepts, models, metaphors and beliefs that form the traditional archival discourse by situating them historically and culturally, and by placing them in the context of other disciplinary approaches. A recurring theme in Part 1 is the visibility of archival objects and infrastructures and of those interacting with the archives. The essays in Part 2, ‘Engaging records and archives’, illustrate various forms of engagement with archives and archiving practices across a range of examples, from historical engagements with records and recordkeeping practices to community-sensitive ways of engaging with archives for social justice, to artistic engagements with archival practices and theories. Part 1 opens with Jeannette Bastian’s ‘Moving the margins to the middle: reconciling “the archive” with the archives’. The author traces the history of the ‘archival turn’ and its many manifestations, and urges archivists to embrace a broader notion of the archive that continues to be discussed and explored across the humanities. Because this more flexible concept of the archive goes beyond traditional understandings of the archives proper and has benefited from various disciplinary perspectives, it might suggest new ways to enrich archival theory and practice. As ‘the archive’ as a metaphor and a virtual space becomes increasingly central and meaningful to a wide range of communities and constituencies, Bastian argues that ‘traditional archives run the risk of irrelevancy’ if they do not engage with this broader discourse and are not open to a more inclusive view of records and recordkeeping. In Chapter 2, ‘Organisms, skeletons and the archivist as palaeontologist: metaphors of archival order and reconstruction in context’, Juan Ilerbaig takes us into the intellectual atmosphere of the 19th century, when some of the ideas about the organic nature of archives, the growth of archives by processes of

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accumulation and sedimentation, the significance of the internal order of archives and the need to restore that original order emerged. By examining the connections between archival science and other disciplines interested in the historical reconstruction of past entities and events on the basis of their ‘remains’, such as geology, palaeontology, architecture, comparative anatomy and linguistics, Ilerbaig sheds light on the historicity of the metaphorical roots of archival theory during its modern foundational period. The more recent origins of data modelling practices in the context of archival description are explored by Jonathan Furner in Chapter 3, ‘“Records in context” in context: a brief history of data modelling for archival description’. Furner discusses the specific historical and cultural conditions under which archives, libraries and museums developed their respective data standards in the late 1980s. In particular, by revealing ‘the archival community’s unique take on data modeling’, his analysis situates archival practice in relation to libraries and museums and draws out crucial differences that derive from the history of each discipline. The tension within current initiatives that are meant to harmonize existing standards is examined against the background of the theoretical and material characteristics of each domain. Marlene Manoff’s Chapter 4, ‘Mapping archival silence: technology and the historical record’ draws on concepts from the sociology, philosophy and history of science in order to investigate metaphors like ‘black box’ or ‘archival silence’, as they are used by scholars who study ‘hidden and increasingly complex systems … to articulate and theorize the unseen, the unknown, and the intentionally effaced’. Globalization and digitization raise the spectre of historical amnesia and failure to secure the past. Science studies, Manoff argues, can help us to frame and better understand the complex interplay of social, economic and technical forces that shape the digital record as both a material and a cultural object. Concluding Part 1 is Elizabeth Shepherd’s Chapter 5, ‘Hidden voices in the archives: pioneering women archivists in early 20th-century England’, which explores another kind of ‘archival silence’, that is, the hidden voice of women in the archives. Drawing upon examples from early 20th-century England, Shepherd brings pioneering women archivists out of the shadows. Her attempt to make visible the role of women in the archives aids a fuller understanding of their ‘background, social lives and critical professional interventions, helps to set them in their proper historical and archival place, and gives a voice to their stories and thus to our emerging archival consciousness’.

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The first two essays in Part 2 demonstrate how tracking particular recordkeeping practices through time and changing political situations is essential not only to understanding the meaning of those practices in their context, but also to gaining insights into the mechanisms through which archives and their tools are constantly reshaped to account for different needs and behaviours. In Chapter 6, ‘The use and reuse of documents by chancellors, archivists and government members in an early modern republican state: Genoa’s Giunta dei confini and its archives’, Stefano Gardini presents a careful study of the transformations that occurred over time to the documentary complex of a Genoese institution which was responsible for overseeing the north-western territorial borders of today’s Italy for more than two centuries. The author highlights the roles played by the various communities interested in those archives in different time periods, particularly their influence on the structure of finding aids. In Chapter 7, ‘The bumpy road to transparency: access and secrecy in 19thcentury records in the Dutch East Indies’, Charles Jeurgens investigates how the Dutch administration and society dealt with access and secrecy in relation to the records produced in the Dutch East Indies in the 19th century. His essay is a historical account of the ‘dilemmas and inner debates of bureaucracy’ as they are revealed through a study of records management practices, and a thoughtful exploration of archives as instruments of power and of the tensions inherent in such power. Access, power and recordkeeping practices are also central themes in Chapter 8, ‘Archival ethics and indigenous justice: conflict or coexistence?’ Melanie Delva and Melissa Adams tackle the delicate and controversial issue of ‘decolonizing’ the archives as an institution that reflects and represents the values and practices of the Western world. Their essay reports on the authors’ own professional experiences of negotiating access to records caught between the directives of the Anglican Church and the desires of an indigenous community on the west coast of Canada. The authors urge the archival community to move beyond its current practices and the ethical ideas governing those practices, and to look critically at its own long-held theories, ‘in favour of actions which respect Indigenous ways of knowing and perspectives of recordkeeping’. Another kind of engagement with records of colonial and post-colonial regimes is recounted in Chapter 9, ‘History and development of information and recordkeeping in Malawi’. In this account, Paul Lihoma pays special attention to the ways in which different cultures, media and technologies have shaped one another and interacted with the administration of the day. By

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walking through Malawi’s political vicissitudes, we learn about the ‘deleterious effects’ that administrative changes can have on the quality of records, and how archives that are ‘instruments for political oppression’ can be turned into ‘instruments for accountability for the atrocities suffered’ by a country. In Chapter 10, ‘History of community archiving in Poland’, Magdalena Wiśniewska explores community engagement with archives through the lens of two influential community archives: the KARTA Centre Foundation and the Elżbieta Zawacka Foundation. Drawing on Pierre Nora’s theory of the decolonization and democratization of history, Wiśniewska traces the profound reasons for grassroots archival activism in Poland back to the tragic events the country experienced, first with the Nazi occupation and later with the repression under the communist regime. The essay that closes the volume deals with another kind of community, the community of artists. Chapter 11, Sian Vaughan’s ‘Reflecting on practice: artists’ experiences in the archives’ explores how contemporary artists are ‘encountering and reframing’ the archive/archives through their practice by means of an examination of ‘artists’ experiences with archives where the subject matter itself is art’. Vaughan’s study illustrates specific ways in which perspectives from the creative arts can challenge, extend and, ultimately, enrich archival theory and practice. Her final words, that ‘artists can remind and encourage archivists to think differently’, provide a fitting conclusion to the book as a whole. All of the essays included in Engaging with Records and Archives invite archivists to think differently about how we understand, interpret and interact with histories and theories of the archive and archives.

References

Craig, B. L., Eppard, P. B. and MacNeil, H. (2005) Exploring Perspectives and Themes for Histories of Records and Archives. The First International

Conference on the History of Records and Archives (I-CHORA), Archivaria, 60,

(Fall), 1–10.

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PART 1

Rethinking histories and theories

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CHAPTER 1

Moving the margins to the middle: reconciling ‘the archive’ with the archives

T

Jeannette a. Bastian

the ‘archive’ in the late 20th century as a focus of academic enquiry has given rise to a variety of responses from the archival profession. Rejection, indignation, speculation and even amusement have characterized the reactions of archivists to what has often seemed to them to be a misguided, misdirected, poorly understood and overly theorized construct of a primarily practical pursuit. Yet, academic fascination with the archive has lingered and in the early decades of the 21st century only grown stronger, so that the ‘archive’ now appears to be firmly established as a central identifier and research focus of many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. What each discipline means by ‘the archive’ or the ‘archival turn’ may differ slightly, but sufficient commonalities suggest a general understanding that ‘the archive’ – in both the digital and analogue realms – is recognized as an essential knowledge space to be approached, constructed and even confronted in numerous ways and from many perspectives. Environmentalist/historian William Turkel (2007, 66) expresses this broad understanding when he claims that ‘every place is an archive, one that bears material traces of the past in the very substance of the past’, but this is not a view that archivists or the archival profession have traditionally embraced. How have archivists responded to the challenges to their traditional theories and practices posed by the theorized ‘archive’? Archivists often seem reluctant to stray too far beyond their comfort zones, frequently emphasizing the differences between ‘the archive’ as conceptualized by non-archivists, and ‘real’ archival practice. Interrogating the commonalities between both, however, suggests that, for archivists, embracing ‘the archive’ in all its diversity and latitude could open valuable pathways towards a more HE EMERGENCE OF

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inclusive and all-encompassing understanding of the variety of records that communities create and the many ways in which they tell their stories. This essay attempts this interrogation, investigating developing multidisciplinary concepts of ‘the archive’ as well as their divergence from and impact on traditional archival theory and practice. It proposes to identify and map evolving concepts of ‘the archive’, seeking to reconcile them with traditional archival theory while exploring ways in which archival theorizing from other disciplines could expand archival thinking by archivists, and to some extent already has done so. Given the dissonance around the contrasting and even contradictory visions of the ‘archive’ and the archives, discussion and analysis of both are more than just an intellectual exercise. As scholars and disciplines hone their own constructs of the ‘archive’ outside of the archives and absent the input of archivists, traditional archives run the risk of irrelevancy. At the same time, recognizing the values of the ‘archive’ offers many opportunities for partnerships, for both the ‘archive’ and ‘the archives’ have much to offer one another.

Into the archive

Let me begin by offering a personal story: It is fairly well known among archival institutions and community groups in Boston, Massachusetts that students in our archives education programme routinely do internships as part of their academic programme. As a result, we receive many requests for records assistance both from organizations and individuals. Several years ago I received one such individual request. Recognizing the name of the requester as that of a woman well known as an activist in the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, I was intrigued and offered to take a look at her collection and discuss options for assistance. Working on these records could, I felt, be an exciting and even inspiring opportunity for our students. Accordingly, a colleague and I went to visit her. Her small apartment was crammed with archives boxes, and so was the storage facility that she drove us to – some 180 linear feet of records in all as it eventually turned out. She was then in her early 70s, and sorting and working in her archive had become her primary occupation and concern. Although our immediate recommendation was that she should donate her collection to a traditional archives and let the professionals there describe and organize it, she told us that she had to sell her archive. It was her only asset and she needed the money.

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But things were not quite so simple and her archive was much more than just an asset. The woman – let’s call her Sara – was already being courted by a prominent archives. While this archives was willing to pay for the collection, the archivists had indicated interest in retaining only parts of it – primarily, material concerned with national aspects of the women’s movement and not the more personal records. This was an immediate red flag! Sara felt passionately about her archive, as an expression not only of herself but also of the feminist movement itself, and specifically of the radical life that she advocated. She refused to sell unless the entire archive could be preserved – ideally, in the order that she decided on. With the help of a student, Sara continued to work on her archive while she also actively used and interacted with it in her daily relationships with a wide and diverse community of friends and colleagues and in a surprising array of causes. Sara believed that a radical life embraces radicalism broadly – not only specific causes. Radicalism is itself a way of life. Her archive echoed that belief. Sara also began to write about her archive, taking small sections at a time, reflecting on the materials and weaving them into short narratives. For Sara, her archive was more than a reflection of her life, it was a metaphor for a lifestyle she believed in and lived. This archive that was not in the archives – a DIY archive if you will – was both a personal, internal archive and an integral part of the broader external archive of knowledge on the feminist movement. Sara would have agreed with Brazilian artist Paul Bruscky, whose studio in Brazil houses a personal archive of over 15,000 items and who, when interviewed about his archives, observed that ‘my art and life have always been inseparable, and the studio-archive is clearly an expression of that. How do we give form to knowledge? In this space I make no difference between my works and everything else here, the archive, my library my life’ (Osthoff, 2009, 24). Sara and her relationship to her archive – ultimately purchased by that very institution that she initially rejected – foreshadows a generational shift in that complex relationship between scholars, artists, activists and archival materials. Scholarly engagement with the archives has moved from one of wariness and scepticism to one in which the archives is embraced as ‘both a point of departure and a destination’ (Eichhorn, 2008, n.p.). Sara’s archive, whether in her own possession or as a collection in a traditional women’s archives, is always already part of the feminist archive writ large, it is a component of that broader conceptual ‘feminist archive’ wherever it may be located. Feminist scholar Kate Eichhorn (2010, 625), defining the archival turn

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in the context of current third-wave feminism, claims that for this new generation, ‘the archive has never been … an impenetrable barrier to be breached, but rather it has always been a site and practice integral to our knowledge-making and cultural production and our activism. It is precisely where our academic and activist feminist work converge. The creation of archives is part and parcel of how we produce and legitimize knowledge and make our voices audible in the public sphere’. I tell the story of Sara’s archive to introduce an enquiry into that intriguing late 20th-, early 21st-century academic phenomenon, the ‘archival turn’, from the perspective of an archivist. Sara and her archive provide a small window, a lens, into comprehending a philosophical and scholarly space that envisions the archive not only as all that can be ‘known and unknown’ (Derrida, 1995, 36), but as a site of both community identity and self-realization, a monolithic accumulation of knowledge on the one hand, a sponge-like fluidity of information on the other, a particular location but with no fixed address, a place of affect and emotion (for both archivist and user) as well as passion (that well known ‘fever’) and, importantly, a context for evidence and memory. And while I recognize that the relationship between this scholarly archive and the archivist’s archives is neither smooth nor seamless, and often seems barely acknowledged, I will suggest that there is much common ground and ample room for mutual understandings. Where and how do notions of recordkeeping, recordkeeping behaviour and the relationship of records to their creator fit into the nexus of the archivists and the ‘archive’? For Sara, the archive was not so much the residue, nor even the representation of her life, but a dynamic construct that was both intimate and internal, while also forming a part of a larger external and continuing story. And it may be that this internality/externality is at least one of the factors that distinguishes the archive from the archives. In this essay, I hope to add to the analysis of the relationship between the archive and the archives by examining the following: 1 the archival turn and (re)turn – both metaphoric and material 2 how different disciplines view the ‘turn’ 3 the nexus – between academics and archivists 4 the challenge – how archivists turn with the ‘turn’.

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Turn and (re)turn

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Knowledge spaces, sites of power, cultural anxiety, reading against the grain, disruption, post-colonialism, this is only some of the terminology associated with the current archival turn. What may be less known is that the archival turn of the 21st century is also a (re)turn. The first archival turn occurred in early 19th-century European history studies when historians, led by Leopold von Ranke, turned towards archival documentation as the essential evidence needed for historical truth and began to ‘equate professional historical studies with scholarship based on archival research’ (Herman, 2013, 68). Previously, history had been struggling to become an independent discipline and it was not until the late 17th and early 18th centuries that history became ‘increasingly accepted as independently valuable without the validation of the universal principles of philosophy or the coherence of rhetoric’ (Eskildsen, 2013, 10). In concert with other academic scholarship of the time, the tools of the historian were empirical, relying on philosophical reconstructions, first-hand accounts, grand narratives and the work of previous historians. Von Ranke and his followers focused on texts, primarily those found in archives. His ‘turn’ included a belief in historical objectivity, historical truth and trustworthiness. Through the use of primary sources in the archives, ‘one could trust the work of one’s fellow historians because one understood and shared their procedures of working and writing. Even historians who did not share Ranke’s belief in historical objectivity described critical methods as such a guarantee’ (Eskildsen, 2013, 19). This first ‘turn’ established a methodological terrain for the discipline of history that persists today. But, beginning in the mid-20th century, a new kind of ‘archival turn’ or a (re)turn fostered a redefinition of the relationship of the archives to historical scholarship that not only questioned historical truth but also re-imagined historical sources. This ‘archive’ expanded beyond the text to include memory, witnessing, materiality, performance, art – a broad and deep spectrum of what can be ‘known and not known’. This expansive view of the archive helped construct a conceptual and analytical terrain for discourse in a range of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. It relocated the archive as both a theoretical metaphorical space and potentially many physical spaces. In this formulation, for example, a historian pursuing the archival silences of slavery in the American South might interrogate ‘slavery’s archive’, meaning all the relevant and existing and silenced knowledge in a vast array of archival materials across a wide range of locations (Klein, 2013). ‘Slavery’s archive’, to continue that example, is in no one place, and is never completely knowable; rather, it is an imaginary

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with no specific location but exists wherever the material might exist – in traditional archives, but also in the abstract and in the possible. While archivists often see a physical or virtual space populated with records, papers, manuscripts, scholars envision a wider sweeping space of knowledge, a potential for knowledge that may be found in a variety of materials including those that are yet undiscovered. History is not the only discipline that claims both a ‘turn’ and a ‘re-turn’. Scholars of photography trace the entry of the archive to the early 19th century, when the invention of the stereograph heralded an abundance of documentation that could be stored and organized into a body of evidence. Photography theorist Alan Sekula (1986, 16), studying the effect of the photograph on criminology, describes it thus: ‘in short, we need to describe the emergence of a truth-apparatus that cannot be adequately reduced to the optical model provided by the camera. The camera is integrated into a larger ensemble: a bureaucratic-clerical-statistical system of “intelligence”. This system can be described as a sophisticated form of the archive. The central artifact of this system is not the camera but the filing cabinet’. A theorist writing in 2012 describes Sekula’s ‘shadowy presence of the archive’ in the countless, neatly packed files, folders, drawers and shelves where, in the years between 1880 and 1910, ‘the archive became the dominant institutional basis for photographic meaning’. He notes that, ‘for Sekula and for some others at the end of the 1970s … the archival mode was a political apparatus inseparable from the rationalization of information’ (Tagg, 2012, 26). The archive as a source of power and control, an instrument of the state then, was recognized early on in the development of photography, particularly in its ability to compile and categorize. In today’s (re)turn of the photographic archive, remembrance and collective memory are central to the visual image, where ‘the forces of selfdetermination, decolonization, and their counter-movements have made it a highly politicized space, as communities have come to be seen as being made and remade through the sharing of the ethical obligation of remembrance and through the claim to “collective memory”, of which the archive is now seen as the repository’ (Tagg, 2012, 32). Many disciplines in the social sciences and humanities have embraced the archive as a core knowledge site, and engaging and interrogating the archive has become a paramount academic activity. Although in this essay it is not possible to do justice to all the various theoretical perspectives from the many academic disciplines that have embraced the archive, it nonetheless seems clear that whether the ‘archive’ is considered in terms of film, photography,

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art, literature, history, anthropology, performance arts or rhetoric, each discipline establishes and develops its own particular constructs and meanings. But while each discipline may focus on its own formulations, there are commonalities.

commonalities

Among these commonalities is the perception of the archive writ large as the core but dispersed resource for specific disciplines. Eichhorn (2010, 623) writes that ‘since the “archival turn” in the Humanities and Social Sciences, it has been commonplace to understand the archive as something that exists well beyond the boundaries of the institutions that have historically authorized their existence’. Importantly, this ‘archive’ is often digital, with the affordances of digitalization enabling the linking and data mining across complementary or even seemingly disparate and unrelated collections. In fact, one could say that these technological affordances are vital to the existence of the scholarly archive. The ‘archive’ is also always a deliberate site of power. Comparing the word ‘collection’ to that of ‘archive’, Eichhorn notes that ‘to adopt the term archive over collection is to consciously choose to think about documentary assemblages as sites that are as much about texts and textual practice as they are about people and relations of power’ (Eichhorn, 2008, 3). Deconstructionism or the close reading of individual texts was the popular critical trend in the late 20th century. The archival turn has moved that focus from the primacy of the text itself toward situating the text within the context of the archive. For example, film theorist, Eric Smoodin (2014) explains that, historically, students of film would study and analyse a single film, but today films are widely studied as components of more complex activities that embrace all the contextual information about the film, not only the obvious tropes such as creator, actors, etc., but historical knowledge as well. For Smoodin, in film studies, ‘the archival turn refers to a new consideration of the materials we might use for writing history and to our sense of institutional relations in that history’ (96). He points out that, even more significantly, the ‘archival turn’ suggests an intersection between film theory and history. As with photography and their file cabinets, Smoodin finds that the technologies associated with the archive (for example, editing machines that archivists use in the archives to describe and preserve film) help to situate the films and their styles ‘at the very center of the discipline’ (97). Just as context is gaining ground, evidence is also a key aspect of the

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archival turn. In examining different theories of the archive, Marlene Manoff (2004, 16) notes that ‘the archive anchors explorations of national identity and provides the evidence for establishing the meaning of the past’. In 2014, a forum of literary scholars devoted an issue of the Journal of Nineteenth Century Americanists to ‘Evidence and the Archive’. In the introduction, ‘The Aesthetics of Archival Evidence’, the author critically examines the current path of literary criticism in terms of the archival turn, concluding that ‘we came to see the “archive” (both as a term and a practice) as a way of guarding literary studies against accusations of interpretive triviality … what is the status of the epistemological category that brings us to the archive in the first place: evidence’ (Hyde, 2014, 157). Similarly, a visual artist finds that her studio, ‘with all its interior and objects, can still be viewed as a physical space filled with “evidence”’ (Sjöholm, 2014, 501).

Different views

But, while converts to the ‘archival turn’ in various disciplines have many commonalities (certainly, many that archivists should also find familiar) and might also agree as to the ‘increasing significance given to the archive as the means by which historical knowledge and forms of remembrance are accumulated, stored and recovered’ (Merewether, 2006, 10), they differ in their perceptions of exactly how the turn impacts on their own particular knowledge spaces. For example, art critic Simone Osthoff (2009, 12), considering the archive within the context of art, posits that ‘the archive as artwork challenges the notion of history as a discourse based primarily upon chronology and documentation’. A working artist who sees her studio as her personal creative archive is described as recognizing that ‘the studio as an archive is clearly a space of productive remembrance. Being her own archon, one artist has, throughout her work process, collected and constructed her own archive’ (Sjöholm, 2014, 512). Anthropologists find that ‘the reflexive turn from the 1980’s led scholars to question more explicitly the role of archives, just as they had become accustomed to questioning the contents of documents. They began to explore the implications of thinking of documents and the archives that held them as social artefacts’ (Trundle and Kaplonski, 2011, 408). These different views also suggest new paths for archivists. While the ‘archival turn’ may signal an academic turn towards an archive of knowledge that metaphorically constitutes both the totality of information about a discipline and the context within which to understand it, for archivists the

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‘archival turn’ could also be seen as a turn towards expanding that which can be considered archival. So, for example when geographer Kenneth Foote (1990) contemplates the erasure of the site of the Salem witch trials from the landscape of Salem, Massachusetts, he sees a landscape that could be considered as part of the record of a particular tragedy but from which the central record has been removed – the landscape and its missing memories are both text and context for an event and its expunction. Foote notes that, ‘Like archives, cultural landscapes can be said to maintain a representation of the past’ (384). Similarly, an archaeologist, interpreting an indigenous community at a historical site in Northern Australia writes, ‘narratives relating to a place are linked in space to form a culturescape, a physical place composed of localities where the events of the remembered past took place’ (Fredericksen, 2002, 299). He considers context and the textual/physical landscape as an archive of local knowledge. Post-colonial scholar Laura Stoler (2010, 20), focusing on ‘archives-as-process’ rather than ‘archives-as-thing’, turns to the archive as ‘condensed sites of epistemological and political anxiety rather than as skewed and biased sources’. Each of these constructs of ‘the archive’, beyond positioning it in a particular relationship to a discipline, adds to the more general vision of what an archives is or could be – a studio, a landscape, an artefact, an archaeological site, documents that reveal subaltern voices. And in tandem with the ‘archival turn’ is the ‘digital turn’, where scholars are discovering and inventing new ways of finding and mining data across the imaginary archive. The historian referenced earlier tracking the silences in ‘slavery’s archive’ notes that, ‘illuminating this movement through digital means, reframes the archive itself as a site of action rather than as a record of fixity or loss’ (Klein, 2013, 665). All these perceptions potentially expand the archives as well as the ‘archive’, offering not only the possibility of bringing the unheard and undocumented into the archives but also the potential for knowing the unknown – or at least, knowing it in better and in different ways.

constructs of records

Put more plainly, does the ‘archival turn’ stretch our understanding of both the archives and the records within it? Archivists have spent a considerable number of words as well as a great deal of thought on the question of defining the record. How proponents of both the ‘archive’ and archives understand and define ‘record’ is one of many possible points of recognition and synergy.

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Do the constructs of records in the ‘archive’ tally with those of the archivist? In his extensive analysis of recordness, archival theorist Geoffrey Yeo (2007, 318) notes that ‘even within archives and records management, writers and practitioners disagree about what is meant by a record and what distinguishes it from other organizational or cultural resources. Most acknowledge a close connection between records and the activities of individuals, families, communities, or organizations, but beyond this, perceptions vary considerably’. The official International Council on Archives (2000) definition of a record states that it is ‘recorded information in any form or medium, created or received and maintained, by an organization or person in the transaction of business or the conduct of affairs’. The Society of American Archivists assigns the qualities of content, structure and context to the record, also noting that it is ‘data or information in a fixed form that is created or received in the course of individual or institutional activity and set aside (preserved) as evidence of that activity for future reference’ (Pearce-Moses, n.d.). Yeo (2007, 337) himself chooses to reject these definitions, preferring instead to broadly conclude that ‘records can be characterized as persistent representations of activities, created by participants or observers of those activities or by their authorized proxies’. Introducing a more complex relationship between the record, the motivation for the record and the consequences of records creation in the wider society, Terry Cook suggested in 1990 that ‘behind the record always lies the need to record, to bear evidence, to hold and be held accountable, to create and maintain memory’. More recently, Eric Ketelaar (2012) expands on that relationship, writing that ‘the record is a repository of meanings some of which may be read in the record or inferred from the intertextuality that connects it to other documents; however, other meanings have to be deduced from the context of records’ or even archives’ creation and use. I deliberately use the plural of “meaning”; a record does not have only one meaning’ (23). Within this ‘cornucopia’ (a term suggested by Yeo, 2007, 330, quoting Verne Harris) of archival definitions, it is possible to discern threads between the ‘archive’ and the archives. The implicit relationships between records, representations, meaning and memory suggest that for both the ‘archive’ and the archives a record can be at least partially defined through the context in which it is perceived, the action, activity or motivation it evidences, and through its relationship to the society that creates it. With the focus on context, the linking of knowledge and evidence, ‘the archive’ may not be as far removed from ‘the archives’ as might at first appear.

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Archivists and the archive

How have archivists reacted to ‘the archive?’ Archivists have not generally taken kindly to the archive. Tweets retrieved from a conference of librarians and archivists in 2015 express often-heard concerns that not only does the theoretical archive obscure and undervalue the real work of archivists but the literature on the archive does not cite archivists: The ‘archive’ is overtheorized; ‘archives’ (where labor of record keeping takes

place) are undertheorized & underfunded.

and undervalued (from a viewing archivists as colleagues and not handmaidens

to researchers POV).

And what does it say about us that when scholars want to talk about significance

of ‘The Archive’ they aren’t citing archivists?1

There is a sense that somehow the scholars of the archive have not only reappropriated the archives but also have relegated archivists to a subordinate position – that once again, archivists are in danger of becoming handmaidens. And this view often seems to be borne out in academic discourses where scholars seem surprised that archivists and librarians are upset. Does this mean that archivists have not theorized enough? Not sufficiently carved out their own positions or laid out their theories? Or does it mean that archivists are not the exclusive arbiters of the archives, that perhaps the archives and theories of the archive(s) are more ubiquitous than archivists think? That perhaps the archives belongs to whoever cares enough to theorize or worry about it? Archivists may complain because scholars of the archive do not consult them or cite their literature. But should they? Each discipline, including the archival discipline, speaks from its own expertise, develops its own literature and conceptual frameworks and pursues its own mandates – and often lives in its own silo. But, as that ultimate metaphor, the Internet Archive, exemplifies, the archives and the archive are broad, deep and accommodating. It might be useful and productive to share and learn from one another. And as I have tried to suggest, while the goals and purposes of the archive and archives are not necessarily the same, they seem surprisingly close. At the same time, it is often archivists who make much of the work of the

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scholarly archive possible. Increasingly, though perhaps not yet enough to satisfy archivists, this is being acknowledged by academic scholars of the archive who are beginning to cite a small group of archival theorists such as Eric Ketelaar, Verne Harris and the late Terry Cook, all of whom have written about the archival turn and archival theory. Examining citations and bibliographies, it is clear that the academic scholars are mindful of at least some of the archival literature, raising the speculation that perhaps they are also seeking a kind of archival authenticity.

New territory

Archival theorists are also suggesting that thinking about the archive and the archival turn can lead archivists into new territory as well. Verne Harris (2009, 141), for example, notes ‘that there are many lenses available to archivists in reading of archive. That lenses from outside archival discourses offer abundant riches. That increasingly we are benefiting from these riches’. Terry Cook (2011) urged archivists to claim their place within the archive, writing that ‘despite the impressive external theorizing on the “archive” in recent historical writing, what is still missing is the voice of the archivist, who, after all, is the principal actor in defining, choosing, and constructing the archive that remains, and then in representing and presenting that surviving archival trace to researchers’. As both Harris and Cook suggest, archivists have not only something to learn from the archive but also much to contribute. Why is it important for archivists to understand the scholarly archive? Here are a just a few reasons: ■ to broaden understanding of the many disciplines that use archives

■ to participate and collaborate with scholars in developing search tools

and enhancing access

■ to utilize both archival theory and disciplinary ‘archive’ theory to reveal

hidden collections and extend the walls of the archives

■ to work with scholars on innovative projects that link and mine data in

order to extend archival access across collections

■ to bring marginalized groups and under-documented issues into the

archives

■ to re-conceptualize the meaning of ‘text’ and ‘record’: what belongs in

the 21st-century archives?

Geologist Kenneth Foote (1990) challenged archivists to expand their archival

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thinking and embrace a broad vision of human traces and transmissions that goes beyond traditional documentation. He noted that ‘the cultural role of the archives is hard to isolate from the contributions of other institutions and traditions’ (380). The archival turn has understood and responded to that challenge. Additionally, recent writings on documents and records by archivists themselves also strongly suggest that the limitations of traditional definitions may be inhibiting a more inclusive acceptance of what a record might or could be. These expanded definitions similarly expand a records universe in which both the internal and the external archives work together. Both archivists and academics are recognizing that in our global yet highly individual world, ‘The very existence of an archive has come to be viewed as constitutive of a community’s claim to identity, and what should be in the archive, who should adjudicate it, and who should have access to it have become questions of urgent social and political significance’ (Tagg, 2012, 32).2

Bridging the ‘archive’ and the archives

Canadian archival educator Tom Nesmith (2015) points out that people have always ‘used various means of communication to recall their thoughts and activities’, and that they have ‘designated one or more places to keep them – in memories and on bodies, in nature, rituals, a location at home or work, or an entire building or other shelter specifically dedicated to that purpose’. He calls all these designations archives because, ‘at heart any archival institution is people doing archival work’ (92). It is in this spirit that strategies for building bridges between archivists and the scholarly ‘archive’ could be explored. Mindful of the need for new strategies in the evolving relationships between the archives and society, this exploration by archival theorists has been underway for some time. There are many possible approaches, but the following paragraphs offer a few of them. As Terry Cook (1997, 46) has cautioned, ‘archival theory should not be seen as a set of immutable scientific laws disinterestedly formed and holding true for all time. The leading archival thinkers in this century have imaginatively reinvented the concept of archives in ways that very much reflected, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes consciously, the dominant strains of public discourse in their time and place’. Cook’s own advocacy of societal provenance speaks directly to the fluidity of public discourse. Broadly conceptualizing the multiple relationships between records and the communities that create them and locating records within an expansive context encourages archivists to think not only about the records in their care

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but also about the related and pertinent records existing in a myriad other locations. Contemplating archives as ‘communities of memory’, Eric Ketelaar (2005, 54) writes that ‘collective identity is based on the elective processes of memory, so that a given group recognizes itself through its memory of a common past. A community is a “community of memory”. That common past is not merely genealogical or traditional … it is more: a moral imperative for one’s belonging to a community’. Seeing records through the lens of collective memory posits record creation as communal endeavours that are as expansive as the communities themselves. Recently, Anne Gilliland and Michelle Caswell (2016) have suggested stretching archival theory to include the imaginary or not-yet-realized or perhaps not-yet-discovered record. They explain: ‘What we are calling impossible archival imaginaries and the affect associated with the imagined records produced within those imaginaries, offer important affective counterbalances and sometimes resistance to dominant legal, bureaucratic, historical and forensic notions of evidence that so often fall short in explaining the capacity of records and archives to motivate, inspire, anger and traumatize’ (55). Contemplating Foote’s expunging of the site of the Salem witch trials, or the difficulties in uncovering ‘slavery’s archive’, archival imaginaries seem very real, extending the archives beyond its walls. In digital environments, connections are possible that simply did not exist in the analogue world. The rise and the prominence of the ‘archive’ has been fostered by these digital affordances, although it could well be argued that ‘the archive’ has always existed in some form. Nonetheless, technology, the convergence of cultural heritage institutions, the increasingly global access to knowledge and the emerging importance of community and community identity in locating oneself within that global environment all offer possibilities for mutual and productive cooperation and understanding between the scholars of the ‘archive’ and the archivists in the archives.

Conclusion

In conclusion, let me return to the title of this chapter, ‘Moving the margins to the middle’. Who is on the margins, and who is in the middle? It may depend on where you are standing. The wealth of theory and literature on the ‘archive’ might suggest its appropriation by scholars, but equally, the rise of the more familiar ‘archives’ offers new opportunities for archivists.

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In the spirit of opportunities, I offer one more story. Of all the memorable characters in Herman Melville’s great American sea classic, Moby Dick – the obsessed Captain Ahab, the mystical Queequeg, the terrifying white whale – none should resonate more with archivists than an anonymous personage who appears only once in the preface, and is never heard from again. This personage is the sub-sub librarian, a poor and pathetic creature who devotes his life to collecting and compiling scraps of unrelated information about whales. On the scale of human endeavours, Melville places the men of action – those seafarers and adventurers who actually go whaling – at the top. The sub-sub librarian (can we also call him ‘archivist’?) is at the bottom, a creature who ‘belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong’. Melville concludes, ‘Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless’. Herman Melville was extolling the virtues of those who directly engage in action, who confront the deed or even do the deed itself. Through the character of the sub-sub librarian, Melville makes clear that the further away we are from the real thing and the more we deal only in the representations, the more irrelevant and inconsequential are our endeavours. In this call to action he undoubtedly echoed the adventuring pioneer spirit of early 19thcentury America, a spirit that persists today. But in his devastating portrait of information collectors, Melville reaffirmed a stereotype that has also persisted. By rejecting that stereotype, archivists today have every reason and every incentive to turn away from the margins and turn towards the middle, embracing the ‘archive’ and its adherents and engaging with those amorphous but dynamic knowledge spaces – not as the clerks or the keepers, but as the actors and collaborators.

Notes 1 2

In the interest of preserving the anonymity of the tweeters and the tweeting

event, these tweets are not referenced beyond the information provided through

the text.

For archivists reaching towards a more global vision of archives, see, for

example, Caswell, M. (2014) Archiving the Unspeakable Silence, Memory, and the

Photographic Record in Cambodia, Madison WI, University of Wisconsin Press.

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References

Cook, T. (1997) What Is Past Is Prologue: a history of archival ideas since 1898, and the future paradigm shift, Archivaria, 43, 17–63.

Cook, T. (2011) The Archive(s) Is a Foreign Country: historians, archivists, and the changing archival landscape, American Archivist, 74, (Fall/Winter), 600–32.

Derrida, J. (1995) Archives Fever. A Freudian impression, Diacritics, 25, (Summer), 9–63.

Eichhorn, K. (2008) Archival Genres: gathering texts and reading spaces, Invisible Culture. An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, 12, (May),

http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/archival-genres-gathering-texts-and-reading-spaces/.

Eichhorn, K. (2010) D.I.Y. Collectors, Archiving Scholars, and Activist Librarians:

legitimizing feminist knowledge and cultural production since 1990, Women’s

Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal, 39 (6), 622–46.

Eskildsen, K. R. (2013) Inventing the Archive: testimony and virtue in modern historiography, History of the Human Sciences 26 (4), 8–26.

Foote, K. (1990) To Remember and Forget. Archives, memory and culture, American Archivist, 53, (Summer), 378–92.

Fredericksen, C. (2002) Caring for History: Tiwi and archaeological narratives of

Fort Dundas/Punata, Melville Island, Australia, World Archaeology, 34, (October),

288–302.

Gilliland, A. J. and Caswell, M. (2016) Records and Their Imaginaries: imagining the impossible, making possible the imagined, Archival Science, 16, 53–75.

Harris, V. (2009) Against the Grain: psychologies and politics of secrecy, Archival Science, 9, 133–42.

Herman, P. (2013) The Heroic Study of Records: the contested persona of the archival historian, History of the Human Sciences, 26 (4), 67–83.

Hyde, C. (2014) Introduction: the aesthetics of archival difference, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth Century Americanists, 2, (January), 155–62.

International Council on Archives (2000) Record. In ISAD(G): General International Standard Archival Description, 2nd edn, Ottawa, International Council on

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Ketelaar, E. (2005) Sharing: collected memories in communities of records, Archives and Manuscripts, 33, 44–61.

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Klein, L. F. (2013) The Image of Absence: archival silence, data visualization and James Hemings, American Literature, 85, (December), 661–88.

Manoff, M. (2004) Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines, Portal, Libraries and the Academy, 4, 9–25.

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MIT Press.

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Sekula, A. (1986) The Body and the Archive, October, 39, (Winter), 3–64.

Sjöholm, J. (2014) The Art Studio as Archive: tracing the geography of artistic potentiality, progress and production, Cultural Geographies, 21, 505–14.

Smoodin, E. (2014) As the Archive Turned, Writing Film Histories Without Films, The Moving Image, 14, (Fall), 96–100.

Stoler, A. L. (2010) Along the Archival Grain: epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press.

Tagg, J. (2012) The Archiving Machine; or, the camera and the filing cabinet, Grey Room, 47, (Spring), 24–37.

Trundle, C. and Kaplonski, C. (2011) Tracing the Political Lives of Archival Documents, History and Anthropology, 22, (December), 407–14.

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CHAPTER 2

Organisms, skeletons and the archivist as palaeontologist: metaphors of archival order and reconstruction in context

A

Juan Ilerbaig

S ARCHIVISTS, WE

know that context is important; that it is, in fact, everything. As scholars, we also know that pretty much everything is context; what surrounds the text is virtually infinite. In the case of the Dutch Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives (Muller, Feith and Fruin, 1920/1940) we know about the immediate Dutch archival context of its composition, that it was grounded in the practices of its authors and their predecessors, and on their discussions with their colleagues at the Netherlands Association of Archivists (Horsman, Ketelaar and Thomassen, 2003; Ketelaar, 1996; Ketelaar, 1997). We also know that the Manual achieved renown not because of the novelty of its ideas, but as a consequence of the thoroughness of its compilation. As Samuel Muller acknowledged, the combination of concepts and principles that it canonized was already ‘in the air’ when the authors set out to write it (Horsman, 2002). In articulating those concepts and principles, the Dutch trio used a series of metaphors that has left an indelible imprint on the development of archival science. A common metaphorical thread was woven into the fabric of the discipline, linking archival science to natural history. An archives became an organism possessing a skeleton, record making and keeping were described as a process of accumulation and deposit of sedimentary residues, and the archivist’s work was compared to that of the palaeontologist. How did that family of metaphors come to impregnate the theoretical language of archival science in its modern foundational period? Were they as much ‘in the air’ as the concepts and principles that Muller had in mind? One can dismiss metaphors as merely ornamental or illustrative resources. Scholars who have examined the use of metaphorical concepts in the scientific sphere agree that some metaphors merely add colour or play a pedagogical

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role. Yet many others so completely frame our thinking, individually and collectively, that we should think of cognition as being metaphorical. In every field of enquiry, metaphors provide ‘the cognitive means to chart the unknown’ (Klammer and Leonard, 1994, 31). The word ‘metaphor’, from the Greek metapherein, to transfer or carry over, shares etymology with ‘inference’ and, like the word ‘method’ (methodos, travelling or following after), conveys the idea that cognition is a process that consists of moving and carrying ‘things’ along the way. This is true at the individual level and, perhaps even more, at the social level of the academic discipline. Since metaphors can be very important for the conceptual development of a discipline, our question bears investigating: why did Muller, Feith and Fruin, when they tried to come to terms with archival theory and practice, feel compelled to talk about skeletons and sediments, organisms and palaeontologists, functions and original orders? Were these 19th-century archival theorists following in the footsteps of contemporary scholars in other academic fields? In addressing these questions, I will take you on a grand tour outside archival science. If the past is a foreign country, this exploration may feel doubly alien to most archival readers, as I will look into the history of disciplines such as natural history, linguistics and architecture as my method for understanding the context of archival science’s disciplinary coming of age. I will show that Muller, Feith and Fruin were not charting unknown metaphorical territories but were aligning themselves with scholars who, in other fields, had traversed similar terrains, with much the same goal of achieving academic legitimacy for their new academic disciplines. I will argue that the approach to palaeontological reconstruction pioneered by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier at the turn of the 19th century became a model for a series of nascent disciplines outside the natural sciences – disciplines that shared with palaeontology the goals of reconstructing past entities on the basis of remaining fragments. Cuvier’s fame and his methodology of comparative anatomical analysis presented an almost unavoidable model for disciplines like linguistics, architecture and, later on, archival science. And the fundamental concepts used by Cuvier were adopted by the other disciplines as the mark of a legitimate scientific enquiry. However, in a time before Darwin, Cuvier’s reconstructionist science had a paradoxical relationship with history. The very entities that it virtually brought back to life were organisms from past times, yet also entities without a history. This was clearly not the case with those disciplines like linguistics, architecture or archival science. While plants and animals could be seen as

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having an individual development without the species themselves changing through time, languages, buildings and archives were clearly historical products in a more complex way. As these disciplines applied the palaeontological model, they also introduced diverse interpretations of history, variously assimilating Romantic and historicist perspectives into the static Cuverian framework and presenting slightly diverging views on the reconstruction of past arrangements. Here is a quick overview of my itinerary. I will first examine the metaphors that constitute the focus of this essay, as they were introduced in the Manual. Then I will present, in succession, developments in the three disciplines that can help to illuminate the wider context of the reconstruction project entailed by those metaphors: palaeontology, linguistics and architecture. Finally, I will return to the archives, to examine some of the effects and implications of those metaphorical choices for archival theory at the turn of the 20th century.

The metaphors

Let us start with the metaphor that compares archival materials to sedimentary deposits. In rule #2 of the Manual Muller, Feith and Fruin (1920/1940, 19) recapitulated the definition of an archives from the first section along geological lines, when they noted that it was ‘always a sediment of the functions of [an organizational] body or of [an] official’.1 As a metaphor, ‘sediment’ refers mainly to the mode of growth of an archives, showing that such a mode of growth is akin to the natural, slow deposition of materials previously held in suspension in a (liquid) medium as that medium slowly dries up or recedes. However, it also points tangentially to the relationship between the nature of an organization and its documentary remains: the remains necessarily share or reflect the material composition of the original whole that produced them. Although the metaphorical relationship between geology and archives has an interesting and somewhat convoluted history, I will leave it aside here, focusing instead on the other group of metaphors used by the Dutch trio in the Manual: the comparison of an archives to an ‘organism’ that possesses a ‘skeleton’, and the associated comparison of the archivist’s tasks with those of a ‘palaeontologist’. Unlike the ‘sediment’ metaphor, that of the organism refers directly to the nature of the archives and its internal organization, and only indirectly to its mode of growth. In the Manual, Muller, Feith and Fruin (1920/1940, 19) state that ‘an archival collection is an organic whole, a living organism, which grows, takes shape, and undergoes changes in accordance with fixed rules’.2

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They develop this metaphor long enough to extract a few subsidiary principles: that the nature of the archives responds to functional changes in the organic body; that archives, like organisms, are individuals and, therefore, that ‘each archival collection must be treated in its own way’; and, finally, that arrangement can be based only on full knowledge and ‘examination of the structure of the organism’. It is not until midway through the chapter on the arrangement of archival documents (rule #20) that we encounter another, very related metaphor. This time, the authors are reporting on a relatively extensive discussion about the metaphorical reference to ‘the skeleton of the [archival] collection’ (Muller, Feith and Fruin, 1920/1940, 66). The authors point out that a ‘misunderstanding’ over the meaning of the metaphor occurred at one of the meetings of the Netherlands Association of Archivists. Due to its ‘interest’ and ‘significance’, the authors’ discussion of this misunderstanding occupies one half of this long section. The proponent of the metaphor reportedly used ‘skeleton’ to refer to ‘the framework of a wooden house’, while a fellow member of the Association, agreeing with this characterization, thought it literally referred to ‘the skeleton of an animal’ (Muller, Feith and Fruin, 1920/1940, 69). While it appeared that both interpretations of the metaphor equally directed attention to the same element, that is, ‘the main lines along which the archival collection was organized of old’, the authors found the second meaning more appealing because of its being ‘in harmony’ with the organic metaphor introduced in rule #2. Discussion of rule #20 focused on how to conceptualize the main lines – i.e. the skeleton – of an archives. As the authors put it, two very different points of view were being set in contraposition: ‘One … wishes to take the old organization of the administrative body as the key to the organization of the archival collection, the other the original organization of the archival collection’ (Muller, Feith and Fruin, 1920/1940, 69). It was in analysing this dilemma that the ‘skeleton’ metaphor was explored in more depth: ‘The archivist deals with the archival collection just as the palaeontologist does with the bones of a prehistoric animal: he tries from these bones to put the skeleton of the animal together again’ (71). Like palaeontologists, archivists use their knowledge to reconstruct the skeleton, not allowing ‘minor deviations in the structure’ to distract them from their labour of reconstruction. Again, like palaeontologists, archivists can reconstruct only ‘one particular state’ (71) – i.e. their arrangement cannot reflect two different stages of organization, just as a reconstructed skeleton cannot mix an adult and an infant. The metaphors point to several aspects of an archives. Like an organism,

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an archives has a developmental history, operates in accordance to fixed (‘physiological’, i.e. functional) rules and possesses individuality. The metaphor of the ‘skeleton’ illuminates a related aspect: that an archives has an internal organization that endures beyond its active life and can be reconstructed by the archivist, just as the structural organization of a longdead organism can be reconstructed by a palaeontologist. If we want to fully understand why this metaphor was chosen as a way to illuminate the tasks of archivists and the nature of the central object of their professional activity, it is important to start by briefly examining the impact of palaeontology in 19th-century culture. In particular, the ideas of the naturalist most clearly identified with that discipline at the time, Georges Cuvier, provided an enduring analytical model for a host of other, nonscientific disciplines that were also then in their formative stages.

Skeletons and palaeontologists

From his central position at the Parisian Muséum Nationale d’Histoire Naturelle for over 30 years, Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) was the most famous and influential naturalist working in the first half of the 19th century. He was one of the originators of the idea that fossils could be used to reconstruct the history of rock formations, to be used, so to speak, as a clock marking the different periods in the history of the earth. Like many earlier and contemporary naturalists, he modelled himself after other students of the past, describing himself as ‘a new species of antiquarian’. He thus conceived of his task as naturalist in the same terms as those who researched and tried to piece together the historical past on the basis of the material and textual evidences that the progress of time had left behind. The exact words in which, in 1812, Cuvier described the nature of his life’s work as a student of fossils should be strikingly familiar to archivists. ‘As a new species of antiquarian’, he wrote, ‘I have had to learn to decipher and restore [rétablir] these monuments, and to recognize and reassemble into their original order [ordre primitif] the scattered and mutilated fragments of which they are composed’ (Cuvier, Preliminary Discourse, Researches on the Fossil Bones of Quadrupeds, 1812, in Rudwick, 1997, 183). This remark is based on an understanding of living organisms that emerged in the middle of the 18th century, in reaction to the naturalists who tried to translate mechanical philosophy’s understanding of the inorganic world to the study of living beings. Naturalists such as Buffon reacted to this mechanistic view by conceiving of organic life as governed by internal forces

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that worked together in a system of mutual interaction. An organism, he claimed, was ‘a whole uniformly organized in all of its inner parts’ (un tout uniformément organisé dans toutes ses parties intérieures); a complex of mutually interdependent parts, rather than a mere aggregate that could simply be decomposed into a set of component corpuscles. The idea of internal organization was key, and it meant that the analytical approach of isolating single elements from the whole would not work in the study of living beings: the study of life was irreducible to physics. Instead, comparative analysis (‘to compare the functional operation of these systems amongst as many classes of living organisms as possible’) became the ‘basic operational mode’ of natural history (Reill, 1986, 439). This centrality of comparison was advanced by the next rising star of French natural history, Georges Cuvier. While Buffon had called for wholesale comparison (of form, size, external configuration, parts and their position, etc.), Cuvier emphasized the detailed examination of the internal structure of organisms as a foundation for natural history in general, and for palaeontology in particular. As he argued, ‘it is only with the help of anatomy that geology can establish in a sure manner several of the facts that serve as its foundations’ (Cuvier, Memoir on the Species of Elephant, both Living and Fossil, 1796, in Rudwick, 1997, 21). Cuvier’s comparative anatomy was not a simple descriptive science, but one based on the understanding of the functional integrity of every organism as a whole. It was based on a functional explanation of form; that is, it understood organic form as a result of the adaptation of the organism to what Cuvier called its ‘conditions of existence’, the way in which a given organism managed to survive in a given environment. From this idea Cuvier derived his two central anatomical principles: the ‘correlation of forms’ and the ‘subordination of characters’. The first principle establishes the functional interdependence between the various organs and systems of the body. The second determines that certain organs or systems have greater functional significance than others (and, as a corollary, that most organic variation is to be found in the subordinate characters, not on the main systems). The result is a dynamic organicism: Every organized being forms a whole, a unique and closed system, in which all the

parts correspond mutually, and contribute to the same definitive action by a

reciprocal reaction. None of its parts can change without the others changing too;

and consequently each of them, taken separately, indicates and gives all the others.

(Cuvier, Preliminary Discourse, Researches on

the Fossil Bones of Quadrupeds, 1812, in Rudwick, 1997, 217)

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Correlation of forms and subordination of characters were posited by Cuvier as inferential principles: he directed naturalists to use those principles as tools in studying the internal organization of animal organisms and reconstructing their fossil remains. He thus advocated a methodology of structural analysis in the pursuit of historical objectives. As he argued, ‘the number, direction, and shape of the bones that compose each part of an animal’s body are always in a necessary relation to all the other parts, in such a way that – up to a point – one can infer the whole from any one of them’ (Cuvier, Extract from a Memoir on an Animal of which the Bones are Found in the Plaster Stone around Paris, and which Appears no Longer to exist Alive Today, 1798, in Rudwick, 1997, 36). Analysis of the parts would lead to the reconstruction of the whole. Cuvier boasted that he had been able to reconstruct many different species of extinct organisms, in some cases on the basis of very few remaining bones. In reality, most of his ability as a palaeontologist rested on his experience as a zoologist and his ability to recognize similar anatomical ensembles, rather than on the guidance of his principles. But accepting this reliance on mere experience would have militated against Cuvier’s main objective, which was none other than to establish natural history in general and palaeontology in particular as a science on a par with the physico-mathematical ones. ‘We are’, he argued, ‘able to establish certain laws which rule these relations [between parts] and are employed like those which are determined by the general [mathematical] sciences’. It is in this way that ‘the history of animals no longer displays the arbitrary and irregular progress that it did twenty years ago; it has become a rational science’ (cited in Coleman, 1964, 74; emphasis added). Cuvier’s fame as a master of palaeontological reconstruction quickly crossed the borders not only of his nation but also of his very discipline. In the next sections I will show how his ideas found their way into other disciplines that participated in what we may call the 19th century’s ‘reconstruction’ or ‘restoration impulse’. From linguistics to architecture to, finally, archival science, the idea of reconstructing lost wholes or restoring pre-existing orders became central to the coming of age of several disciplines that shared both a structural and a historical dimension. In all of these disciplines, references to the models of geology and palaeontology became common, often invoking the very figure of Cuvier. And these models served the goal of turning disciplines into legitimate and rational fields of knowledge.

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Reconstructing the original language

The influence of Cuvier’s views marked a crucial change in the study of language in the mid-19th century as linguistics came of age as a comparative discipline engaged in a communal project of historical reconstruction of linguistic structures. This process had started towards the end of the 18th century, when William Jones (1746–94) formulated the hypothesis of a common ancestor for Sanskrit and the classical languages of Europe, which came to be known as Indo-European. Throughout the 19th century, students of language, mostly in Germany, used Cuverian language as a way to transform the emerging speculative discipline of etymology – which examined lexical (i.e. external) parallelisms between different languages – into a modern comparative science. The process was conceived of as one of creating a ‘linguistic palaeontology’ that, like Cuvier’s comparative anatomy, analysed the fragments of an ancient language ‘like the fossils of a world no longer in existence’ (Pictet, cited in Blanckaert, 2011, 64). Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) applied to linguistics the ideas of the French naturalists, distinguishing between languages that had an ‘organic structure’ (e.g. Sanskrit, Greek) and those that were ‘mechanical’ (Chinese, Basque) (Koerner, 1990). These terms referred to how modifications of meaning were produced: by ‘inflection or internal variations of the primitive word’ (organic) or through the ‘annexing’ of particles (mechanical). Organic languages are highly organized, and their ‘internal connection’ is like a ‘living productive germ’ (Schlegel, 1808/1849, 447). It was because of this organic character that Schlegel (1808/1849, ch. 3) called for the development of a ‘comparative grammar’ that would illuminate the ‘internal structure’ (inner Structur) of languages and shed light on their relationships in the same way as comparative anatomy did for natural history: ‘The structure or comparative grammar [vergleichende Grammatik] of the language furnishes as certain a key to their general analogy, as the study of comparative anatomy has done to the loftiest branch of natural science’. Following in his footsteps, philologists such as Jakob Grimm (1785–1863) and Rasmus Rask (1787–1832) in the 1820s started developing what they called phonetic or sound laws, general correspondences between the sounds in different languages that could be used to investigate the historical development of language. The final step in the Cuverianization of linguistics was taken by Franz Bopp (1791–1867) and August Schleicher (1821–68), who built fully fledged theories about the development of languages and the reconstruction of the Ursprache, the original, perfect language from which many modern European languages

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derived (Indo-European). Like Schlegel, Bopp conceived of language as a ‘linguistic organism’ (Sprachorganismus); languages were ‘organic natural bodies which form themselves according to definite laws’ (cited in Morpurgo Davies, 1987, 84). In his Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit (1833) Bopp advocated an analytical method (which he called ‘comparative dissection’, Zergliederung) that consisted of isolating and comparing functionally similar lexical items of different Indo-European languages. This comparative analysis led to separating original features from new or recent ones and reconstructing a proto-language containing the similarities. Linguistic reconstruction was possible only under the assumption that languages had changed. Bopp understood the process of linguistic change as a ‘development process’ (Entwickelungsgang) of a particular kind: a degeneration from an earlier perfect state (cited in Morpurgo Davies, 1987, 88). Like organisms, languages decay, losing their ‘vital power’ (Lebenskraft) (89). The original state can then be determined from its residues in the morphology of ancient and modern languages. This biological conception of language allowed Bopp to conceive of an object of study (language seen as an organism in a process of development), a method (grammatical and phonetic analysis, akin to the physiological foundation of comparative anatomy), and a goal (reconstruction of the original Indo-European language) for linguistics as an autonomous discipline: a ‘comparative linguistic anatomy’ (vergleichende Sprach-Anatomie) (93). Schleicher further developed Bopp’s views, explicitly looking at the natural historical sciences as a methodological model to be imitated in constructing the autonomous discipline of linguistics (Koerner, 1989, 360). He argued that just as the palaeontologist has to ‘reconstruct’ an organism from the available fossil remains, using certain laws, so the linguist has to reconstruct a language from what remains of it, using methods of comparison. Reconstruction required the use of sound laws in the restoration of the original structure: ‘When comparing the linguistic forms of two related languages, I first try to trace the forms to be compared back to their probable base forms, i.e., that structure which they must have [had]’ (Schleicher, 1852, cited in Koerner, 1989, 360). Schleicher too saw languages as having declined in the historical period. But for him, linguistics was not a historical but a natural science, since it shared with natural sciences such as comparative anatomy a method of reconstruction that was based mostly on unalterable natural laws: ‘The comparative anatomist never compares the form of the skull of two animals by taking the skull of a newborn specimen of the one sort, and the skull of an

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adult of the other; if the needful material is wanting, as is often the case in fossil remains, he does just what we do; according to known laws he reconstructs what is lacking’ (Schleicher, 1852, cited in Koerner, 1989, 352; emphasis added). By positing that languages were organisms endowed with a functionality thanks to their internal structure, 19th-century linguists used the Cuverian palaeontological model based on comparative anatomy to frame the study of language as a legitimate scientific enterprise. The ultimate goal of this discipline was the reconstruction of an original language that was conjectured as an ideal of which modern languages were but increasingly degenerate versions. Reconstruction was possible only with the development of sound methodologies that analysed and studied the components of the internal structure and compared the components of different languages. The metaphor of the organism helped to establish the legitimacy of those tasks and methodologies.

Restoring the ideal cathedral

Another discipline that participated in the restoration or reconstruction impulse characterizing palaeontology was architecture. As I noted above, architecture, palaeontology and archival science are explicitly connected in one lengthy discussion in rule #20 of the Manual. The discussion centred on two related yet different structural metaphors, connected by the ambiguity of the Dutch word used, geraamte, which means both the skeleton or carcass of an animal and the framework of a house. Cuvier had often referred to the framework of the organisms he was reconstructing by using the same word, charpente, often used for the wooden structure of a building, so it should not surprise us that 19th-century architectural theorists, used to dealing with the frameworks of buildings and with the relationships between a whole and its parts, took some cues from Cuvier and the palaeontological literature. Gottfried Semper (1803–79) was perhaps the first architectural theorist influenced by Cuvier. Semper often visited the Muséum during his time as a student in Paris in the late 1820s, and often referred to Cuvier’s work in his attempts to develop a theory of architecture that focused, more anatomico, on the laws regulating the development of individual architectural forms. One of his theoretical manuscripts is titled Comparative Theory of Building (1850), and therein Semper describes the task of the architect as fully congruent with that of the zoologist. He would later state that the goal of the true art of building was the creation of ‘a whole that is ... in harmony both with itself and with the external world’ (cited in van Eck, 1994, 230). Yet, at the same

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time that he was looking for the rules or laws underlying architectural structures, Semper was searching for ‘geographically and historically specific conditions influencing architectural form’ (Hvattum, 2004, 37). Cuvier’s functional organicism allowed Semper to combine the search for scientific or natural laws with a historical, particularizing understanding of architectural form. In 1830s France, a group of architects known as the Romantic Pensionnaires similarly reconceptualized architecture as a science that, based on rational, scientific principles, tries to respond to the ‘conditions of existence’ imposed by the socio-cultural and physical environment. Léon Vaudoyer (1803–72) and Léonce Reynaud (1803–80) based their architectural views on the idea that ‘conditions of existence are necessary as much with human works as with those of nature’ (Vaudoyer, cited in van Eck, 2001, 94). Henri Labrouste (1801– 75), in applying Cuvier’s functionalist anatomy to architectural reconstruction, gave this adaptationism a historical twist. He understood the Greek architecture of Sicily as ‘the reconstruction of the adaptation of Greek architecture to the climate, materials and institutions of the Greek colonists of Sicily’. Architectural reconstruction thus meant ‘to reconstruct a part of history, not an a-historical vignette’ (van Eck, 2001, 84). But the architectural theorist who found greater inspiration in Cuvier’s ideas was Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79). He is mostly remembered for his reconceptualization of French Gothic architecture, both in his theoretical works as well as through his restorations of key monuments such as the abbey at Vézelay and the cathedral of Notre-Dame. For Viollet-leDuc, restoration required the harmonization of two perspectives: the understanding of a building’s historical formation and the view of architecture as a rational task aimed at fulfilling a functional programme. In the Preface to his Dictionnaire raissonné of French medieval architecture (1854– 68) he urged his readers to follow the example of the natural sciences and study medieval monuments ‘just like one studies the development and life of an organic being’, that is, ‘dissecting them apart [les disséquer séparément] while describing the functions, the goals of the different parts and the changes they have undergone’ (Viollet-le-Duc, 1854, x). Viollet-le-Duc’s views on architectural restoration rested on two pillars that reflected the two Cuvierian principles. Applying Cuvier’s notion of the conditions of existence to architecture, he held that every building embodied a response to the needs and possibilities of the society that produced it. In keeping with Cuvier’s functionalist anatomy, a building had to be seen in terms of the material organization of its different aspects, as a kind of

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organism in which the different parts, each fulfilling a determinate function and performing specific actions, stand in a state of organic equilibrium. As Viollet-le-Duc stated: ‘[E]very member of this architecture is the result of a necessity of that structure, as in the vegetable and the animal kingdom there is not a form or a process that is not produced by a necessity of the organism’ (1990, 92). This structurally rationalist view allowed an architect to deduce, using Cuvier’s principles, the whole structure (i.e. the building) out of its main part (i.e. the vault). Viollet-le-Duc articulated these views in a seminal article on architectural restoration in his Dictionnaire raisonné. The general principle of restoration, he argued, was ‘that every building and every part of a building should be restored in its own style, not only as regards appearance but structure’ (1866/1875, 35). This meant respecting the individuality resulting from the historical growth of a building, making sure not to alter the ‘original arrangement’ that is the result of each building’s history. Viollet-le-Duc gives the example of a 13th-century church to which gargoyles were added in the 15th century. ‘Shall we on the pretext of unity substitute gargoyles of the thirteenth century for them? No: for we should thus destroy the traces of an interesting original arrangement [disposition primitive]. On the contrary, we shall persist in following the later work, adhering to its style’ (43). The paradoxical result of restoration following these principles would be ‘to reinstate [a building] in a condition of completeness which may never have existed at any given time’ (9). The original arrangement is an ideal structure, a theoretical being that boasts the creative effects of temporality (the changes in style) without showing the ravages of time. A sense of the history beneath the structure marks Viollet-le-Duc’s understanding of architectural restoration. In his plans for the restoration of Notre-Dame, he argued against the traditional view ‘that it is necessary to suppress all the later additions to the original structure [construction primitive] and to bring the monument back to its initial form [sa première forme]. On the contrary, we think that each part, added in whatever epoch, ought in principle to be preserved, strengthened, and restored in the style appropriate to it [le style qui lui est propre]’ (Viollet-le-Duc, 1990, 280). Respecting history meant taking into account ‘the slow accretion of Notre-Dame’ (283); otherwise, restoration would be a ‘flagrant … historical lie’ (281). This marriage of history and structure results in what Viollet-le-Duc called ‘respect for the slightest vestiges of an ancient arrangement’ (respect pour les moindres debris d’une disposition ancienne) (1866/1875, 69). This respect is hard to articulate, particularly since time affects a structure in both a ‘constructive’

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and a ‘destructive’ fashion. So Viollet-le-Duc acknowledges that restoration faces a treacherous road between Scylla and Charybdis: If both the original and the altered parts [of a building] are to be restored, should

the latter be disregarded, and the unity of style, which has been disturbed, be re-

established; or, should the whole with the later modifications be exactly

reproduced? In such a case the absolute adoption of one of the two alternatives

may be objectionable; and it may be necessary, on the contrary, to admit neither

of the two principles absolutely, but to proceed according to the special

circumstances of the case.

(1866/1875, 38)

What all those special circumstances may be is ‘impossible to indicate’, so Viollet-le-Duc resorts in the end to the ability of the restoration architects to put themselves in the position of the original architect, to imbue themselves with the style of the building they are to restore (45). In that respect (and here the practice of comparative anatomy comes back as the model) an architect is like a surgeon, who ‘does not touch an organ until he has acquired a thorough acquaintance with its function, and provided for the immediate and remote consequences of his operation’ (67).

Structure and history

When Cuvier presented his project for palaeontology, he set as his goal the restoration of the ‘original order’ (ordre primitif) in which the remaining fossilized fragments of an organism constituted a previously functional whole. Comparative anatomy provided the knowledge of the internal organization that made an organism functional and served as a guide for reconstruction. Throughout the 19th century, a series of humanistic disciplines saw in Cuvier’s palaeontology a powerful model of rationality, the very promise of scholarly legitimacy. These disciplines shared in the same general restoration impulse as Cuvier’s natural science. Linguists argued for a linguistic palaeontology and a comparative linguistic anatomy that would reconstruct the ‘original language’ on the basis of the study of the internal (phonetic and grammatical) structures of existing languages. Architectural scholars also used this model in conceiving of the restoration of past buildings, holding the respect for the ‘original arrangement’ (disposition primitive) of a building as their guiding principle. One of these architectural scholars, Viollet-le-Duc (1866/1875), recognized the concept of ‘restoration’ in

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all its cross-disciplinary generality: ‘the word and the thing itself are modern’, he indicated (10); they are the result of a new ‘attitude towards the past in which [the 19th century] stands quite alone among historical ages’ (13). Architectural and linguistic scholars participated in that attitude, viewing their subject matter (buildings, languages) as organisms and themselves as palaeontologists of a different sort. When Muller, Feith and Fruin used the metaphorical references to organisms, skeletons and palaeontologists, they were following in the footsteps of scholars from those disciplines, borrowing the same scientific model that had proved successful in their achieving a ‘secure path’ of disciplinary development. Palaeontology was a popular and well respected natural science. Like palaeontology, archival science required ‘previous examination of the structure of the organism’, an understanding of the ‘rules under which it was formed’ and the application of ‘principles for its arrangement’ (Muller, Feith and Fruin, 1920/1940, 19). Palaeontology was also a discipline that, like archival science, was engaged in understanding the internal and external relations of past structures through inferences from the remains of those structures. It should not be surprising that archival science, like linguistics and architecture earlier, took palaeontology as model. Why was the metaphor of the organism so attractive for disciplines on the surface as diverse as archival science, linguistics and architecture? The metaphor combines two dimensions: a structural/functional one (organism as system) and a developmental/historical one (organism as temporally specific individual). The organism is a functionally viable system of component parts that possesses a historical individuality, and this concept can equally be applied to a language, a building or an archives. According to this view, once we discover the principles or rules that govern the relationships between the parts, we can reconstruct a past organism, or an earlier stage of an organism, on the basis of its remains. The power of the Cuverian version of this model lies in its basing the reconstructionist enterprise on the methodical and careful application of inferential methods. Scholars in different disciplines explicitly proclaimed this underlying rationality, seeing in palaeontology models of reasoning and inference, the seeds of possible methodologies for the reconstruction of past structures. For archival scholars, it fulfilled the search for ‘principles [that] naturally are uniform and equally applicable to all archives’ (Theodoor van Riemsdijk, cited in Ketelaar, 1996, 34).

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The tension between structure and history

There is, however, a tension between these two elements (structure and history) of the organic metaphor and its palaeontological extension, a tension that makes the metaphor inherently limiting. Cuvier’s model introduced the idea of one ‘original order’ as its goal: the state of the organism right before the whole was broken up, before functionality ceased and the structure became a set of remains. The reconstruction of that structure is supposedly based on a recognition and application of the functionalist principles of comparative anatomy. Although the Cuverian model aims at reconstructing past wholes, history becomes simply the stage in which its structural– functional principles play the main parts. As far as historical reconstruction proper goes, the model is Hamlet without the prince. Understanding the processes by which some structures may or may not have left a complete set of remains, or the processes through which some remains may have shifted position or been obliterated, can be, at most, of minor assistance in applying the main reconstructive principles. But, more importantly, understanding a given structural whole as the result of historical processes of its own was, of course, completely alien to Cuvier. He lived in a world in which species had no history; in fact, he was firmly opposed to any position that granted such historicity to the organic world. This tension between the structural and the historical became apparent for linguists and for architectural scholars, but does not seem to have been felt strongly by the Dutch trio. Some linguists considered the potential for historical reconstruction as the most important element, while others (e.g. Schleicher) opted for considering that their discipline was mostly structural, a natural science of language. In the case of the architectural scholars, Violletle-Duc was aware of this tension, struggling to equally incorporate and respect both elements in his conception of restoration. However, the Dutch trio accepted this aspect of the palaeontological model more fully than most of their counterparts in linguistics or architecture. As far as the Dutch trio are concerned, they generally discussed the connections between records and the specific administrative and social contexts of their creation and use. But the dynamic of continuous temporal change in which those connections took place was left aside in the articulation of a reconstructionist project in the Dutch Manual.

Pattern, not process

Muller, Feith and Fruin have been criticized for adopting what has been

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described as a Darwinian model (Horsman, Ketelaar and Thomassen, 2003, 261, 270; Cook, 2013, 103). Yet, as Peter Horsman (1999, 52) has written, they were more concerned about archives as relics of the past than about understanding recordkeeping systems. The model they were following (along with scholars in architecture or linguistics) was not a Darwinian one, but the one developed by Cuvier in the early 19th century. The Manual (metaphorically) participates in a cultural movement that not only temporally pre-dates, but logically goes against Darwinism. We should not confound 19th-century organicism with Darwinism. Whereas a Cuverian thinks of structures in terms of perfect engineering logic in response to external needs, a Darwinian relishes chance and contingency, the true markers of history. Natural selection is an optimizing device, much like Cuvier’s principles; but it always conducts that optimization in a specific situation, subject to historical contingent environmental pressures and the historically contingent availability of materials. Unlike Cuvier, Darwin was a historical thinker. A Darwinian does not reconstruct ideal structures, but the contingent historical processes that explain the organic world in its glorious imperfection. The pre-Darwinian palaeontological model espoused by the Dutch trio was concerned with structural pattern, that is, with the relationships between the parts of a whole, or even between different wholes (the archives and the organization). Had they truly adopted a Darwinian model, they would have sought to understand, instead, the changing and contingent historical processes underlying the pattern or arrangement. They would have moved from seeing archives as static relics from the past to seeing them as dynamic and ever-changing.

Reconstructing ideal states

However, they all shared in a Romantic conception of history that precluded such realization. This conception viewed the past simply as the moment when an ideal version of its object of study (be it a vertebrate archetype, a completely rational Gothic architecture or a perfect Indo-European original language) was actualized. The scholars’ task was the reconstruction of such an ideal essence. All of the manifestations of the restoration ideal that I have traced across different disciplines share, to a greater or lesser extent, one common characteristic: they posit the reconstruction of ideal states. For the palaeontologist Cuvier, every organism is ideally the expression of a perfect interaction of parts at the service of a functional goal; for the linguists Bopp

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and Schleicher, the proto-language they try to reconstruct is the perfect original language before the process of linguistic degeneration started; for Viollet-le-Duc, the goal of restoration is a building in a form that never existed (the impossible combination of ‘unity of style’ and historical change). These are three slightly different versions of the ideal, but all of them are ideal constructions nonetheless. How about archival science and the Dutch trio? The arrangement they intend to restore is described in similarly ideal terms. For instance, when in rule #16 they argue that the arrangement should be based on the original organization of the archives, they note how for every archives there is ‘a certain relationship [that] has existed from of old’, the result of ‘certain rules’ having been followed in arrangement that ‘are better and more in accord with the nature of the collection’ than any other rules one may impose or think about imposing. That old organization is ‘not the result of chance but the logical consequence of the organization of the administrative body’ (Muller, Feith and Fruin, Rule#16, 56, 57; emphases added). The assumptions about an archives having a ‘nature’, with a logical and necessary character (derived from the structure and needs of the organization) that defies chance and contingency, could not be more in line with the Cuverian reconstructionist ideal. This is the view of original order in the Manual that has been described as an ‘ideal-type’ by Peter Horsman (1999, 45).

Conclusion

There is a high price to pay for the organismic conception inherent to the Cuverian model: the focus on the ideal ‘whole’ often leads to disregarding the empirical study of the issues and forces that affect and transform it. The comparative linguists that followed this model, for instance, were driven to conceive of language as an ideal whole that was somehow independent from the speakers, and from all the problems of language transmission and diffusion, i.e. from the historical change that explains language. Similarly, the 19th-century German historians who developed the ideas we refer to as ‘historicism’ held an organismic conception of the nation and its unity of purpose that led them to disregard (and allowed them to avoid) a truly empirical study of social forces and movements that is required to properly understand history (Iggers, 1986). The Dutch trio were aware of some of the limitations of an organicism that implied such a limited consideration of history. They recognized that, when organizations are dismembered or abolished and functions transferred to

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other organizations, two principles come into conflict, i.e. the view of archives as remains of the activities carried out by organizational structures (and, hence, somehow an extension or ‘continuation’ of those functions and structures) and the view of the archives as an organic whole (hence, indivisible without losing that character) (Muller, Feith and Fruin, 1920/1940, Rule #11). They concluded that the second of these principles, the idea of an archives as an organic whole, should prevail, and that archives should not be broken. Had archives been ‘dismembered’, the inventory should be used as the way of bringing the whole together again, ‘from a scientific point of view’ at least, if physically not possible (Rule #12). However, just as was the case with linguists, architects, and even historians who accepted Cuvier’s static organicism as a way to achieve scholarly legitimacy, the archival science that the Dutch trio helped to stabilize could not overcome the limitations of its underlying (metaphorical) principles. As Peter Horsman (1999, 46) has noted, ‘the structure an administration uses for its records is rarely a static one. It changes over time, resulting from changes in the organization, changing technology and changing functional requirements’. Overlapping filing systems create a dynamic multidimensionality in recordkeeping; or, rather, it is the unpredictability of human-led organizational and recordkeeping processes that is the source of this complexity. But the organicist perspective of the Manual did for its authors what it had previously done for the early comparative linguists’ view of language, for the architectural scholars’ view of a building or for the historicists’ view of society: it allowed them to neglect the messy, contingent historical dynamics at the very centre of archives, while giving them the (false) impression of having achieved a theoretical understanding of archival logic and rationality.

Notes 1

The metaphor was obscured for the English-speaking public by Leavitt’s

translation of the Manual. As Horsman, Ketelaar and Thomassen (2003, 261)

have pointed out, Leavitt used the word ‘reflection’ as a translation of ‘neerslag’

(‘sediment’ or ‘deposit’), thus metaphorically portraying an archives as the

2

mirror image of the administrative body, rather than its sedimentary deposit.

Leavitt translated the Dutch word ‘archief’ as ‘archival collection’, so I have

maintained that expression in my quotations from the Manual, since I quote

from Leavitt’s translation; but I use the expression ‘an archives’ throughout the

text when I am not quoting.

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& géologues inventent la préhistoire, Paris, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle,

53–95.

Coleman, W. (1964) Georges Cuvier, Zoologist: a study in the history of evolution theory. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press.

Cook, T. (2013) Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: four shifting archival paradigms, Archival Science, 13, 95–120.

Horsman, P. (1999) Dirty Hands: a new perspective on the original order, Archives and Manuscripts, 26, 42–53.

Horsman, P. (2002) Last Dance of the Phoenix, or the De-Discovery of the Archival Fonds, Archivaria, 54, 1–23.

Horsman, P., Ketelaar, E. and Thomassen, T. (2003) New Respect for the Old Order: the context of the Dutch manual, American Archivist, 66, 249–70.

Hvattum, M. (2004) Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Iggers, G. (1986) The European Context of Eighteenth-Century German

Enlightenment Historiography. In Bödeker, H. E. (ed.), Aufklärung und

Geschichte: Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18.Jahrhundert, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 225–45.

Ketelaar, E. (1996) Archival Theory and the Dutch Manual, Archivaria, 41, 31–40.

Ketelaar, E. (1997) Muller, Feith and Fruin. In The Archival Image: collected essays, Hilversum, Verloren, 55–65.

Klammer, A. and Leonard, T. C. (1994) So What’s an Economic Metaphor? In

Mirowski, P. (ed.), Natural Images in Economic Thought: markets read in tooth and

claw, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 20–51.

Koerner, K. (1989) August Schleicher and Linguistic Science in the Second Half of the 19th Century. In Practicing Linguistic Historiography, Amsterdam, John

Benjamins, 325–75.

Koerner, K. (1990) The Place of Friedrich Schlegel in the Development of HistoricalComparative Linguistics. In de Mauro, T. and Formigari, L. (eds), Leibniz,

Humboldt, and the Origins of Comparativism, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 239–61.

Morpurgo Davies, A. (1987) ‘Organic’ and ‘Organism’ in Franz Bopp. In

Hoeningswald, H. M. and Wiener, L. F. (eds), Biological Metaphors and Cladistic

Classification: an interdisciplinary perspective, Philadelphia PA, University of

Pennsylvania Press, 81–108.

Muller, S., Feith, J. A. and Fruin, R. (1920/1940) Manual for the Arrangement and

Description of Archives, New York NY, H. W. Wilson. Translation of Handleiding

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Reill, P. H. (1986) Science and the Science of History in the Spätaufklárung. In Bödeker, H. E. (ed.), Aufklärung und Geschichte: Studien zur deutschen

Geschichtswissenschaft im 18.Jahrhundert, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 430–51.

Rudwick, M. J. S. (1997) Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes: new translations and interpretations of the primary texts, Chicago IL, University of

Chicago Press.

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Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Frederick von Schlegel, London, Henry G.

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van Eck, C. (1994) Organicism in Nineteenth-century Architecture: an inquiry into its

theoretical and philosophical background, Amsterdam, Architectura & Natura Press.

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L’architecture, les sciences et la culture de l’histoire au XIXe siècle, Saint-Étienne,

Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 83–98.

Viollet-le-Duc, E.-E. (1854) Preface. Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVI siècle (Vol. 1), Paris, B. Bance.

Viollet-le-Duc, E.-E. (1866/1875) Restauration. In Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVI siècle (Vol. 8), Paris, B. Bance and A. Morel. English

translation by Charles Wethered, On Restoration, by E. Viollet-le-Duc and A Notice

of His Works in Connection with the Historical Monuments of France, London,

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CHAPTER 3

‘Records in context’ in context: a brief history of data modelling for archival description

I

Jonathan Furner

paper, I attempt to identify some historical factors that combine to explain current differences in certain of the data modelling practices of the archives, library and museum (ALM) communities. I am prompted to do this out of interest in the work of the International Council on Archives’ Experts Group on Archival Description (ICA-EGAD; see Gueguen et al., 2013; Pitti et al., 2014). This group is engaged in the design of a new model of data that is descriptive of archival holdings, with the intention that eventually it shall supersede older models that are deemed less useful in contemporary contexts. Reading between the lines of EGAD’s ‘Interim Report’,1 some observers initially speculated that this new model may be more in line with those developed in the library and (in particular) the museum communities. It occurred to me that a historical analysis might help us to weigh up the pros and cons of adopting the new model. It certainly seems prudent to ask in what ways such a development might be construed as a positive one whose benefits outweigh its costs; and my assumption is that a historical analysis could help us to answer that question. If we were to come to an understanding of the historical conditions for the distinctive direction taken by developers of archival standards since 1987 (so the argument goes), and compare them with advances made in libraries and museums, then that would help us to account for differences in the data models that have been produced in each domain, and perhaps also help us to understand the need for a new archival model. There is an ethical subtext to all of this, which arises from asking the question whether, ceteris paribus, data models should be (a) more like one another or (b) less like one another than they currently are. My N THIS SHORT

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characterization of this as an ethical question derives from a conviction that one’s answer will depend on how much one values uniformity above or below diversity. I believe that this valuation will be a complicating factor in determining one’s feelings about different data models. At the same time, there are reasons why I should not have tried to write this paper. The history of archival data models does not extend back in time much further than the 1960s. This means that we are engaging in what is sometimes known as recent history, where the qualifier ‘recent’ functions almost as a pejorative, if not oxymoronic term. Recent history is prone to criticism in several typical respects. For a start, we hear, it is way too soon to start thinking about the events in question from a distinctively historical point of view. Not only that, but I am way too close to the events in question to be able to think about them in the non-politicized way that good history requires. Supposedly, my temporality is problematic: I do not have hindsight yet; it is premature for me to assess the full impact of recent events; it is impossible for me to identify clear beginnings, ends or turning points. Moreover, my positionality is problematic: I do not have perspective yet; my vision is obscured; it is impossible to be objective and unbiased, so my narrative inevitably becomes politicized. The other side to this argument is that, in these respects, recent history is hardly worse than history tout court. All narratives are constructed, as are all ‘turns’ and ‘moments’. Recognizing my subjectivity is not incompatible with engaging in critical reflection on the historical context of recent, even ongoing, events. As a practice in which people participate in different ways at different times and in different places, archival data modelling is not special. It is a practice whose nature, purpose and value are shaped by the specific historical and cultural conditions under which it is carried out. In turn, the kinds of narratives that may be constructed to explain the causal processes characteristic of various kinds of contexts are themselves many and various. In order to explain differences among data models designed for use by members of the ALM communities, one might have reason to prefer an interactionist, agent-oriented theory that gives prominence to the interests and purposeful actions of human actors. For instance, one might observe that the specific groups of individuals who have been involved in the production of the different data models, and the respective sets of interests of those individuals, vary in relevant and systematic ways; and, given the tendency for people with different interests to make different decisions even in similar situations, one might choose to look no further for a plausible account of the variation in different groups’ creations.

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Alternatively, one might favour a functionalist, artefact-oriented theory that emphasizes the uses and contexts of particular kinds of objects; or a structuralist, domain-oriented theory that focuses on disciplinary traditions and customs. Taking a functionalist approach, one might consider the distinctive natures of the specific kinds of artefacts that are modelled by different data models and of the contexts in which those artefacts are produced and used, and conclude that the differences among those data models are explained by the tendency for different kinds of artefacts to require different kinds of handling, even in similar kinds of situation. On a structuralist reading, recognizing that the specific domains or disciplines whose worldviews are modelled, and the traditions and customs (both theoretical and practical) developed in those domains, may be distinguished in relevant ways, one might conclude that data models vary in accordance with the different approaches to similar situations taken in different domains. Certainly there are yet other options. Categories such as these might in any case be construed as unproductively simplistic. Needless to say, most historical explanations involve factors of more than one type. The chapter is structured as follows. In the next section I attempt briefly to clarify some of the terminology that is a source of some confusion in this field. In the third section I construct a narrative of some of the significant events in the recent history of data modelling practices in the ALM communities. In the fourth section I identify some of the ways in which archival data is traditionally treated differently from library and museum data. In the final section I draw a few tentative conclusions from the observations made in the preceding sections.

Terminology

The term ‘data model’ has at least two distinguishable senses (see, e.g. Simsion, 2007, 12–13). One is the sense in which it has been used since the early 1970s to denote abstractions such as the relational model of data defined by E. F. Codd (Codd, 1970). In this sense, a data model is equivalent to what had come to be known in the late 1960s as a data structure class (see, e.g. Codasyl, 1969, 7, 9), i.e. a specified set of types of structural element, such as ‘item’, ‘record’, ‘relation’ and ‘file’, to be used in descriptions (a.k.a. schemata) of the structure of particular databases.2 In a second sense, dating from the mid-1980s, ‘data model’ has become loosely synonymous with ‘schema’, as the term is increasingly frequently applied to descriptions of database structure rather than (or, more confusingly, as well as) to specifications of the kinds of elements that may be instantiated in those descriptions.

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Some distinguish between conceptual schemata and schemata of other kinds. A conceptual schema (sometimes known as a conceptual model or, indeed, a conceptual data model) is a representation of reality – specifically, a simplification that reduces the complexity of the real world to a specification of the classes (types) of things that are (considered to be) the most important in a given domain. Such classes might include classes of things that are agents and/or actions, artefacts and/or ideas, places and/or periods, properties and/or relations. For some, ‘data model’ is not to be equated with ‘conceptual model’ but, rather, denotes a schema of a different kind: one that identifies not only classes of real-world things, but the kinds of data about those things that may be collected, stored, accessed and used. Nevertheless, from now on, I shall be using the term ‘data model’ as synonymous with ‘conceptual schema’. In the early stages of any given data management project, the establishment of a data model is necessary so that developers may be guided in defining the various tables and inter-table dependencies that combine to form a database. Each entity-type and relationship-type in an instance of the Entity– Relationship family of models, for example, would be represented in a database by a table made up of values for a set of specified attributes of each entity- or relationship-instance. The very simple data model with which the developers of the databases underlying most library data management systems typically begin is one where a basic distinction is drawn between two entity-types: library (a.k.a. bibliographic) resources (e.g. editions of books), and authorities (e.g. authors and subjects). The common rationale for separating data of these two kinds is that certain efficiencies are thereby assured: redundancy is reduced; labour may be shared; updates are faster and more accurate; indexing is easier; etc. Applying this conception of a resource/authority distinction to archival data management, while also taking into account variations (a) in the logical scope of archival resources at different levels of a part–whole hierarchy and (b) in some of the types of authorities to be linked to resources, results in a relatively straightforward archival analogue of the library data model (see Figure 3.1).

An origin story

The idea that an internationally standardized data model, or models, might be useful for any group within the ALM communities was not seriously entertained before the mid-1980s. In the space of three years, 1987–90, meetings of interested parties were held that successively established separate needs for data models appropriate to museums, archives and libraries.

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archival resource data

archival authority data

Fonds

corporate bodies, persons, families

45

series Repositories Files

Items

Functions

Figure 3.1 Basic archival data model

In September 1987, at a meeting of the International Council of Museums’ International Committee for Documentation (ICOM-CIDOC) in Cambridge, UK, its Working Group on Data Standards began to discuss efforts to devise a data model that would identify and standardize ‘those data fields most essential for adequate documentation of collection objects’ (Kley, 1988, 15). In time, the work begun in Cambridge was to produce ICOM-CIDOC’s eventoriented Conceptual Reference Model (CRM). A precursor to the CRM, the Relational Data Model (RDM), is described by Reed (1995, iii) as a specification of ‘what the data is rather than how it is used’. CIDOC’s goals for the RDM were characteristically ambitious: ‘At the highest level of abstraction, there are five big entities which can be defined and documented: People, Places, Things, Events, Concepts. These five entities and the relationships among them can document anything in the entire spectrum of human (or inhuman) experience’ (Reed, 1995, 3). In 1995, a total of 19 entitytypes were defined in the RDM; 20 years on, version 6.2 of the CRM (International Council of Museums, 2015) includes declarations of 94 ‘classes’ (entity-types) and 168 ‘properties’ (attribute-types). See Figure 3.2 for an ultrasimplified top-level view of the CRM, with both Object and Event taking centre stage; a complete diagrammatic illustration of the CRM would require the reproduction of many pages of documentation. In October 1988, the International Council on Archives (ICA), in

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Person

concept

Object

Event

Timespan

Place

Figure 3.2 ultra-simplified council of Museums’ International committee for

Documentation conceptual Reference Model

collaboration with the National Archives of Canada (NAC), organized an Invitational Meeting of Experts on Descriptive Standards (IMEDS) in Ottawa, Canada, at which prospects were discussed for the development of a set of standards for archival description based on a common understanding of the relevant data elements. ‘It was fitting that this meeting was held in Canada’, observed Hugo Stibbe of the NAC, ‘because, during the 1980s, the Canadian archival professional community had devoted a great deal of attention to the issue of such standards and had created a national infrastructure to develop them’ (Stibbe, 1993, vii). Stibbe’s point was well taken: in 1985, the Bureau of Canadian Archivists (BCA) had issued Toward Descriptive Standards (Eastwood and Dryden, 1985), a report of its Working Group on Archival Descriptive Standards making 35 recommendations that collectively provided ‘a plan to develop descriptive standards for archival materials based on accepted archival theory and principles’ (Dryden, 1990, 2); in the same year, the BCA established a Planning Committee on Descriptive Standards (PCDS), which followed up with the publication in 1987 of Developing Description Standards: A Call to Action (Dryden and Haworth, 1987). Archivists in the USA had been just as busy in this area: a full decade earlier, in fact, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) had established its National Information Systems Task Force (NISTF), which recommended ‘that archivists agree on categories of descriptive information and employ common data elements to convey this information’ (Gibbs Thibodeau, 1993, 92). By the time of the task force’s disbandment in 1983 (and succession by a standing

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Committee on Archival Information Exchange, CAIE), an empirical survey of data elements in current usage by archival information systems had been completed, a comprehensive data element dictionary had been compiled and a new Machine-Readable Cataloging format for archives and manuscript collections (MARC-AMC) had been implemented jointly by SAA and the Library of Congress (see, e.g. Lytle, 1984; Bearman, 1987). David Bearman was one of NISTF’s eight original members, assuming the role of its full-time project director in 1981. Bearman had noted in 1979 that the goals of an automated archival system included not only the maintenance of ‘a data base containing all the information used by the archives in its administrative and service functions’ (Bearman, 1979, 180), but also the ‘accommodat[ion of] data conforming to national and international standards’ (183) so that the system can ‘generate guides, link holdings of various collections, [and] produce authority files of names and institutions indexed and thesaur[i] of subject terms’ (183).3 Bearman was in attendance at IMEDS in 1988, and liked what he heard: ‘To me, the agreement around the table that a number of entities other than holdings – entities such as repositories, records-creating organizations, retention schedules, facilities, and users – might be promising areas for development of description standards was an exciting outcome of the meeting. Clearly archivists are ready to think about the possibility of sharing authority records of various sorts in order to realize the potential benefits of information exchange at the international level’ (Bearman, 1988, 55). In the UK, the goal of standardized description had emerged from a 1983 survey of archival automation conducted jointly by the British Library and the Society of Archivists, and a first edition of the Manual of Archival Description (MAD) had been published in 1985 (Cook and Grant, 1985; see also Cook, 1990; 1992). It is to Australia that we should turn, though, for what is now recognized as the earliest proposal for a separation of resource data and authority data. As early as 1966, in his ‘case for abandonment’ of ‘the record group concept’, Peter Scott had distinguished explicitly between ‘record control’ and ‘context control’, arguing that each could be achieved by keeping descriptions of organizations, agencies, families and persons separate from descriptions of record series and their components, and inserting ‘interelement links’ between the two sets (Scott, 1966). With this and subsequent papers, as well as his implementation of such a ‘series system’ at the Commonwealth Archives Office in Canberra, Scott anticipated the late-1980s surge of interest in archival data modelling by some 20 years. As an immediate upshot of the 1988 meeting, the ICA confirmed that standards development was to be an important aspect of its overall mission.

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A ‘Statement of principles regarding archival description’ was published in the Canadian journal Archivaria in 1992 (International Council on Archives, Ad Hoc Commission on Descriptive Standards, 1992), calling for the production of consistent, relevant and explicit descriptions that would facilitate the retrieval and exchange of archival data and allow for the integration of descriptions from different repositories into a unified information system. The familiar illustration of a ‘model of the levels of arrangement of a fonds’ (Figure 3.3) appeared for the first time in this context. Over time, ICA’s continuing work on standards has produced, inter alia, the General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD(G), International Council on Archives, Ad Hoc Commission on Descriptive Standards, 1994; 2nd edn, 2000), the International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (ISAAR(CPF), International Council on Archives, Ad Hoc Commission on Descriptive Standards, 1996; 2nd edn, 2004), the International Standard for Describing Functions (ISDF, International Council on Archives, Committee on Best Practices and Standards, 2007), and the International Standard for Describing Institutions with Archival Holdings (ISDIAH, International Council on Archives, Committee on Best Practices and Standards, 2008). See Table 3.1 for an overview of the relationships among these content standards, US national standards and encoding/structure standards, for both resource and authority description. Two years after IMEDS, in August 1990, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions’ programme on Universal Bibliographic Control and International Machine-Readable Cataloging (IFLA-UBCIM), in collaboration with IFLA’s Division of Bibliographic Control, held a Seminar on Bibliographic Records in Stockholm, Sweden, initiating a process that would eventually produce the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), underpinned by a data model that distinguished explicitly between works, expressions (versions), manifestations (editions) and items (copies), on the one hand, and between corporate bodies and persons (and later families), on the other. (See the canonical diagrams from the 1998 Final Report on FRBR reproduced in Figures 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6.) Delegates attending the Stockholm seminar called for a study of the basic functions performed by the bibliographic record, resulting in a project whose terms of reference included, by 1992, the development of a conceptual model that ‘identifies and clearly defines the entities of interest to users of bibliographic records, the attributes of each entity, and the types of relationships that operate between entities’ (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, 1998, 3). IFLA’s Final Report on FRBR was issued in 1998, to be followed later

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Fonds

sub-fonds

series

series

sub-series

sub-series

File

File

series

File

Item

File

Item

Figure 3.3 Model of the levels of arrangement of a fonds (source: International council on

archives, ad Hoc commission on Descriptive standards (2000, 36))

by separate reports on Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, Working Group on Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records, 2009) and Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions Working Group on Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records, 2011). Table 3.1 archival content and encoding/structure standards

Archival resource records International content standards ISAD(G) US national content standards DACS2 International EAD encoding/structure standards

Archival authority records: Creators

Archival authority Archival authority records: records: Functions Repositories

ISAAR(CPF) DACS2 EAC-CPF

ISDIAH DACS3? EAG

ISDF DACS3? EAC-F

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WORK

is realized through EXPRESSION

is embodied in MANIFESTATION

is exemplified by ITEM

Figure 3.4 Group 1 entities and primary relationships (source: International Federation of

library associations and Institutions, study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (1998; corr. 2009, 14))

The history of each of these three data models – ICOM-CIDOC’s eventoriented CRM, the collection-oriented archival model underlying ICA’s ISAD(G) and related standards4 and the work-oriented library model underlying IFLA’s FRBR and related standards – is well documented in the technical literature of its particular domain (see, for example, Doerr, 2003; Bunn, 2013; Coyle, 2015). However, such narratives struggle to explain the considerable inter-domain differences in the forms taken by the various products.

Archives are different

An artefact that proves rather useful for those wishing to develop a fuller sense of the archival community’s unique take on data modelling is a compilation of the papers that were presented at IMEDS. From the evidence provided in these papers, all written in 1988 or earlier but not published until five years after the fact (International Council on Archives, Invitational Meeting of Experts on Descriptive Standards, 1993), we can make several inferences about the context for the IMEDS discussion. Firstly, it is clear that few attendees had given more than cursory prior thought to archival data modelling. ‘The archival profession traditionally has balked at rigorously examining archival description’, notes Lisa Weber

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WORK

EXPRESSION

MANIFESTATION

ITEM

is owned by PERSON is produced by

is realized by CORPORATE BODY is created by

Figure 3.5 Group 2 entities and ‘responsibility’ relationships (source: International

Federation of library associations and Institutions, study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (1998; corr. 2009, 15))

(Weber, 1993, 107). She continues: ‘Archivists do not have clearly articulated, precise statements about descriptive requirements. Quite frankly, the profession’s understanding of the role of archival description is unclear. We do not know what the purpose of our descriptive systems is other than the broadly defined goal of improving access to materials’ (Weber, 1993, 113). Much like Bearman (1993), Weber identifies data structure, content and value standards … but no data model standards. At the same time, it is possible to see the first small steps being taken in the direction of data modelling. The British archivist Michael Cook, for instance,

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WORK

has as subject

WORK

EXPRESSION

MANIFESTATION

ITEM

has as subject

PERSON CORPORATE BODY

CONCEPT

has as subject

OBJECT

EVENT

PLACE

Figure 3.6 Group 3 entities and ‘subject’ relationships (source: International Federation of

library associations and Institutions, study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (1998; corr. 2009, 16))

was eloquent about his understanding of the relation of computer science to archival science: ‘The arrival of computers has revealed that much traditional archival practice has been based upon theories and assumptions common to computer work. … In the light of computer practice, we can for the first time see what we were always trying to do; and, for the first time, we have a strong motive for doing it effectively’ (Cook, 1993, 122). He continues: ‘For example,

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sets of archival descriptions are files in a database. The information within the database is an assembly of data elements, each with a special characteristic: these are the values associated with fields within the record. The way in which the various fields are linked within records is a data structure’ (Cook, 1993, 122). A second major inference we can draw relates to the pervasiveness, at the time, of the perception that archival data is qualitatively very different from the sorts of data that are generated in libraries and museums. Resistance to the broader application of library data content standards such as the AngloAmerican Cataloging Rules, the second edition of which had been published in 1978, was already widespread: ‘Toward the end of the 1970s, descriptive standards in librarianship … began to become much more codified. … At least some archivists began to feel pressure to conform to these standards. The first response of these was principally rejection. The challenge and the response revealed that there was little common ground in professional language and terminology, in common practice, or in the understanding of professional aims’ (Cook, 1993, 121). Lisa Weber was speaking for many, of course, when she argued that archival description is about providing access primarily to collections, rather than to item-level objects: ‘Cataloging is the library function most analogous to archival description, although the two processes are not the same. Archival description encompasses a lengthy process of providing access to collections or groups of materials. … Creating library-like catalog records for archival materials is only one activity in the process and usually not the most important one. Comparatively, library cataloging is generally at the item level, takes less time per item, and is the primary means of providing access to publishing materials’ (Weber, 1993, 108). For Weber, not only is the general orientation of archival description quite different from that of library cataloguing, but quite different sets of data elements are constitutive of useful archival resource records and useful bibliographic records, respectively: Even assuming that some library standards can accommodate archival needs,

clear distinctions exist between library and archival materials. Common sense

suggests that archival descriptive systems will need to answer different kinds of

questions beyond the ones intended to be answered by the four objectives of the

library catalog. … For example, if provenance is often more important than

authorship in the context of archival materials, how can archival descriptive

systems improve access to the corporate entity that created the records? Does an

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PaRT 1 ❖ RETHINkING HIsTORIEs aND THEORIEs archival descriptive system need to provide access to the functions of a creating

agency or body? … The answers to these questions should determine the

categories of data that archivists include in an archival description. To determine

the answers, we must study users to determine how they discover the archival

materials that they seek.

(Weber, 1993, 109)

Weber drove the point home later in the same paper: One of the most valuable lessons US archivists learned from developing the data

element dictionary and the USMARC AMC format was the recognition that

archivists collect and distribute different categories of information. These

categories include data about provenance or context, content, physical aspects of

the materials, access to the materials, and actions, or what archivists do to the

materials. The ability to separate these categories is helping to articulate just

what we do and to see new options and possibilities in how we do things.

(Weber, 1993, 115)

Again expressing a view that had for long been mainstream among archival theorists, Weber recognized that not only were archival data primarily about different kinds of things (collections rather than items), and not only were those things more usefully described primarily by different kinds of data (data about context rather than data about content), but also that archival data was most usefully arranged in a different way from that used to organize bibliographic data. Weber invoked what she called ‘the principle of levels’ in specifying that archival data is characteristically arranged on a hierarchical basis: Both the British and Canadian archival communities are examining archival

description from ‘first principles’; that is, they are establishing principles of

archival description from which archival descriptive standards follow. One result

is the central principle of levels of records and the subsequent identification of

categories of information for each specific level.

(Weber, 1993, 107)

Further on: British and Canadian archivists are approaching standards development from

the perspective of levels of arrangement and description. Though American

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archivists are concentrating on less hierarchically confined levels of access, all

archivists must be concerned about these issues.

(Weber, 1993, 113–14)

Michael Cook also spoke of the significance of the concept of hierarchical level: Data management by automated systems is quite amenable to the idea of linked

files arranged in hierarchical levels of dependence. … [T]he principal objection to

using library standards in archival management is that library cataloguing

systems do not accommodate the concept of level (especially where changes of

level require different models of description).

(M. Cook, 1993, 124)

To summarize, then, mid-1980s archival science can be characterized as hosting three unique perspectives on the kinds of things, and the kinds of data about things, that are important to its theorists and practitioners (Table 3.2). Archival data is typically collection oriented, rather than work or event oriented; it is typically provenance oriented, rather than content or location oriented; and core archival entity-types are typically related to one another hierarchically, according to their status as parts of wholes, rather than as instances of ideas or as points on a timeline. Table 3.2 Properties of alM data models

Primary entity- Primary type attribute-type

Basis for structuring entity-types

Archives

collection

provenance

partititive relation

Libraries

work

content

instantiation

Museums

event

relative location succession in space-time

When these three ideas are considered together, a distinctive data model emerges – viz. the data model that is implicitly assumed to lie at the heart of the ICA’s suite of ISAD-related standards. Indeed, we might say that this is the data model that is implicit in archival science, since there is no single standard in existence that merges (a) a basic resource–authority model of the type presented in Figure 3.1, with (b) the model of the levels of arrangement

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of a fonds that is presented in ISAD(G) (see Figure 3.3) and (c) a model that relates descriptions of logical resources to descriptions of physical instances, as in Figure 3.7 – all in the context of (d) a map of the relationships among content and encoding/structure standards (see Table 3.1).

by their function

catalogue records

accession records

Finding aids

by the kind of thing they describe Resource records • Works • Expressions • Manifestations • Items authority records • Agents • Subjects • Functions • Repositories

by their physical scope Repositories

by their logical scope Fonds

Buildings series Floors Rooms shelves

Files

Items

Boxes Folders

Figure 3.7 Four different ways of categorizing archival descriptions

Although its contours have yet to be drawn precisely, such a model is simultaneously more granular than the data model specified in the librarians’ FRBR, and less granular than that forming the museologists’ CRM.

Conclusion: from ISAD(G) to EGAD

The data model underlying the ISAD family of standards is not codified explicitly in any official document. Recognizing this absence, EGAD was formed by the ICA in 2012 with the charge ‘to develop a conceptual model for archival description’ (Pitti et al., 2014, 2) with ‘clearly defined entities and … relationships’ (3). The product of EGAD’s work is a model called ‘Records in Context’, developed with the stated goal of close alignment with ICOMCIDOC’s CRM and FRBRoo. In the light of the preceding discussion, a

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question we might wish to ask ourselves is this: will harmonization with CRM require wholesale replacement of a well-established family of standards, developed over a two-decade period, in which data elements for the description of records and their contexts are already clearly defined? In other words, is there a risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater?5 The historical approach conducted in previous sections represents one way of addressing this question. Does our analysis reveal that there are clear, predictable, persistent, pervasive differences in the opinions of leadership groups in each domain? Or in the types of resources handled, and the techniques used to handle them, in each domain? Or in the dominant theoretical traditions of each domain? If so, then what is to be gained by replacing any existing data model with one that is better aligned with others? Put another way: in current archival theory and practice, is there any less of a focus on collections, or logical scope of description, or fonds, series, files and items, than there was in earlier periods? Is there any more of a focus on events or objects, or relative location in space-time or role played by resource, or relationships between events or between works, expressions, manifestations and items? If the obvious answer were ‘Yes’ in any of these cases, then I could see how a realignment of the standard archival data model with CRM might be desirable. My sense, however, is that the onus lies on EGAD to present a convincing argument in support of such an answer. In 1988, Lisa Weber (1993, 106) made a compelling distinction between pseudostandards – ‘practices that appear to be standards but are not’ – and de facto standards – ‘standards that arise through common practice without any formal agreement’. The current archival data model may well be a de facto standard; EGAD’s task is to avoid an outcome in which ‘Records in Context’ becomes a pseudo-standard. The argument presented in this paper was developed in the course of constructing a particular narrative of events. To create this narrative, I have primarily drawn on existing secondary literature, some of which might plausibly be considered to rise to the status of eye-witness reports. Other methods – those of oral history or discourse analysis, for example – might have been used to produce results of greater validity and reliability. Ultimately, the most productive method may well be that of evaluation – i.e. the evaluation of model-as-theory or model-as-tool against time-honoured criteria such as correspondence with reality, internal coherence and usefulness. ‘[W]e must always subject our standards to the test of use’, wrote Bearman in 1988, with customary prescience:

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PaRT 1 ❖ RETHINkING HIsTORIEs aND THEORIEs Whoever the users are for whom the standards were designed, we must study

their use of the descriptions and the implementations we offer, and be ready to

evolve these standards and implementations in response to needs. … No

standards deserve to be implemented as a strategy to improve access unless they

can be shown to work. … Only empirical evidence should be accepted as an

argument for standards if the standards are intended to promote access through

automated systems. In all aspects of the standardization process, we must stoutly

resist introducing requirements that have no warrant in archival practices and

that will return few, if any, benefits.

(Bearman, 1993, 168)

Notes 1

‘As we develop the ontology, we are paying close attention to CIDOC CRM and

the FRBR [Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records] extension to

CRM, FRBRoo, as one important objective in the work of the EGAD is to lay the foundation for aligning with these ontologies, at a high level. We also want to

take advantage of this allied work, as there are major overlapping areas of

description that conceptually align, if not always completely, with archival

2 3 4

understanding’ (Pitti et al., 2014, 9).

See Haigh (2009) for an authoritative account of the 15-year period of conceptual

development (1954–69) that culminated in Codasyl’s specifications.

Not for nothing has Bearman been described as ‘the leading archival thinker of

the late twentieth century’ (Cook, 1997, 15; see also Gehrlich, 2002).

Here, and on several subsequent occasions, I am self-consciously flouting the

Jenkinsonian injunction to reserve the term ‘collection’ only for materials that

are not accumulated in the course of regular business activity. The sense in

which I use ‘collection’ (and, I believe, the sense meant by others whom I quote)

5

is the broad one of ‘aggregation’.

Michael Cook (1993, 128) alluded to this kind of risk in his 1988 commentary on

then-current developments in the UK: ‘Because of the MDA’s [Museum

Documentation Association] interest in archival materials associated with

museum collections, it is quite likely … that in Britain, the development of

national databases will occur through collaboration between archives and

museum services rather than between archives and libraries. This divergence of

tradition may well have serious consequences for the long-term development of

the profession’. David Bearman (1993, 166) also advised against wholesale

change: ‘New description standards should not be totally revolutionary, because

they need to connect to existing practice, not only to convince people to follow

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them but also to link past descriptions with future descriptions. New standards

could simply be a codification of existing practice; indeed, the simplest way to

make behavior conform to a standard is to declare a current practice as the

standard. If current practice embodies a range of approaches, a standard can be

defined to encompass them all’.

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Reed, P. A. (1995) CIDOC Relational Data Model: a guide, revised edn, Washington DC, Office of Information Resource Management, Smithsonian Institution.

Scott, P. J. (1966) The Record Group Concept: a case for abandonment, American Archivist, 29 (4), 493–504.

Simsion, G. (2007) Data Modeling: theory and practice, Bradley Beach NJ, Technics.

Stibbe, H. L. P. (1993) Foreword. In International Council on Archives, Invitational Meeting of Experts on Descriptive Standards (1993) Toward International

Descriptive Standards for Archives: papers presented at the ICA Invitational Meeting of Experts on Descriptive Standards (National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, 4–7

October 1988), Munich, K. G. Saur, iii–iv.

Weber, L. B. (1993) Archival Descriptive Standards Concepts, Principles, and

Methodologies. In International Council on Archives, Invitational Meeting of

Experts on Descriptive Standards (1993) Toward International Descriptive

Standards for Archives: papers presented at the ICA Invitational Meeting of Experts on

Descriptive Standards (National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, 4–7 October 1988),

Munich, K. G. Saur, 105–18; see also American Archivist, 52 (4), (1989), 504–13.

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CHAPTER 4

Mapping archival silence: technology and the historical record

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archival silence signal a heightened and expanding concern with information that is lost, concealed, destroyed or simply not available for scholarly use. For a dynamic and interdisciplinary group of artists, scholars and theorists, archival silence serves as a productive metaphor as well as a kind of shorthand to refer to gaps, omissions and distortions in the historical record. Like the term ‘archive’ itself, ‘archival silence’ has a certain elasticity and ambiguity that lends itself to theoretical speculation and manipulation. As digital capacity fosters the expansion of the archive, archival metaphor and archival theory proliferate. And as our access to the archive becomes more dependent upon the technologies of the interface, scholars exhibit increasing concern about the impact of digital affordances and constraints on recordkeeping, research and artistic production. Because digital technologies introduce a variety of new elements – material, social and technological – into questions of archival access, they vastly expand the possibilities for both creating and redressing archival silence. As digital archives are techno-cultural artefacts, developments in the field of science studies can provide insight into the interdependence and coevolution of the social, cultural and material factors shaping archival access. By the 1990s, Donna Haraway (1991a) had initiated a rethinking of the complex relationship between the human and the non-human. Haraway and other science studies scholars describe instruments and devices as complex assemblages of human and non-human elements. Karen Barad (2006), Bruno Latour (1999) and others have helped us to see how machine and human agents form tightly linked networks that must be understood as dynamically integrated wholes. These scholars view physical matter and social meaning ECENT THEORIZATIONS OF

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as so deeply intertwined that they cannot be understood separately. They believe that disciplinary boundaries may serve as impediments to understanding both technology and culture. Digital archives lend themselves to this kind of exploration of the entanglement of matter and meaning, content and device, human and machine elements. Digital archives are the product of multiple mutually conditioning factors, including the intentions of document creators, the professional practices of librarians and archivists, the structure of archival institutions, the behaviour of corporate content owners, the judgements of computer designers and the properties of the materials used in the production of digital infrastructure (Manoff, 2015). This essay focuses on the entanglement of these and other factors in the production of archival silence and attempts to shed light on the way the term functions both within and outside of archival studies.

Defining archival silence

In a 2012 blog post Kate Theimer (2012a) addressed the issue of different perceptions of archival silence specifically by archivists and members of the digital humanities communities.1 She proposed what she acknowledges is a simple distinction. For archivists, archival silences refer to gaps or omissions in a body of original records. For digital humanists, archival silences often refer to materials that are not available in formats useful for scholarly research and, more specifically, materials which have not been digitized and marked up. Theimer finds this latter usage problematic, as it holds the potential to obscure what she calls ‘the depth of the universe of true archives’. She contends that many digital humanists use the term in ways that fail to distinguish situations in which there are no authentic archival sources from ones in which no sources are available in formats that are ready for scholarly use and manipulation. Still, Theimer understands that the lack of appropriately digitized archival materials creates challenges for researchers. In a follow-up posting that she titled ‘A Different Kind of “Archival Silence”’, Theimer (2012b) acknowledges the negative impact of selective archival digitization.2 She concurs with historian Tim Hitchcock that limiting digitization projects to ‘nationally significant’ or other mainstream criteria inhibits scholarship, whether or not it constitutes archival silence as defined in her earlier posting. More explicitly, Chris Alen Sula (2015) emphasizes the role that cultural heritage institutions play in determining what can and cannot be studied. Decisions about which of their materials to make openly accessible in digital

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formats is a crucial aspect of this function, which in turn hinges upon a variety of factors including funding, staff, local infrastructure and/or partnerships with commercial vendors or other institutions. Elaborating on the notion of the importance of archival digitization projects in shaping research possibilities, Stephen Robertson (2014) declares that historians’ contributions to the field of digital humanities have been inhibited by ‘the limited availability of machine readable texts’. Robertson explains that historians rely more than literary scholars on unpublished sources and handwritten records and that, unfortunately, it is not yet possible to use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to effectively convert many of them into machine-readable form. Robertson thus finds that historians’ lack of access to digitized archival materials has constrained their ability to produce new work built on these original sources, thus creating a gap within the digital humanities. These barriers to new modes of historical enquiry are further exacerbated by the fact that much of the published material that has been digitized and that is of interest to historians is behind paywalls. Robertson (2014) claims that only scholars at wealthy institutions have access to these materials, and even then these commercially digitized resources are generally not available for computational analysis. Adopting Karen Barad’s (2006) formulation, we can thus understand digital archives not as singular physical entities, but as a set of possibilities shaped by the convergence of social as well as material factors. These factors might include their comprehensiveness, their accuracy, their cost, their interface design, their searchability, their interoperability and their manipulability. Archival silence may thus emerge from a cluster of intersecting constraints. Many science studies scholars, including Karen Barad (2006), Donna Haraway (1991b), Andrew Pickering (1995) and Bruno Latour (1999) are concerned that a critical focus on socio-cultural factors leads to a failure to address the agency and materiality of objects. The importance of material factors in determining archival access, and thus archival silence, is evident, for example, in a library of badly burned scrolls that was excavated from Herculaneum in the 18th century (Wade, 2015). The scrolls survived the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE but cannot be unrolled without damaging them. Archival silence in this instance is due not to the absence of original documents but to their material properties and vulnerabilities. Sources, original or not, in any format that cannot be viewed, read or listened to, are by definition silent. A full accounting of these silences requires attention to the intersection of multiple material and socio-cultural factors.

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Breaking the silences

Recently, physicists using X-ray imaging techniques were able to decipher letters inside one of the burned, rolled-up scrolls recovered from Herculaneum (Wade, 2015). The development of this technology may determine whether or not these scrolls will remain silent. More generally, multispectral imaging techniques are being used to reveal features of manuscripts not visible to the naked eye. A 2015 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Voosen, 2015) cites Gregory Heyworth, director of the Lazarus Project at the University of Mississippi, who estimates that there are 60,000 manuscripts in libraries worldwide whose contents have been rendered mute by age, climate, firebombing or other causes. Digital imaging techniques are beginning to remedy some of these silences. Donna Haraway (1991a) describes these kinds of technologies as prosthetic devices and perceptual systems that extend our cognitive abilities. Beyond their capacity to aid in the recovery of the content of previously inaccessible documents, new technologies may also enable us to defer or prevent future archival silences. By providing tools for migrating digital content to more stable platforms, digital forensics software, for example, may ensure a more secure future for the content of ageing technologies like floppy disks, CDs, tapes and cassettes that would otherwise have relatively brief lifespans (Kondayen, 2015).

Creating new silences

But, despite new technical capacities for redressing or forestalling archival silence, the development of new technologies has spurred the interest of theorists in notions of archival silence less for their ability to mitigate such silences than for their potential to create new silences. In addition to concerns about the instability and impermanence of the digital record, digital technologies are drawing increased scrutiny for what they conceal and render invisible. German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst (2006, 117) claims that computational devices produce a dramatically altered archive whose processes occur below the level of human perception. Scholars in a number of fields are confronting the silences created by the complexity and opacity of technical processes. The relatively new field of media archaeology, for example, defines itself as an attempt to fill the gaps, ruptures and silences of media history (Parikka, 2012). It aims to redress failures to take into account technologies that were discarded or that failed to evolve. Media archaeologists claim that our ability to grasp the implications of our communication systems

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requires that we take into account the physical properties of the machines and software that support them. The work of excavating and exposing the silences produced by new forms of computation has coincided with a heightened scrutiny of so-called blackbox technologies. This approach resembles and intersects with explorations of archival silence that have appeared in the wake of digital proliferation. In both cases researchers are concerned with what is invisible or concealed and thus what cannot be taken into account. The focus on black-box technology emerges from the sense that our devices are purposely designed so that their interiors are inaccessible, thwarting attempts to understand how they function. In a similar fashion, scholars lament that hidden algorithms and other computational processes invisibly shape their research. Kaleev Leetaru (2015), for example, argues that ‘many archives are opaque black boxes that offer researchers little understanding of their inner workings’. Safiya Umoja Noble, a professor of information science at University of California, Los Angeles, has demonstrated how Google searches can distort or misrepresent ethnic and gender identities (Noble, 2012). She describes how searches on terms like ‘black girls’, ‘Latinas’ or ‘Asian women’ typically yield a list of links in which pornographic and dating sites predominate. Her essay subtitled ‘What search engines say about women’ highlights the often insidious ways in which hidden algorithmic processes determine our access to information. Digital humanists are also concerned about the role of hidden technological processes and algorithms. Martha Nell Smith (2014) raises questions about the workings of many digital archives and argues that designers often fail to promote transparency and flexibility of use. She cites the example of the Emily Dickinson Archive, claiming that its ‘hierarchy and high level of mediation … closes important aspects of access’ (2014, 405). Smith also objects to the way in which decisions about both its content and usability have been obscured. She asks ‘what has been made very difficult or impossible to discover by the structures of archival organization, and what is or is not made transparent?’ (405).

The impact of computational processes

Black-box metaphors provide a way to describe the hidden impact of computational processes on contemporary life as well as scholarly research. Frank Pasquale, in The Black Box Society: the secret algorithms that control money and information (2015), explains how personal data compiled by the finance industry, Google, Amazon, Facebook and other tech companies enables the

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highly profitable use and abuse of private information. Black-box metaphors evoke the combination of power and invisibility that allow this exploitation of big data. The scandal over Volkswagen diesel emissions that erupted in 2015 is also a reminder of the hidden power of computational processes. Under pressure from government regulators, Volkswagen engineers admitted that the company had created software to defeat auto-emissions testing in 11 million automobiles (Ewing and Mouawad, 2015). In the words of Paul Kedrosky (2015) ‘a modern high-end car is staggeringly complex. It requires something like a hundred million lines of code’. It thus functions as a black box. Auto mechanics no longer have the ability to master the inner workings of the vehicles they service. Volkswagen’s acknowledgement of its emissionsdefeating protocol raises questions about what may have been programmed into other consumer devices. In addition to the impenetrability of machine processes and algorithms, scholars are attending to other hidden or less apparent aspects of new technologies. These include the remoteness and low visibility of such things as the mining of rare earth minerals that go into our devices; the labour of computer design and engineering; the labour of manufacturing and assembling devices; the labour of selecting, scanning, organizing and digitizing content; the labour of disassembling and disposing of huge quantities of discarded electronic equipment; and the environmental damage and degradation caused by the disposal of this often toxic or radioactive electronic waste. Growing numbers of scholars and artists bring a sense of political urgency to the project of illuminating these phenomena.

Making the silences visible

Artists are devising a variety of creative ways to expose the impact of technological development. Some are attempting to make visible the cloud or the internet – to show that these are not exclusively virtual spaces and that, for example, tens of thousands of data facilities not only occupy physical space, but consume vast amounts of energy. Irish artist John Gerrard undertook to document a remote Google data centre in Oklahoma (Holmes, 2015). When Google denied him access, he hired a helicopter and worked with Max Loegler to take 2500 photos and replicate the centre in 3D as a digital simulation. Gerrard describes this project as a way to raise awareness of a vast network of largely invisible facilities (Holmes, 2015). His work helps to disrupt the silence surrounding the massive physical infrastructure that supports network connectivity. He seeks to close the gap in public perception

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that is represented by the widespread notion that the internet is a virtual, disembodied space. Artist Trevor Paglen is also concerned with exploding the myth of the immateriality of technical infrastructure (McLean-Ferris, 2015). Like Gerrard, Paglen seeks to illuminate a world that is largely hidden from view. Paglen has produced thousands of photographs of classified and covert military locations, as well as spy satellites, drones and underwater cables, many of which support and enable government surveillance and eavesdropping. His photographs document and render concrete locations and phenomena whose remoteness and low visibility contribute to a culture of secrecy and lack of accountability (Weiner, 2012). Paglen’s work can be viewed as an attempt to call attention to the archival silence surrounding our militarized, technologized and clandestine surveillance state. In a similar move to make visible silences in the history of media and communication technologies, artists and engineers are appropriating and repurposing obsolete media. Their goal is to create a more inclusive narrative of technological development. They bring attention to the multiple generations of devices and systems that have been discarded and forgotten. In 2015, for example, PAMAL (Preservation and Art Media Archaeology Lab), located in Aix-en-Provence, mounted an exhibit that included repurposed obsolete game consoles and videotext made by the early French online service Minitel (Jozuka, 2015). Benjamin Gaulon, one of the contributing artists, created a series called ReFunct Media. A typical example ‘features a mash-up of [old] Gameboys, Atari Consoles, and Aquarius Computers’ (Jozuka, 2015). According to Gaulon, these objects are meant to make visible the sociocultural, political and economic contexts of planned obsolescence.3 Similarly, UK-based artist Julie Alice Chappel, creates striking organic sculptures resembling winged insects out of old circuit boards and other discarded electronic materials (Yoo, 2015). Her work confronts viewers with a reminder of the continued existence of abandoned devices. These artists all speak to the silence that obscures our production of somewhere between 20 and 50 million metric tons of electronic waste worldwide each year.4 Their work foregrounds the material elements of these issues and expands our awareness of their planetary impact. Writers and scholars investigating hidden and increasingly complex systems adopt black-box metaphors and metaphors of archival silence to articulate and theorize the unseen, the unknown and the intentionally effaced. Both metaphors signal a heightened concern across disciplines and cultures with the increasing complexity of global systems and mechanisms of social

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and political power. Digitization and computation render these systems less visible. New forms of scholarship and artistic practice seek to make computational systems more legible – to deconstruct and parse their multiple interlocking elements. Bethany Nowviskie (2015) describes the allure of revelation that fuels the growth in black-box metaphors. Her explanation also applies to metaphors of archival silence. Nowviskie claims that scholarship is always an attempt to ‘interpret and fashion narratives from incomplete information’ and to ‘reverse-engineer lost, embodied material processes, whether those processes are the workings of ancient temple complexes or of nineteenth-century publishing houses’ (2015). Over the years, many historians have made a similar case. Carolyn Steedman (2001, 1177) declares that ‘historians read for what is not there’; they must be able to ‘conjure a social system from a nutmeg grater’ (1165). Or, in the words of Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995, 27), ‘any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences’. The work of the historian is to deconstruct them. Writers and artists are developing new methods and terminology to name and explore the implications of an environment with a massive archival footprint that is vulnerable to loss, distortion and misuse. This work enables us to understand metaphors of archival silence, like black-box metaphors, as part of a larger phenomenon that includes the impulse to question how knowledge may be concealed, misappropriated or exploited in the service of governments, corporations and individuals. The project of naming and addressing the complexity and obscurity created by the exponential growth of information networks and computational devices is generating new theoretical insights and new terminology, while opening up avenues for dialogue and collaboration between archival professionals and scholars in other disciplines.

Erasure and deletion

One newly prominent method for engaging issues of cultural disappearance, destruction and distortion is through critical and artistic practices of erasure and deletion. Erasure as an aesthetic strategy involves the removal or modification of text or images from a pre-existing work in order to create a new object. The aim is to draw attention to both new and original versions, thus allowing for a kind of double reading. Although this type of artistic production has a long pedigree (Benzon and Sweeney, 2015), critical and artistic practices of deletion have attracted new interest against a backdrop of digital proliferation and cultural change. These practices have proved

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productive in part because erasability is increasingly understood as a major attribute of the digital. Wendy Chun (2008, 160–1) explains how the inscription of digital data always involves the erasure or overwriting of old data: ‘[d]igital media is degenerative, forgetful, eraseable [sic]’; ‘a computer’s memory can be rewritten because its surface constantly fades’. In the digital environment there is no permanent original version, only instantiations that can be accessed on a screen, in another digital medium or printed out on paper. Deletion and erasure are thus taking on new meaning as the materiality of information production garners increasing attention. A 2015 special issue of the journal Media-N devoted to the topic of ‘The Aesthetics of Erasure’ poses the question of what is gained or lost by changes in the material production of texts and aesthetic objects. In the words of guest editors Paul Benzon and Sarah Sweeney (2015), erasure ‘is the black hole at the center of digital culture’. Critical and artistic practices of erasure are a way to interrogate archival silence by making new meaning out of absence and loss. The editors thus describe ‘the question of the archive, [as] perhaps the largest and most fundamental issue at stake in the aesthetics of erasure’. The essays in this special issue take a variety of approaches. One describes a project called ‘The Deletionist’, which is ‘a javascript bookmarklet’ created by the authors (Borsuk, Juul and Montfort, 2015). Users can add the bookmarklet to their browsers and then, with a single click, it will automatically create an erasure poem by deleting a portion of the text from any website visited. The authors designed their deletion algorithm by incorporating strategies and techniques from earlier deletionist art. The bookmarklet serves to highlight both the newly created poem and the significant volume of text that is lost to erasure. The authors explain that the standard view of the internet is the one we see through our browsers. Other possible views are available through ‘Page Source’ or ‘View Source’ options which allow us to see the HTML coding that produces the conventional page. The Deletionist bookmarklet, in providing an alternative version of any web page, is a reminder of the existence of other views. It prompts us to consider the complex processes occurring outside of our field of vision that are nevertheless crucial to producing the internet as we know it. It also reminds us how easily electronic text can be made to disappear. The essay describing The Deletionist bookmarklet is one of several in the collection that depict erasure as an act of production or creation. Every erasure ‘adds to the archive at the same time that it seems to take away from it’ (Borsuk, Juul and Montfort, 2015). Deletions open up the possibility for new

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meaning and invite us to consider additional interpretations. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010) is a striking example of deletionist art in an analogue medium. Foer created a new work out of Bruno Shultz’s 1936 novel Street of Crocodiles. Using a die-cutting technique, Foer excised much of Schultz’s text to reveal a new, much-abbreviated story. The die-cutting process produced holes in each page of the novel through which parts of other pages can be seen.5 The new story reflects upon the meaning and status of the original. Neither Schultz, an important 20th-century writer, nor much of his artistic output, survived the Holocaust. Foer’s novel creates meaning out of the silences evoked through the holes in his pages. The blank spaces create a palpable sense of absence and loss that prompts us to reflect upon the silences created by Schultz’s death at the hands of the Nazis, the loss of his manuscripts during the war and the legacies of others whose work has not survived. Foer embraces the materiality of the book and the particular affordances of print technology to evoke and explore archival silence and the fragility of the historical record. In another essay in the special issue of Media-N devoted to erasure, scholar and journalist Joshua Craze (2015) also addresses the power of art to confront silence and loss. His account centres on Jenny Holzer’s artistic renderings of documents from the US war on terror. These works include Holzer’s silkscreen copies of heavily redacted classified documents as well as paintings depicting the censored texts of interrogation reports, including testimony of Afghan detainees. Craze explains that he has spent years studying declassified and redacted documents and that what struck him upon seeing Holzer’s work was its ability to confront the silences of the record: ‘[j]ournalists have to write about content, and writing about the redactions themselves is outside their purview. Holzer’s paintings insist that these documents have a content that is not reducible to information; she is letting the absences exist, and insisting that we look at them’. Holzer’s work thus provides an artistic strategy for addressing gaps in the historical record. Her work creates an alternative narrative that is as much about the forces of redaction as it is about the text that we cannot see. Her depiction of these heavily censored materials serves as a vivid illustration of the power of military and intelligence bureaucracies to shape and control our knowledge of the past. A few archivists have also developed creative strategies for confronting holes in the historical record. Describing a gesture not unlike Holzer’s, Michelle Caswell (2014) reveals how archival traces and the absences they embody can be deployed against the brutal legacy of authoritative regimes

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like the Khmer Rouge, who orchestrated the genocide of perhaps two million Cambodians. Caswell tells the story of the roughly 5000 mug shots taken by Khmer Rouge operatives at Tuol Sleng prison where many thousands of prisoners were executed. Caswell acknowledges the ‘complex layering of silences encoded in these photographs’ (10). We know little about many of these subjects and less of the many thousands who perished leaving no photographic trace. Yet Caswell describes how the mug shots have taken on a second life at the centre of a community of archivists, survivors and relatives of the victims. This community ‘has strategically deployed the mug shots in legal testimonies, documentary films, and still photographs… ‘(7). Repurposing original sources in ways unimaginable to their creators and ‘subversive of their aims’, they have made these photographs into elements of a programme to ‘reunite disparate information, hold mass murderers accountable, and memorialize the dead’ (12). Like Holzer’s repurposing of redacted documents and prisoner testimony, the reuse of anonymous prisoner mug shots becomes a way to bring new attention to a historical record of destruction and loss. It harnesses the potential power and eloquence of silence itself.

Addressing the gaps

Historians are also devising new methods to address gaps in the archival record. Writing about challenges to the historiography of slavery, Vincent Brown (2015, 134) claims that the surviving record is often one of ‘absence, silence, negation, death, perhaps even cultural genocide’. Where sources exist they are often tainted by the perspectives of colonial governments, slave holders and other beneficiaries of slavery. If not properly contextualized, fragments retrieved and assembled from the lives of the enslaved ‘would seem to risk, among other things, repeating the discursive and historical violence that constitutes the archive of slavery’ (Naimou, 2015, 11). Many important projects have uncovered texts by women and minorities and made them available for study and teaching. But in some cases there are no texts to unearth or the available documents represent only the voices of the powerful. Stephen Best (2011, 156) claims that in these cases ‘our desire to recover evidence of lives apparently lost to history involve[s] us in a narrative of the impossibility of retrieval’. Best thus elaborates (159–60) what he calls the ‘paradoxes of absence’ – ‘the clash between the imperative to recover the past and the impossibility of doing so’. In response to limitations in the documentary record, some historians are

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adopting methods from the digital humanities. Vincent Brown (2015) and others use computational techniques to reveal patterns that were previously invisible and that can now be foregrounded and studied. Brown created a cartographic visualization of the Jamaican slave revolt that occurred in 1760 and 1761.6 He used a variety of sources, including maps and diagrams as well information culled from diaries, letters, newspapers and other contemporary accounts. Brown’s animated mapping technique provides insight into the strategies and tactics of the rebel uprising and demonstrates how Jamaican topography helped to shape the nature and course of the revolt. His project shows us how, in the face of archival silence, historians are developing new techniques that ‘define, clarify and advocate visions of the world that might otherwise go unarticulated’ (Brown, 2015, 136). Evincing a similar sense of the limitations of traditional strategies of unmasking and disclosure, some researchers are beginning to question projects to reverse-engineer and expose the workings of black-box systems. Despite her acknowledgement of the usefulness of black-box metaphors, Bethany Nowviskie (2015) is one of a growing number of digital scholars who claim that ‘the most fruitful research paths may lie beyond or alongside the impulse to “reveal” the contents’ of black-box systems. Instead, scholars are advocating that we reframe our notions of excavating and uncovering silences and filling gaps. Nowviskie proposes that, rather than exposing the working of black-box systems, we should educate and design for resistance through performance and play. This language might well describe the work of the artists discussed in this paper who have devised a variety of creative methods to highlight rather than fill archival silences. Photographer Trevor Paglen, for example, whose work might appear to be a straightforward attempt to make covert government activity visible, explains that this is not the case. Paglen (Weiner, 2012) claims that he intentionally creates blurred images of classified government sites because he is less interested in exposing and edifying than in confounding and unsettling. The ambiguity in his photographs provides ‘a metaphor for the difficulty of uncovering truth in an era when so much government activity is covert’ (Weiner 2012, 57). His project is not to fill archival silence so much as to make it visible. Taryn Simon, another artist who has photographed objects and locations that are secluded and inaccessible to the general public, also declines to describe her project as one of simple disclosure. Her 2007 volume, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, depicts roughly 60 sites that she was able to photograph only after extensive efforts to secure permission. Her subjects include a nuclear waste encapsulation and storage facility, a Braille

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edition of Playboy, a contraband room at John F. Kennedy International Airport run by US Customs and Border Protection, a cryopreservation unit, an inbred white tiger, stacks of sexual assault kits awaiting DNA analysis, a federally funded site for marijuana cultivation and research and a live HIV virus in a Harvard Medical School research lab. Simon (2009) declares that these hidden sites represent something ‘integral to America’s foundation, mythology and daily functioning’. Her focus on the inaccessibility of her subjects underscores the secrecy and obscurity at the heart of much contemporary culture. In the foreword to Simon’s collection, Salmon Rushdie (Simon, 2007, 7) observes that her work is important precisely because we inhabit a ‘historical period in which so many people are making such great efforts to conceal the truth from the mass of people’. Yet Simon (2009) does not claim that her photographs provide access to a hidden reality, only that they provide ‘another place from which to observe’. She is less interested in revealing secrets than in confronting ‘the divide between privileged and public access to knowledge’. Simon’s work both highlights archival silence and suggests the need for new strategies to address it.

New strategies and conceptual frames

Many archivists, like the historians described above, have elaborated on the limitations of a research model aimed at exposing hidden truths and filling gaps in the historical record. Wendy Duff and Verne Harris (2002), for example, following Gayatri Spivak (1988), have written of the perils of attempts to excavate the voices of silenced subalterns. Archivists have instead turned to investigating how silences may be built into the process of archival production. Theorists Terry Cook, Joan Schwartz (Cook and Schwartz, 2002), Tom Nesmith (2002), Eric Ketelaar (2001) and Jeannette Bastian (2006) have all proposed attending to the dynamic processes involved in the construction of the archival record. This work highlights the ways in which materials come to be included or excluded. Further insisting on the importance of process, Paul Conway (2015) emphasizes the need to explore and document the impact of the physical labour and multiple steps involved in the transformation of archival materials into digital formats and their preservation over time. Addressing the growing need for archivists to manage large-scale collections of digital surrogates, he argues that it is ‘necessary to recognize and protect the distinctive archival traces that derive from the transformational processes and active management in preservation repositories’ (66). This work is essential if we

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want to acknowledge and illuminate the silence and loss that attend the production of the archival record. Growing numbers of digital humanities scholars, like many archival theorists, are seeking new strategies rather than simply championing disclosure and transparency. Jamie Bianco (2012), drawing on the work of Bruno Latour (2010), insists on the need to move away from a critical stance of unveiling, exposing and debunking. Instead Bianco proposes ‘creative and critical making and doing’, which she describes as an elaboration of Latour’s notion of ‘composing creative critique’. This kind of experimentation, of thinking through making, is central to the work of the artists discussed in this essay. Scholars and artists are attempting to find new conceptual frames for interrogating archival silence and for addressing the proliferation of black-box systems. The focus on ‘critical making’ within the digital humanities has initiated debate on the theoretical implications of tinkering, hacking, curating and building. This work has significant implications for archival thinking. Roopika Risam (2015) claims that the ‘relationship between theory and praxis is integral to the digital humanities’ and that ‘[c]onnections between the two appear in the archives built, corpora analyzed, oral histories recorded, and geographies mapped’. Vincent Brown (2015, 134) argues that ‘when we shift our emphasis from historical recovery to rigorous and responsible creativity, we recognize that archives are not just the records bequeathed to us by the past; archives also consist of the tools we use to explore it, the vision that allows us to read its signs, and the design decisions that communicate our sense of history’s possibilities’. Designing and building digital or analogue collections is itself a kind of theoretical work. Creating new tools and new ways of organizing, manipulating and visualizing data involves a range of skills and modes of thinking. The recent proliferation of maker spaces and digital media labs in library contexts indicates a move, much like that within the digital humanities, toward reconceptualizing the relation between doing and thinking or between research and design. It also signals a recognition of the importance of experimentation. Both librarians and archivists are creating venues for establishing new forms of creative and collaborative research practice. A project called Archives Unleashed: Web Archives Hackathon is one example.7 An Archives Unleashed workshop was convened in March 2016 in Toronto and a second, hosted by the Library of Congress, was held in Washington, DC in June 2016.8 Sponsors represent a variety of fields and include the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Science Foundation, The Internet Archive, Library and Archives Canada, the University of Toronto Libraries, Rutgers University and the

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University of Waterloo. These multidisciplinary workshops are meant to provide ‘an opportunity to collaboratively unleash our web collections, exploring cutting-edge research tools while fostering a broad-based consensus on future directions in web archives analysis’.9 The workshops are a first step in the process of building ‘a community of practice around web archive analytics platforms and tools’. This focus on collaboration, experimentation and tool building represents an evolution in thinking about archival creation as a transdisciplinary project. It also signals a new emphasis on making and hacking as legitimate aspects of archival production.

Conclusion

For digital humanists and media studies scholars, critical making, performance and play, including practices of erasure and deletion, provide new frameworks for addressing archival silences and for bringing the interlocking social and material aspects of obscured systems into public consciousness. This work should encourage a redefinition, or at least a broadening of notions of archival silence within the archival and library community and encourage interdisciplinary and multidimensional thinking on these issues. Archivists and librarians should resist the urge to decry the interdisciplinary adoption of archival terminology. Instead, like several of the archivists cited above, they should welcome this acknowledgement of a shared preoccupation with the nature of the historical record, as well as this transdisciplinary exploration of the multiple intersecting forces that will determine the future of the archive.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6

7

8 9

www.archivesnext.com/?p=2653.

www.archivesnext.com/?p=3119.

www.recyclism.com/statement.php.

www.basel.int/Implementation/TechnicalAssistance/Partnerships/

PACE/Overview/tabid/3243/Default.aspx.

www.visual-editions.com/our-books/tree-of-codes.

http://revolt.axismaps.com.

http://archivesunleashed.com/.

https://artsweb.uwaterloo.ca/archivesunleashed/ and

http://archivesunleashed.com/call-for-participation/.

http://archivesunleashed.com/call-for-participation/.

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CHAPTER 5

Hidden voices in the archives: pioneering women archivists in early 20th-century England1

I

Elizabeth shepherd

about the public voice of the archivist, according to Hilary Jenkinson (1948, 31) ‘the most selfless devotee of Truth the modern world produces’. Jenkinson told us that the archivist’s career ‘is one of service. He exists in order to make other people’s work possible’. Jenkinson also urged the archivist not ‘to import into the collection under his charge what we have been throughout most anxious to keep out of it, an element of his personal judgement’ (Jenkinson, 1937, 149). In other words, archivists should leave their own views aside, should be detached and impartial, should not leave any mark or inscription on the archive, should not be seen and should not be heard. This notion of anonymity is a trope in archival discourse. Archivists dance over the archive imagining that they hardly leave a trace of themselves, of their actions and decisions. Archivists have understood themselves as not apparent in the archive. But, in their actions archivists do leave impressions on the archive; they are at the same time everywhere and nowhere. Can we hear the voice of the archivist? Do archivists document themselves? Or are archivists ‘sans-papiers’, the undocumented, the persons without identity papers (Derrida, 2005, 55)? Derrida examined the link between archives and identity, naming and existing, silence and presence. He reflected on secrecy and openness, the past leaving its traces in the future through the archive, and asked ‘what becomes of its archive when the world of paper … is subordinated to … new machines for virtualization? Is there such a thing as a virtual event? A virtual archive?’ (2005, 2). Or, one might add, a virtual archivist? Are archivists afraid of being identified and named? The phenomena of archives and the voices of archivists are explored in the literatures of other disciplines (Cvetkovich, 2003; Steedman, 2001). But philosophical, historical, literary and feminist writing overwhelms archival HAVE BEEN THINKING

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science; archivists are in danger of being drowned out, repressed, excluded and hidden. I see an analogy between the presence and absence of the archivist in the archive and the voice of women in the public sphere, the right of women to be heard in public discourse. Mary Beard, the classical scholar, (2014, 11) reminds us that in Homer’s Odyssey, Telemachus exerted his public power over his mother Penelope, telling her to ‘go back up into your quarters and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff … speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household’. Women’s voices were not for the public sphere. It is a recurring theme in fairy tale, myth and legend. Richard Strauss’s opera Die Frau ohne Schatten, first performed in 1919, is, among other things, about women’s struggle to find their identity and place in the world. In Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto, Barak the Dyer’s brothers exclaim, ‘Wer achtet ein Weib und Geschrei eines Weibes?’ (‘Who takes any notice of a woman and the whining of a woman?’). Jane Austen, in Northanger Abbey (1817), alludes to the irrelevance of history to the domestic experience of women, as being ‘the quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilence in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all’. Mary Spongberg (2002, 57) suggests that in the 19th century ‘women’s exclusion from the public sphere was reinforced by practices adopted by historians engaged in developing the new discipline of history within the university’. Leopold von Ranke’s documentary seminar teaching, based on his archival research in Austria, emphasized ‘facts over concepts’, ‘the centrality of politics to the study of history’ (Spongberg, 2002, 57–8). And, as history became ‘conflated with a masculine quest for identity’, it tended to privilege national consciousness and state archives, or, in Austen’s terms, ‘popes and kings’. Von Ranke’s teaching moved historical science ‘from the public lecture hall, which was open to all, to the seminar room, a private space available only to men’ (Spongberg, 2002, 57). The presence and absence of women in modern historiography has been examined by Bonnie Smith (1984). Women historians of the 19th century, for example Sarah Taylor Austin and Mary Berry, made use of ‘unusual sources such as diaries, travel accounts and memoirs’ (Smith, 1984, 713). As a consequence, ‘women who attempted to write history were rarely considered “real” historians: rather they have been characterized as biographers, historical novelists, political satirists, genealogists, writers of travellers’ tales, collectors of folklore and antiquarians’ (Spongberg, 2002, 1–2). Local history, genealogy, personal, domestic and community interests, characterized by Philippa Levine (1986, 6) as the domain

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of the amateur in the 19th century, and once perceived as the women’s sphere, are at the heart of the archive in the 21st century. These are the archives which tell the stories of real people. Having briefly examined the voice of women in history, this chapter will go on to consider the archive and the archivist in the scholarship of humanities disciplines, before illuminating the role of women in the emerging archival profession of the early 20th century. By these means, I will seek to make the voice of the archivist clearer.

The archive in scholarship

Disciplines as diverse as history, critical theory and cultural studies, literary studies, art history, dance and visual studies, anthropology and critical heritage studies have focused on archives and experienced an ‘archival turn’ in theory and research methods. Historians have gradually recognized that archives are not merely sources but are objects of research in their own right. The anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler characterizes this as the shift from ‘archives-as-things’ to ‘archiving-as-process’ (Stoler, 2009, 20). Stoler, writing about the colonial archive, examines supposedly neutral archives ‘against the grain’. She draws attention to ‘the force of writing and the feel of documents’ (2009, 1). Historian Philipp Müller (2010, 109–10, 123) has shown how von Ranke sought privileged access to the archives of the Habsburg monarchy, using various bureaucratic and diplomatic strategies as a foreign subject to seek the favour of the sovereign and his officials. Yet, having obtained that access, a mark of his high status as a historian, von Ranke in his private letters ‘gave testimony about both the existence of the manuscripts … and his own sensual experience of their material quality’. Critical cultural theorists, literary and feminist scholars have engaged in the notion of the archive. Maryanne Dever (2014), Kate Eichhorn (2013) and Arlette Farge (2013) all consider the source of cultural authority, the nature of cultural production and ‘working in the archives’. Dever (2014, 285) focuses on the physicality and materiality of the archive, asserting that the ‘promise of paper’ attracts researchers and that the ‘physical contact with original documents is what has traditionally confirmed our status as privileged researchers and generated that longed-for sense of intimacy’. Dever (2013, 176) reflects that ‘Allusions to the sensual possibilities of the materials with which we work are rare. Indeed, researchers are encouraged to transcribe the words they find in documents and then to let the possibilities of the page itself fall from view’. As Alice Yaeger Kaplan (1990, 103) remarks, ‘conventional

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academic discourse requires that when you write up the results of your archival work, you tell a story about what you found, but not about how you found it…. The passion of the archives must finally be used to eradicate all personal stories in the interests of dry archival report, fit for a public’. Dever, Newman and Vickery (2009) interrogate the contemporary practice of archival research. They remind us of the importance of the individual experience and the affect of the archive in life stories. Research methods in literary studies and in biography range from archival sources, discourse and textual analysis and semiotics to embrace visual culture, auto/biography, auto-ethnography and creative writing (Griffin, 2005). In contemporary disclosive social culture, the self-revelation of the researcher compels her to go beyond documenting the ‘facts’ of a biography, to attempt to interpret and ‘read’ the lives of those she studies (Griffin, 2005, 33). Historians of women’s history such as Sachs (2008, 660) have reflected on the methodological difficulties of archival research where both archivists and historians were constrained in the past by ‘a conceptual framework that privileged a very limited spectrum of male political, social and economic activity’. Archives relating to women’s lives were not considered worthy of preservation or, if preserved, were confined to the ‘w – women’ index entry (Sachs, 2008, 665). Many scholars in the humanities and social sciences undertake research in the archive without much reference to archival science scholars and professionals. The different communities do not understand or experience ‘the archive’ in the same way. In explorations of the affect of the archive, the archivist seldom appears as a material being and so is invisible. Yet, without the agency of the archivist, the ‘archival turn’ would often not be possible. Archival scholars have begun to reflect on the presence and absence of the archivist and to challenge the traditional notion of impartiality. Catherine Hobbs writes about the power of the personality in writers’ archives, ‘the unfinished draft of a life lived’, and ways in which archivists should reflect ‘the psychology of archives’, character, storytelling and self-narratives in their treatment (Hobbs, 2006, 110, 117). Twenty years ago, Terry Cook (1997) wrote about memory, archives and archival history, remembering and forgetting. He urged archivists to create a collective archival discourse, or meta-narrative, to mark the shift from being passive, impartial custodians to active shapers of our documentary heritage. As Cook (1997, 18) wrote, the work of activist archivists means that ‘the world’s citizens can open the doors to personal and societal well being that comes from experiencing continuity with the past, from a sense of roots, of belonging, of identity’. Brien Brothman (2010), Eric Ketelaar (2001, 2012) and others have written about removing the boundaries

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of archival context, thinking about the problematic of the archive and refiguring the archivist in the archive. If the archivist does not speak, then other archival narratives are suppressed, confined to what Gerard Genette (1997) called the ‘paratext’. Archivists become footnotes, obscure, shadowy, hidden and elusive, almost invisible, silent, not apparent and lacking materiality. Many professions, as they mature, seek to understand themselves through reflection on and investigation of their own histories and of their historical context. Archival science is no exception. Histories have been written of national cultural institutions (Posner, 1964; Harris, 1991; Wilson, 1982–83; Cantwell, 1991), of professional developments (Cox, 1983; Duchein, 1992; Millar, 1998; Cook, 2005) and, to a more limited extent, of leading individuals (Cox, 2004; Wosh, 2011). Few women in the library and archival fields have been studied in detail: Ida Leeson, the first woman to be appointed Mitchell Librarian in Sydney, Australia in 1932 (Martin, 2006) and Margaret Cross Norton, head of the Illinois State Archives (Mitchell, 2003), are notable exceptions. Other disciplines have studied the professional contributions and lives of women pioneers. For example, in early 20th-century experimental psychology, Valentine (2006, 2009) explores the lives of Beatrice Edgell, Jessie Murray and other pioneering women. Valentine’s approach combines the study of a few individuals in depth, with shorter studies of a larger number of women: taken together, the lives shine a light on the role of women in the early history of psychology and psychoanalysis in Britain. Her work exemplifies a research method through which an analysis of women’s professional lives is set in their educational, cultural, social and family contexts, tracking their social networks and exploring their personalities in an effort to understand their place in the history of their profession (Valentine, 2006, 137–88). Nearer to our own field, Levine’s (1986) study of antiquaries, historians and archaeologists in 19th-century England makes use of research methods which might be adopted for a new endeavour. Levine analyses the activities which typified the historical profession emerging in the 19th century in order to identify the different communities, government and educational institutions and individuals. She reconstructs the network of lives, social relationships and individual interests which combined to bring about the shift from amateur to professional history. Collective biography and prosopographical research methods are used by Valentine and by Levine to construct a narrative of an emerging profession. Returning, then, to the archivist and archival history, this chapter seeks to explain the need for a new area of research in archival science: the role of pioneering women archivists

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in the development of the archival profession. The chapter will not permit more than an introductory exploration of individual lives but will seek to establish a framework for future research and an examination of some possible research approaches.

Women in the archive

Archival history in England has tended to be the history of great men and institutional archives, such as the Public Record Office (now The National Archives). My own work (Shepherd, 2009) focuses on the national themes of archival history in 19th- and 20th-century England, examining government commissions and reports, the development of archival institutions, professional infrastructure and university education, providing the larger framework for our history. We know about the first Deputy Keepers of the UK Public Records, Sir Francis Palgrave, Sir Thomas Hardy and Henry Maxwell Lyte (Cantwell, 1991). There is a brief history of the Secretary and Commissioners of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (Ellis, 1969). We recognize Sir Hilary Jenkinson, ‘the father of English archives’, author of A Manual of Archive Administration (1922), Deputy Keeper of the Public Records from 1947 to 1954 and first President of the Society of Archivists, from 1955 to 1961 (Davies, 1957). We have come across George Herbert Fowler, Professor of Zoology at University College London, who became the founder of the first local record office in Bedfordshire in 1913, author of The Care of County Muniments in 1923 (Bell and Stitt, 2002). They are well documented. Margaret Procter (2012) studied Hubert Hall, author of A Repertory of British Archives, who worked at the Public Record Office (PRO) from 1879, ending his career there as an Assistant Keeper in 1921. Hall was trained in the von Ranke tradition and he passed on the documentary approach to history by means of seminar teaching at the London School of Economics (LSE). Procter (2012, 175) shows that at the LSE a ‘majority of seminar participants were women’, in contrast to Spongberg’s view of the historical seminar in Germany and the USA as a male space. Hall’s teaching ‘encompassed diplomatics and palaeography and administrative history but it also provided the skills needed for employment in the various branches of historical work’ (Procter, 2012, 186). Procter (2012, iii) says that Hall, along with ‘his PRO contemporaries, Charles Johnson and Charles Crump’, trained ‘a generation of women historical workers’. Procter (2012, 193–5) suggests that these women were not employed as academic historians in the universities, but that there was a direct line from ‘the women who came

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within [Hall’s] ambit as students, collaborators and researchers, whether in his classes at LSE or in the PRO searchrooms, [to] a later generation of women who were clearly identified as archivists’. Where are the voices of pioneering women in the history of English archives? Dr Irene Churchill of Lambeth Palace Library, trained at Hall’s LSE seminars, was Joint Honorary Secretary with Jenkinson of the British Records Association from its foundation in 1932 (Jenkinson and Churchill, 1948). Joan Wake, also taught by Hall at the LSE, a record agent and founder of Northamptonshire Record Society and county archives, was prominent on the Council of the British Records Association in the 1930s and first Vice Chairman of the Society of Local Archivists in 1947 (King, 1974). Ethel Stokes, a record agent and a friend of Wake’s, founded the Records Preservation Section of the British Records Association and was its first archivist (Harris, 1989). Lilian Redstone, also a record agent, was the first archivist for Ipswich and East Suffolk and the author of Local Records: their nature and care. She succeeded Stokes as Secretary of the Records Preservation Section in 1944 (Charman, 1959). Kathleen Major was archivist at Lincoln Diocesan record office from 1936 and Secretary of Lincoln Record Society, then Reader in Diplomatic at Oxford University in the 1940s and later Principal of St Hilda’s College Oxford (Bullough and Storey, 1971, v–x). Ida Darlington worked for London County Council as a historical researcher on the Survey of London from 1926, was active in the British Records Association and the Society of Archivists and was eventually appointed Head Archivist and Librarian to the newly merged London and Middlesex Councils in 1965 (Draper, 1970). When F. G. Emmison reminisced about his early years in the profession (he was trained by G. H. Fowler in Bedfordshire from 1926 and was the first county archivist of Essex in 1938), of the 11 pioneering archivists he named, 8 were women (Emmison, 1985). Where are their voices? Why, in a strongly feminized profession, do we not know more about them? Maxine Berg’s analysis of the work and personality of Eileen Power (1889– 1940), Professor of Economic History at the LSE in the 1930s and the best-known medieval historian of the inter-war years, provides a model (Berg, 1996). Power is of special interest here because she played a part in the history of English archives. After school in Bournemouth and Oxford Girls’ High School, Power studied history at Cambridge from 1907. She lived at Girton College, where she became friends with women involved in feminist and suffragist causes: she later joined the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Power won the Gilchrist scholarship to study at the École nationale des chartes in Paris in 1910 and then obtained a scholarship to study social

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and economic history at the LSE from 1911 to 1913. At the LSE, she attended Hubert Hall’s research seminars. Power was appointed to a lectureship at the LSE in 1921 and to a chair in 1931. She did innovative work on teaching history in schools and was a pioneering BBC radio broadcaster in the 1930s. In 1937, she married the historian Michael Postan. In 1927, Power became secretary to the Economic History Society, launched by the Anglo-American Historical Conference in 1926. She also became involved in the new Economic History Review journal. In 1932, she proposed ‘the formation of a Committee for the study and preservation of London business archives’ which would compile a register of archives and establish a depository at the LSE. The Director of the LSE, William Beveridge, convened a meeting, attended by Sir Josiah Stamp (chairman of London, Midland and Scottish Railway), A. E. Stamp (Deputy Keeper of the Public Records), A. V. Judges and Michael Postan (both LSE historians) and Richard Pares (All Souls, Oxford) to discuss a proposal for a new Council, which would promote the preservation of archives of commercial and industrial enterprises useful to the economic historian, compile a register of business records over 100 years old, seek to prevent the destruction of business records by arranging their deposit in public institutions and provide expert advice and publications (Shepherd, 2009, 136–8). The Council for the Preservation of Business Archives was launched in 1934 with 39 foundation members comprising academics, businessmen, archivists and librarians. Irene Shrigley was its first secretary (Mathias, 1984). These pioneering women archivists should be brought out of the shadows; their stories and voices need to be heard. Eileen Power’s life and work have been documented: others deserve similar attention. Understanding the background, social lives and critical professional interventions of pioneering archivists helps to set them in their proper historical and archival place and gives a voice to their stories and thus to our emerging archival consciousness. Women in the early 20th century often faced educational barriers, although the Girls’ Public Day School Trust began to offer them school education at a time when many girls were still educated at home by governesses. Few women had the classical education needed for university entrance, and in any case few universities admitted women (Spongberg, 2002, 155–62). London University was the first in England to award degrees to women, in 1878. When the LSE opened in 1895, women were allowed in to lectures, awarded bursaries and scholarships for study and appointed to academic posts. Lilian Knowles was appointed to the LSE in 1897 and went on to become the first female professor in England. At Oxford, although there were women’s

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colleges and women could attend lectures with men if they were chaperoned, no degrees were awarded to women until 1920. At Cambridge, women were not awarded degrees until 1948. Women had frequently to choose between marriage and employment. Some women joined internationalist organizations such as the League of Nations Union or became suffragists, joining the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. During World War 1, the London Society for Women’s Suffrage investigated the employment of older educated women on war work (London School of Economics Women’s Library Archive, 2LSW/F/2/07). In 1915, The Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries proposed a scheme for the temporary employment of women as record cataloguers and indexers in county councils (The National Archives, PRO 44/3). Hubert Hall was concerned that such temporary employment would prejudice permanent jobs for women in records work. He proposed an alternative scheme of advanced historical training leading to permanent jobs for women as ‘skilled archivists and assistant archivists’ (The National Archives, PRO 44/3). He estimated that there was work for over 100 such trained and skilled women, perhaps more if local authorities co-operated. Hall suggested a that Committee be formed to investigate, to include Lilian Knowles at the LSE and Eileen Power, but I have not been able to find any record that this ever happened.

Pioneering women archivists in England

I want to bring to light some of the individuals whose lives make up our archival history and let their stories speak to us. As a start, I will examine briefly two pioneering English women archivists from the inter-war period, Joan Wake and Ethel Stokes: later publications will look in more detail at individual women. The treatment here intends only to explore in outline what it might be possible to study through more extensive research, and to illustrate the approaches that could be adopted. Although their family backgrounds were very different, Wake and Stokes were colleagues, correspondents and friends. Indeed, Wake wrote of Stokes that ‘a full-length memoir of this remarkable woman must one day be written’ (Wake, 1954, 1). Both were record agents, work that was academic in nature but allowed freedom from formal organizational hierarchy. Both played significant roles in the foundation of English local archives and for this reason alone they are worth revealing. Neither married. Neither has yet been studied systematically, although Joan Wake was included in a family history (Gordon, 1992, 298–335) and work is underway on an edition of her letters and diaries to be published

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to celebrate the centenary of Northamptonshire Record Society in 2020 (Harries, 2014). Hundreds of boxes of papers from the Wake family, including some relating to Ethel Stokes, are held at Northamptonshire Record Office and with Northamptonshire Record Society (Northamptonshire County Council, 2014). So far uncatalogued, these papers may in time reveal something of the archival habits of the archivist, the documentary life of the record agent.

Joan wake

Joan Wake, born in 1884, the fifth of six children of Sir Herewald Wake, 12th Baronet (she claimed descent from Hereward the Wake), was educated at home with her two sisters, while their three brothers went away to school (Gordon, 1992, 2004; King, 1974). The family seat was at Courteenhall in Northamptonshire. They were well connected, married into the St Aubyn family of Devonport and the Bloomsbury Sitwells (Gordon, 1992, 303), and in the social circle of the suffragists. Joan Wake enjoyed a country childhood riding horses, hunting rabbits and visiting villagers. In 1898, she joined the newly founded Northampton School of Music, where she studied the piano. Two years later she became parish organist at Courteenhall, training the church choir and raising money to replace the organ (Gordon, 1992, 299, 302). Wake travelled around Europe, visiting her aunt Amy Ball, who lived in Paris, in 1902. In 1914, she toured with her mother, Kitty, and aunt Josephine St Aubyn to Bruges, Budapest, Prague and Vienna, making detailed notes of the architecture, buildings and museums she visited (Gordon, 1992, 302). She began to read widely about art and literature, and wrote essays under the guidance of Professor John Churton Collins, an academic at the University of Birmingham who was involved in the University Extension movement (Gordon, 1992, 303). At the age of 29 she decided to move to London, where she enrolled at the LSE to take a twoyear part-time course in palaeography, diplomatic and medieval economic history, from 1913 to 1915 (Gordon, 1992, 303). She attended Hubert Hall’s seminars, developing her skills in palaeography and diplomatic and her knowledge of parish documents, land tenure and manors. She attended lectures by Power on economic history. At the sessional examination in July 1915 she was placed first (Gordon, 1992, 303). Wake found a practical use for her knowledge when she was asked by Sir Thomas Fermor-Hesketh at Easton Neston, Northamptonshire to examine some deeds, including a 12th-century charter, in which, she later recalled, ‘a

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church, a chapel, a mill and two crofts are mentioned, all in this little scrap of parchment under nine inches by four. As I had lived within five miles of all these places for the whole of my life, my interest may well be imagined. I had obviously hit upon an important collection right at the start’ (Gordon, 1992, 303). She cultivated relationships with experts who could help her to develop her skills, such as guidance given in Latin by the Northamptonshire ecclesiastical historian, R. M. Serjeantson (Gordon, 1992, 305). She became a student and friend of Frank Stenton, Professor of Modern History at University College Reading from 1912 to 1946, after meeting him through her friend Stephen Ward, a member of the faculty of philosophy. Stenton invited her to attend his lectures and documentary seminars at Reading. Here Wake developed her interest in ‘this wonderful and exciting business we were up to, this intimate contact with real people in the remote past which I was experiencing’ (Gordon, 1992, 305). She came to believe, as Stenton did, that there was no real distinction between local and national history. Stenton was very influential in guiding Wake’s future work, writing to her in 1915, ‘I do not know of any work at the present time more valuable than the copying of records in private custody. ... What we want is a supply of local monographs, plenty of them, and well distributed’. He introduced her to Canon Foster, who had founded Lincoln Record Society in 1910, saying to Wake, ‘You must start a Record Society in Northampton’ (Gordon, 1992, 305–6). However, World War 1 intervened and Wake was diverted to war work. She served in a Cambridge hospital and then, from 1916 to 1919, was the Honorary Secretary of the Northamptonshire District Nursing Association (Gordon, 1992, 306). Travelling the county during the war made Wake aware of the threats to the survival of local records from paper-salvage drives and the break-up of country estates, which made archive rescue work essential (Harris, 1989, 3–4, Gordon, 1992, 306). Wake began her archival work in earnest when she founded the Northamptonshire Record Society. In October 1920, public meetings were held in Peterborough and in Northampton at which Wake, supported by Frank and Doris Stenton and Canon Foster, urged the need to save records from destruction as a ‘foundation for future social historians to build upon’ (Gordon, 1992, 306). The Society was established, with two committees (one each for Peterborough and Northampton) and a Council, to collect records, arrange lectures, train students and prepare records for publication (Gordon, 1992, 306). Wake sought to acquire and preserve local records. In the absence of an official archive service in Northampton, the Record Society acquired records of landed estates, Quarter Sessions, local authorities, solicitors,

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manors and families. Wake recorded in her diary many visits to major county houses, solicitors’ offices and other ‘odd corners’ to survey and collect records, bringing them back in sacks on a lorry or in a suitcase on her motorbike to the Record Society. There the records ‘would be kept in a fire-proof strongroom, produced two or three at a time, and used in the presence of me or my assistant, by properly accredited students’ (Gordon, 1992, 307–8). In 1927, Northamptonshire Record Society was designated as a Manorial repository for Northamptonshire and Peterborough by the Master of the Rolls Committee (The National Archives, HMC 5/1). Records were stored in the library and museum until new storage rooms were opened in County Hall, Northampton in 1930, although these quickly became full (Gordon, 1992, 312). A proposal for premises in the new county council offices, due to open in 1940, was indefinitely postponed by World War 2, and the records were moved out of Northampton for safe-keeping (Gordon, 1992, 313). Wake also trained assistants who went on to be county archivists in their own right, including Mary Grace, who went to Norwich public library and the Castle muniment room in 1931 as the first archivist. Grace wrote to Wake, ‘thank you ever so much for all you have helped and taught me, I shall take care to see that all your efforts are not in vain but for the good of the cause’, although she comments ‘there does not seem to be much conception of THE CAUSE here as far as I can see yet, nor of a local record office’ (letter M. Grace to J. Wake, 1931, unlisted, Northamptonshire County Council, 2014). The pioneering work of rescue and preservation, along with editing and publication, set precedents for other counties. After the war, Wake continued to rescue records, travelling thousands of miles in her little car. ‘The car itself was crammed with cartons, attaché cases, a portable typewriter, rolls of postage stamps and her very large handbag. Her driving, which could be erratic, often terrified passengers, especially when she became diverted by what she was saying’ (Gordon, 1992, 316). The records were rehoused at Lamport Hall, owned by Sir Gyles Isham, an active member of the Record Society (Gordon, 1992, 317–19). By 1950, ten rooms were full of records, stored in various types of boxes and crates. Wake complained about the difficulty of getting the Hall cleaned, using German prisoners quartered nearby; and when the Hall was unoccupied she felt compelled to ensure its security by sleeping overnight on a temporary bed (Gordon, 1992, 319). The cramped conditions of the office in the 1940s were described by a later County Archivist: ‘the Library … had to serve as both the students research room, offices, cataloguing room and a place for meetings and lectures, … students … had to contend with the telephone, typing,

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dictation, discussion, disturbance by visitors and occasionally even exclusion when meetings were in progress’ (King, 1960). Wake began to look for a permanent home for the records. Delapre Abbey, near Northampton, was unoccupied and in need of restoration when it was purchased by Northampton Council in 1946. A sustained campaign by Wake, working with Northamptonshire Rural Community Council, supported by distinguished historians and county families, including a conference in Whitehall with Harold Macmillan, Minister of Housing and Local Government, letters to The Times, and a huge fundraising effort, led in 1957 to a 99-year lease by the borough of Northampton to Northamptonshire Record Society at nominal rent (Gordon, 1992, 327–8). In 1952, a joint archive service for the borough of Northampton and county of Northamptonshire had been established, under the Northamptonshire Archive Committee. Patrick King, who was Assistant Secretary of the Record Society from 1948, became Chief Archivist of Northamptonshire, and Wake continued to run the Record Society as Secretary (Shepherd, 2009, 100; Gordon, 1992, 320). In 1959, the Record Office and Record Society moved 40 tons of records to the newly refurbished Delapre Abbey, celebrated with an opening ceremony attended by hundreds of people (Gordon, 1992, 329). While Wake believed that local archives such as those in Northamptonshire were of great value, she also made a significant contribution to national archival development (Shepherd, 2009, 131–4, 145–6). She spoke at the AngloAmerican Conference of Historians and served on its Committee for the Migration of Manuscripts in the 1920s. She was an influential figure in the British Record Society and organized the first Conference of Record Societies at the Archaeological Congress in 1930, which aimed to ‘formulate a systematic scheme to deal with the practical questions that are daily arising in connection with rescued documents’ and to discuss records preservation and ‘acceptable standards’ for record repositories. The Committee set up to continue the work, whose members included Fowler, Jenkinson and Wake, led, after some complicated negotiations and significant differences of opinion, to the formation of the British Records Association in 1932. Wake remained an active Council and committee member of the British Records Association for the next 25 years (Shepherd, 2009, 131–4). She was the first Vice Chairman of the Society of Local Archivists, set up in 1947 as a ‘kind of Local Archivists’ Committee, the chief object of which would be to hold meetings at which archivists’ practical problems could be discussed’, predecessor of the Archives and Records Association (ARA) (Shepherd, 2009, 145–6). Wake also travelled internationally to visit archives and give lectures.

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In 1925, she visited national and municipal archives in the Netherlands and in Sweden (Gordon, 1992, 307). In 1947, she took the three-day flight to Southern Rhodesia to visit her brother Godwin, and returned to the UK via Kenya, where she visited the Central African archive (Gordon, 1992, 323). In 1957, she embarked on a two-month lecture tour of the USA, speaking at the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America at Harvard, visiting the Huntingdon Library in Los Angeles to look at Northampton documents and staying with her cousin Evelyn Sitwell in Virginia and her friend the medieval scholar Hope Emily Allen in New York state (Gordon, 1992, 324). Wake was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1945 and appointed CBE in 1960, but, according to Gordon (1992, 334), it was the award of an honorary MA by Oxford University in 1953 which made her finally feel accepted as a historian by the academic world. Her obituary (King, 1974) recorded that she lived until her 90th year and recalled her stocky build, determined jaw, her ‘striking personality, at times formidable, her character and her capacity’ for work. ‘Joan was an untidy worker; her rooms were filled with piles of papers and books both on the desk and the floor. She was a great but impatient user of the telephone. Many a missive was delivered to some errant on one of her famous postcards’ (Gordon, 1992, 309). Although not much interested in her appearance, ‘she always carried her best hat in a box on her motorcycle, and later in her small car, for visits to the grander houses’ (Gordon, 2004).

Ethel stokes

Joan Wake wrote a tribute to her friend, Ethel Stokes (1870–1944), in which she described her as ‘the prime mover, the chief instigator, in the truest sense the real founder of the biggest movement for English history since the passing of the Public Record Office Act of 1838’, establishing a service for the preservation of the local archives around England (Wake, 1954, 1). Stokes was from a much more modest background than Wake. Born in Holloway, London in 1870, she was a student at Notting Hill High School, one of the first founded by the Girls’ Public Day School Trust, where she was a contemporary of Beatrice Edgell (Valentine, 2006, 7). Family circumstances prevented her from going to university (Wake, 1954, 2). Instead, by the 1890s she had begun work as a record agent, researching and editing records, in the PRO in Chancery Lane, London, at the British Museum and also working on parish, ecclesiastical, municipal and estate records. ‘A sturdy and plainly dressed figure’ with a ‘strong and vigorous’ personality, Stokes set up business with Mary Louise Cox (1873–1936), daughter of a law stationer (Wake, 1954, 1).

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Stokes and Cox had rooms at Lincoln Chambers, 75 Chancery Lane, across the road from the PRO, from which they worked and largely lived, cooking on a gas ring in a recess behind a baize curtain (Wake, 1954, 2). Wake (1954, 2) describes the rooms as ‘furnished with heavy Victorian furniture and a huge oil-painting of Miss Cox. Books and papers were stacked here and there in orderly piles’. Stokes investigated peerage claims and genealogies, edited historical documents for publication by record societies and was involved in research and writing for the Victoria History of the Counties of England, under the guidance of the founding editor, H. A. Doubleday. In fact a significant proportion of the essays in early (pre-1914) volumes of the Victoria County History, especially on unfashionable topics such as social and economic history, were by women. During World War 1, Stokes and Cox, with a group of elderly women, took on women’s work; not spinning and weaving but stitching wind-proof waistcoats for the troops (Wake, 1954, 3). Stokes also devoted time to the Paddington Boy Scouts, acting as the secretary from soon after their foundation in 1917 until her death in 1944. She died as a result of an accident with a lorry, crossing the street on her way from the PRO to a scout meeting in the black-out (Wake, 1954, 7). However, her place in our story rests on her largely unacknowledged role as founder in 1929 of the Records Preservation Committee, forerunner of the British Records Association (Harris, 1989). The British Record Society had been founded by William Phillimore in 1888 to edit and publish local records. Wake and Stokes were active in the British Record Society in the 1920s as editors and also helping to offer advice on the deposit of local records. Stokes was secretary of a British Record Society Committee charged in 1928 with obtaining more funding for editorial work; but she had a larger vision for English archives (London Metropolitan Archives, ACC/3162/RPS2/1/1). She wrote a report which proposed ‘a nationally useful’ society for ‘organised work throughout the country’, ‘to support, consolidate and coordinate the work of local and special societies’ as members of a national society, ‘to advise owners and custodians of records and historical papers’ and ‘to secure the establishment of local record offices’ so that ‘our splendid heritage of records should be preserved and properly valued’. Stokes sent her scheme to many influential people, including Lord Hanworth, Master of the Rolls. She secured the support of Professor Frank Stenton (who was also a friend of Wake’s) and A. E. Stamp, Deputy Keeper of the Public Records. The Times published an editorial and article supporting the scheme for the preservation of records on 26 June 1929. Some were not in favour, such as the Librarian of the Institute of Historical Research, Guy Parsloe, who feared a ‘waste of energy which

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must result from overlap’ (London Metropolitan Archives, ACC/3162/RPS2/ 1/2). However, most were enthusiastic, and the momentum was unstoppable (Shepherd, 2009, 131–4). The Carnegie Trust gave a grant. The Records Preservation Committee of the British Record Society was established in 1929 as a ‘centre for the reception and distribution of unwanted documents’. William Le Hardy, of record agents Hardy and Page, chaired the supervising committee and provided a room at 2 Stone Buildings, London, for the sorting and listing of solicitors’ records. In 1932, the Records Preservation Committee transferred to the newly founded British Records Association. The ‘old committee had continued at work’, dispatching ‘a great number of consignments of records to the appropriate repositories’. Miss Stokes was elected as Chairman. The move was not trouble free, however, with significant differences of opinion over the handling of the Carnegie Trust grant money, and disagreements about the proper powers of the Records Preservation Section to publicize its work and manage the volunteers. There were resignations. Miss Stokes resigned as Chairman in 1936 ‘owing to ill health’ but, when asked to reconsider a few months later, she became honorary secretary; Miss Wake resigned too, but after a ‘unanimous resolution expressing regret and the hope that she would reconsider’, she did (London Metropolitan Archives, ACC/3162/RPS/1/4). A huge network of over 300 volunteers and workers around the country rescued, registered, sorted and listed and distributed archives to the localities in the inter-war period. Many British Records Association deposits formed the core of embryonic local collections in a period when local archive services were still in formation. Between 1933 and 1939 the Records Preservation Section redistributed 270 archives to local repositories. The British Records Association records tell of tireless advocacy for archives and rescue work, mainly undertaken by Stokes after 4.30 in the afternoon, when the PRO closed and she finished her business as a record agent. The work rate steadily increased: 50 dispatches were made between October 1937 and April 1938, 81 in the six months from October 1938 to April 1939. In the final six months of 1939, 38 receipts and 91 dispatches of records were made (London Metropolitan Archives, ACC/3162/RPS/1/7). The work took its toll on Stokes, who persisted with all her obligations throughout the bombings of London, even though her room off Chancery Lane was destroyed and she lost most of her possessions. She was periodically ill, and on one occasion collapsed and had to be carried back to her room in Tooks Court. The Records Preservation Section office moved to 8 New Square, where she sometimes slept. Later she helped staff at the PRO who were on fire-watching duty all night, and,

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according to Wake (1954, 6), ‘for the last eight months of her life she slept on a mattress on the floor underneath a table in the library’ at the PRO. By the end of World War 2, as a result of the combined efforts of the national network of committees of the Records Preservation Section under the guidance of Stokes, records preservation work had achieved a national profile. Stokes had helped to ensure the preservation of archives of great significance to local and national history. After her death, Stokes was succeeded as honorary secretary of the Records Preservation Section by Lilian Redstone, archivist for Ipswich and East Suffolk (Harris, 1989, 11).

Conclusion

Much more work needs to be done to address the hidden lives and voices of women archivists in early 20th-century England and in other countries, but I have made a start and set out here a framework. In this chapter, I have sought to explain and justify the field of study. As I have argued elsewhere, the provision of professional education for archivists, originally training them in palaeography, diplomatic and archaic languages so that they could be ‘hand maids of history’, eventually gave way to the establishment of an academic discipline in archives and records management, a distinct discipline with its own qualifications, literature, professional practices and research (Shepherd, 2009, 171–210). The voices and actions of women archivists are a critical part of our collective history. This chapter has argued that the hidden history of pioneering women archivists should be studied: work on some of the individual women mentioned here has already begun and will be published in the future. Bringing their lives and stories together over time will help us to understand our collective history. Such understanding gives us access to our past, individually and collectively, and helps us to see our place in the world. We need to hear archivists’ voices, from the past and from the present, in order that in the future the archive and the archivist can speak and be seen clearly.

Notes 1

This paper was first given as a Professorial Inaugural lecture at University

College London on 20 May 2014. A revised version was given at I-CHORA 7 in

Amsterdam on 29 July 2015.

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Harris, P. R. (ed.) (1991) The Library of the British Museum: retrospective essays on the Department of Printed Books, London, British Library.

Hobbs, C. (2006) New Approaches to Canadian Literary Archives, Journal of Canadian Studies, 40 (2), 109–19.

Jenkinson, H. (1937) A Manual of Archive Administration, 2nd edn, London, Lund Humphries.

Jenkinson, H. (1948) The English Archivist: a new profession, London, H. K. Lewis.

Jenkinson, H. and Churchill, I. (1948) 1932 to 1947: being a Report from the Joint Secretaries on their Retirement, London, British Records Association.

Kaplan, A. Y. (1990) Working in the Archives, Yale French Studies, 77, 103–16.

Ketelaar, E. (2001) Tacit Narratives: the meanings of archives, Archival Science, 1 (2), 131–41.

Ketelaar, E. (2012) Cultivating Archives: meanings and identities, Archival Science, 12 (1), 19–33.

King, P. I. (1960) Northamptonshire Record Office Review of Establishment, Northampton, Northamptonshire County Council.

King, P. I. (1974) Obituary: Dr Joan Wake 1884–1974, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 5 (2), 144–8.

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London Metropolitan Archives, ACC/3162/RPS2/1/1–3, London, British Records Association, correspondence, 1928–1930.

London School of Economics, Women’s Library Archive, 2LSW/F/2/07 (Box FL367), File, Committee of Enquiry into the Employment of Older Educated Women,

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PART 2

Engaging records and archives

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CHAPTER 6

The use and reuse of documents by chancellors, archivists and government members in an early modern republican state: Genoa’s Giunta dei confini and its archives

I

stefano Gardini

accepted that the transformation of the archives’ function from self-documentation memory to source memory occurred following a long process which started during the French Revolution and matured when archives started to be mainly perceived as cultural institutions (Bautier, 1968; Zanni Rosiello, 1987). Nonetheless, it is equally true that even before the French Revolution, the function of self-documentation memory had an impact on the physical shape of the archives, changing it over the time. In this perspective, the Genoese Giunta dei confini is a particularly relevant case which illustrates the relationship between the idea of the history of a specific archive (Zanni Rosiello, 1987, 44) and the concept of historical sedimentation of archives that has been suggested (Bologna 2014) by recent scholarship. The case provides important insights into the relationship between the slow progression towards the scientific and cultural use of an archive and its previous administrative and political uses: so much so that the papers of the Giunta’s archive eventually became one of the most important sources for the history of many Ligurian communities. The following pages discuss a single case study against the backdrop of an archive characterized by an extremely complex process of sedimentation, which, through further study of other aspects and fonds, could add important elements to the debate. T IS GENERALLY

Territorial control in early modern Italy: producers, functions and archives

During the early modern age the state progressively increased and improved its instruments of territorial control and the exercise of sovereignty. Among

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them, those institutions that were charged with the settlement of territorial disputes were of great significance. So much so that the archives produced by these institutions should be considered as fully fledged state instruments in themselves. Between 1560 and 1742 the Duchy of Florence, the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Genoa, the Duchy of Milan and the Kingdom of Sardinia all established magistracies charged with overseeing borders, all of which exercised similar functions. In various ways and depending on the context, these institutions influenced the archival set-up, not only through the creation of novel documentary complexes, but also through a reuse of documents inherited from the past, as the dates of the oldest documents preserved in these archives clearly show (see Table 6.1) Table 6.1 Dates of the institutions’ establishment and of the oldest documents

(D’angiolini, Pavone, 1981–94, 2, 74, 309, 914; 4, 395, 918–19) State

Magistracy

Year of Date of oldest establishment documents

Florence

Nove conservatori del dominio e della giurisdizione fiorentina

1560

1196

Venice

Provveditore sopraintendente alla camera dei confini

1564

1331

Genoa Milan

Giunta dei confini Giunta-commissariato magistratura dei confini

1587 1736

954 1518

kingdom of sardinia

three different commissions

1742

1108

As the problem always precedes the solution, the state would first try to solve pending issues by using existing instruments; ad hoc institutional changes would be sought only afterwards, when an extraordinary intervention appeared to be the only feasible solution. Thus, inevitably, along with the functions, new institutions also inherited existing papers that were relevant to their responsibilities and objectives; these papers would be managed by the new holder in the way which best satisfied his needs. A first example of the use and reuse of documentation is the unavoidable outcome of institutional change. This relationship between producer, function and archive is very familiar in archival studies. Examples are the concept of ‘archival viscosity’ devised by Valenti (1969) and Pavone (2004), and the idea of function as expressed in the Australian series system (Hurley 1993). However, the phenomenon of use and reuse of documentation and its connection to changing functions within an unchanging institutional framework is certainly less common and less investigated.

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Whenever archives have to fulfil their primary function – namely, administrative duties – they generally acquire the shape which best suits the purposes of the different subjects that manage them on different levels. Their configuration thereafter changes in line with changes in the secondary functions of the archives (practical, legal or cultural) as a consequence of the needs of each subject entrusted pro tempore with the task of holding and managing them.

The Genoese Giunta dei confini and its archival duties

The Giunta dei confini was established in 1587 with the specific aim of bringing order and ensuring the conservation of the territories and boundaries of the Republic (Bitossi 1995, 28). The Giunta was a commission composed of members of the government (Senato and Eccellentissima Camera, called Serenissimi Collegi when in joint session) and assisted by one of the three chancellors of the Republic. This institution, like many others similarly called Giunta or Deputazione, was neither a magistracy nor a constitutional body, and therefore it had no legal personality. It acted on the government’s orders; however, when taking action with regard to external subjects, the Giunta presented itself as if it were the government, so much so that the letterhead of its correspondence read: doge, governatori e procuratori della serenissima repubblica di Genova (doge, governors and procurators of the most serene Republic of Genoa), which was a clear reference to the government (Archivio di Stato di Genova, hereafter ASG, Archivio segreto, Litterarum confinium, 413). This does not imply that the Giunta had any degree of decision-making autonomy, for it usually exercised merely preparatory and advisory functions. If by definition an archive can be produced only by a legally constituted entity, it follows that an archive which was purposely produced by the Giunta does not in fact exist. Rather, its documents take up a section of the government archive relative to the Giunta’s activities, which, as stated, concerned the control of borders and the resolution of territorial disputes. Therefore, from now onwards I will refer to the Giunta’s archive only for the sake of clarity, and also because, in the end, we are not certain to what extent such a firm relationship between an archive and its institutional producer can be considered relevant for the phenomenology of archives. According to the draft of its foundation charter – which, however, was not wholly approved – the Giunta was to play an important role in the management of the archives (ASG, Archivio segreto, 20, 23, Decree approved on 18 February 1587). Its officer, called sindico, was mandated to collect all

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documents concerning any place or fief under the Republic’s control from the public archives and register them in an appropriate book. For the same purpose, the sindico was also entrusted with the task of reordering all the papers that could be obtained from other archives. The charter also established that a notary aided by two young assistants was to be entrusted with the care of the Archivio segreto (the section of the public archives where documents pertaining to the Republic’s foreign policy were kept). The aim was to gather information and preserve all the relevant documentation in order to protect the interests of the Republic. Even though the charter was not approved, archival functions were assigned to the Giunta, also called Gionta dell’archivio or Deputazione all’archivio in later centuries (Roccatagliata 2009, 451–2). Therefore, we should not be surprised if, in these public archives, the series concerning borders were the objects of special attention by the archivists who worked under the Giunta’s supervision.

The actual shape of the Giunta’s archive

The archive of the Giunta dei confini (1587–1797), preserved within the Archivio segreto section in the Genoese State Archives, is composed of several series: ■ the Confinium series (188 items of chronologically ordered papers dating ■ ■ ■ ■

from the 15th century to 1799, the earliest documents dating back to 954) the Finium ex parte series (6 items of chronologically ordered papers dated 1665 to 1713) the Finium series (107 items of papers organized by topic or file) the Paesi diversi series (103 items of alphabetically ordered papers) the Litterarum Confinium series (58 chronologically ordered correspondence registers).

Another series, called Giunta dei confini, which is detached from the Archivio segreto section, must be added to the above list. This consists of 76 items, comprising the papers of Matteo Vinzoni, an 18th-century cartographer. Lastly, numerous maps which are now included in the cartographical collection must also be considered as part of this documentary complex. The intricate arrangement of these series suggests an equally intricate historical sedimentation of papers (Bologna, 2014): for almost two centuries, through the management of self-documentation memory gathered in these documents, the Republic expressed its policy of territorial control against its subordinates and other external subjects (Grendi, 1987). Despite being part

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of an unchanging and homogeneous institutional framework, during its active phase the Giunta’s archive papers underwent several radical reorganizations suggested by different needs.

The first shape of the Giunta’s archive: the chancellor’s role

We cannot date precisely the reorganization of the pre-existing documentary material which covered issues regarding state borders, but we can reasonably suppose that it occurred in the years immediately following the establishment of the Giunta. Such a reorganization was, in fact, explicitly called for in the institution’s constitutive charter. In their inventories, 17th-century archivists Stefano Testa (ASG, Manoscritti, 312) and Gerolamo Borlasca (Roccatagliata, 2007; ASG, Manoscritti, 313) described a complex of items that were still organized according to local traditional criteria; an explanation of this tradition is therefore in order. From the High Middle Ages up to the French Revolution, the bureaucracy of the Republic of Genoa was essentially monopolized by a closed class of notaries (Costamagna, 1970). Not unlike in other regions of Italy, in this milieu record management practices in the public sphere developed according to the local notarial tradition (Giorgi and Moscadelli 2012, 2014). The principal aggregation element for papers was the name of the notary-chancellor responsible for the procedure rather than the name of the office in which he worked, the people involved or even the documents’ subject matter. Following this criterion, therefore, the first organization of public archives in Genoa, as evident from the oldest inventory, drawn up by Francesco Botto around 1530 (ASG, Manoscritti, 219–21), looks like the sum of many personal archives, one for each successive notary who was appointed chancellor. Each one of these ‘personal archives’ was composed of several groups of homogeneous documentary items: Litterarum, Actorum, Diversorum, Inutilium and sometimes even Confinium. We are unsure how documents composing a file were actually arranged but, by analogy with similar cases, we can presume that the papers were arranged in reverse chronological order: a simple consequence of the papers’ stratification during the administrative procedure. The innovation proposed by Testa was to extract the Confinium bundles from each chancellor’s archive and arrange them in three series: one for the eastern Ligurian Riviera, one for the western Ligurian Riviera and the third for the Oltregiogo (the area immediately north of Genoa). In this new arrangement each unit of description was identified by (and even available through) a series of elements written on the cover: dates, place

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names and the name of the chancellor. To cite merely one example, the cover of the bundle which concerned the borders of the podesteria of Polcevera (located in the immediate Genoese hinterland) reads: ‘1589 usque in 1616 foliacium confinium Maçoni cum Pulcifera, item cum Vulturo, item cum Campo ceptum primo a magnifico Andrea Rossano continuatum a magnifico Guillelmo Diana secretario’ (ASG, Manoscritti, 313, 34). This simple way of organizing the papers was therefore natural for the chancellors and secretaries of the Republic, and could be performed by someone who had a profound knowledge of the mechanisms underlying this specific bureaucratic system. The chancellor initiated each procedure, and followed its development through to closure and drew up and received papers; in their hands the files took a fixed and formal shape. Whenever they had to cite earlier documents they were probably able to remember the names of the previous colleagues with ease, rather than dates or place names. This is confirmed by the order according to which identifying elements are cited in the oldest document references: dates, place names and other names are always logically and hierarchically subordinate to the chancellor’s name.

A new task and a momentous reorganization: the archivists

The weakness of the system was proportional to the strength of the administrators, because most of the information was reached through personal memory. This arrangement, so heavily dependent on the personal memory of the administrators, started to be viewed as an impractical record management and archiving system when, around the mid-17th century, the care of the archive was transferred from the chancellors to full-time archivists (Roccatagliata, 2006; Roccatagliata, 2009, 449–58). In 1670, the Senato decreed that the papers should be reorganized in compliance with the prescriptions of the Giunta dei confini (ASG, Archivio segreto, Confinium, 78). Most probably this ordinance led merely to the transfer of all pertinent documents from the chancery to the archives, but the new and improved radical rearrangement which was made a few decades later, around 1710 by archivist Domenico Sorba (Roccatagliata 2009, 469), and between 1715 and 1734 by archivist Giovanni Battista Viceti (ibid., 469–76), confirms the archivists’ need for better control and management of information. The aforementioned archivists produced a general, chronologically ordered rearrangement as well as the first analytical description of the individual documents in each series. This major endeavour lasted about 40 years and involved all the documents collected as the 126 items, dating from 954 to 1738, of the Confinium series,

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which today is still organized according to Sorba and Viceti’s criteria (ASG, Archivio segreto, Confinium, 1–126). In this arrangement, an item was identified by the name of the series and the year or the years of the papers (for example, ‘Confinium 1586’); documents comprising the item, which were likewise chronologically ordered, were identified by a progressive number. The retrieval information written on the cover of the item became less useful than under the previous arrangement: only a person who knew the precise date of a particular document could find it without the help of finding aids. The chronological element is the linch-pin around which the physical archive is still arranged, yet it is not as essential when it comes to accessing the information contained therein. Conversely, the alphabetical index of the series, which was based on place names, called Pandetta confinium (ASG, Manoscritti, 160–1), provides the real access to information and documentation. Under each place name listed in this index, the documents are described with each identifying element following their physical arrangement, i.e. chronologically. In addition to this, each entry contains a short summary of the relevant document: in essence, the index is a sort of virtual codex diplomaticus of each city, village and community to which the records relate. This laborious endeavour was justified by the archivists’ new role: managing documentary memory. This new role comprised not only the task of preserving the documents but also the duty to create new information by selecting and reworking data for the benefit of the Republic. By this period, the chancellors were no longer managing past documents preserved in the archive (except for those pertaining to pending affairs) and therefore were unable to carry out any archival tasks. Members of the ruling class (composed of aristocrats who were co-opted into the Republic’s governmental institutions by their peers) were not interested in supervising the management of the archives, from either a material or a logical perspective: their only interest was in obtaining practical answers to their questions. It was the archivists who catered for such needs, and who also by compiled written reports on questions posed to them by the government and registered these in appropriate books, in order to capitalize on this new memory which was being produced (ASG, Manoscritti, 715–715a). These newly created practices will now be illustrated by means of an example.

How self-documentation memory works: an example

The village of Campo (now called Campo Ligure, in the Oltregiogo) was a

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small imperial fief located less than 30km away from Genoa or, as described in archivist Filippo Campi’s report, ‘situated at the very core of the state’ (ASG, Manoscritti, 715, 48). In 1631, the Republic purchased half of the feudal rights pertaining to this village from the Spinola, an aristocratic Genoese family, in order to ensure the control of such a close imperial enclave, and prevent any threats to state security. For less than a century the Republic and the Spinola administered Campo together. In 1709, however, Domenico Spinola claimed full feudal rights over Campo at the imperial court, obtaining the latter’s approval. In the legal conflict which ensued, the Republic used the information retained in its archives. The work of the archivists and recent information retrieval technologies were necessary in order to master the content of such a cornucopia of data. The first Pandetta confinium (ASG, Manoscriti, 160) listed 99 documents under the headword ‘Campo’, dating from 1544 to 1714. Of these, the 22 documents concerning the legal status of the fief have been marked with a cross providing clear evidence that this selection was based merely on the description that the archivist involved read in the index. This was followed by a further selection of only four documents which the archivist actually used to write the report; three other useful documents were identified in different series dating back to the Middle Ages (Manuali dei decreti del senato and Libri Iurium). The documents were chosen carefully in order to meet the purpose of the report, i.e. to demonstrate that the Republic of Genoa was the original possessor of Campo and that the feudal concession in favour of the Spinola was therefore unfounded. For this purpose archivist Campi identified two documents from those collected in the Libri Iurium, both dated 18 June 1217, in which Otto, marquis of del Bosco granted the fief of Campo to the Republic of Genoa, which in turn immediately enfoeffed the same locality to the marquis and his heirs (Puncuh 1998, 158–64). Therefore the imperial concession favouring the Spinola was unfounded, since the feudal rights over Campo pertained to the Republic. Nonetheless, the judgment on the dispute did not favour Genoa, mainly because at the time the right to grant a fief was considered an imperial prerogative. In any case, it is not the outcome of the story which should be our main concern. This case serves as a practical example of the self-documentation memory use of archival material which involved very old papers and was based on a careful selection of documents and information. In fact, all useless or potentially harmful documents were excluded, thanks to a sorting process that was conducted initially through the finding aids and was subsequently refined by working directly with the documents

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themselves. The archivists who prepared the report had an active role in the definition of procedures, crafting a high-level cultural product that deserved to be preserved and reused, since the report was not merely a selection of old papers but a new expression of the government’s will. It is worth noting that even the report had to be preserved in order to save and rationalize work and resources.

The increase in the production of documents and a new method of arrangement

This attention to saving work and resources is connected with the increased production of documents that, during the 18th century, doubled the quantity of the Giunta’s papers, thus making Viceti’s system obsolete (Figure 6.1). Viceti’s successor, Filippo Campi (Roccatagliata, 2009, 477–85; and 2014), active as archivist between 1734 and 1773, also had to come to terms with the problems created by this rapid increase in documents; a problem which stimulated interesting reflections. Before becoming an archivist, Campi had worked as an apprentice under Viceti’s supervision for almost 15 years. 250 200

Items

150 100 50 0 10–14th

15th

16th

17th

18th

Figure 6.1 Items per century in the Giunta’s archive

In applying his predecessor’s method, Campi also discovered its weaknesses. Firstly, once the chronological shape had been secured by assigning an identification number to each document, the archivist would be unable to insert into the chronological order any documentation which had escaped the reordering process. In fact, the series Finium ex parte (ASG, Archivio segreto, 186–90) is composed of papers found ex parte after the reorganization of the

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Confinium series, which was afterwards arranged in chronological order in a different series and equipped with its own index (ASG, Manoscritti, 162). Secondly, the increase in documentation quickly led to the filling-up of the index book. This compelled the writer to make constant cross-references that slowed down the consultation of the finding aid and decreased its effectiveness. After 1714 the first Pandetta confinium (ASG, Manoscritti, 160) was already full, and all the subsequent documentation had to be recorded on a second Pandetta confinium (ASG, Manoscritti, 161). Between 1719 and 1734, in order to provide a single effective access point to the Confinium series, Campi undertook (probably under Viceti’s supervision) a new, consolidated version of the previous indexes, consisting of many books, one for each letter of the alphabet; this project was never completed (ASG, Manoscritti, 163a-c). To conclude, Viceti’s system was undoubtedly better than the previous ones, but it certainly was not perfect: in particular it was unable to ensure the effective management of newly produced documents which were accumulating. If the identification element of each paper was not the date, but a progressive number assigned by the archivist, and given that the access point was usually the place name, could such an investment of time and resources in rearranging the documents in chronological order be of any use? Obviously not. In view of this, and after a few years spent rigorously following the method of his predecessor, Campi gradually stopped rearranging the documents into chronological order, partly because of the staggering increase in the production of papers. He realized – and this is a consideration which he wrote in one of his reports – that neither a chronological nor a thematic arrangement of the papers was a feasible solution (Costamagna, 1969). According to him, it was the original order, the one devised by the chancellors during the active phase of the Giunta’s procedures, that could prove most effective (Bitossi, 1996; Costamagna, 1969; Roccatagliata, 2003, 2014). This looked like a throwback, but its was merely a face-value impression because, by introducing more effective alphabetic indexing of the most significant entities (obviously place names, but also personal names and other keywords), Campi recovered and improved the information retrieval technologies that had been elaborated in the past, thereby providing a sort of virtual alphabetical arrangement of the archive.

The 18th century: a virtual arrangement of the archives?

The distinction between physical and logical ordering of the papers was, in Campi’s professional experience, a technical innovation that could have also

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represented an important theoretical acquisition, but we have to carefully evaluate its actual impact in archival studies. Although Italian scholarship recognizes that Campi’s work anticipates the theory of the principle of provenance (Lodolini, 2013, 183–6), we have to consider that, as Bologna has correctly stated (2010, 101), the archivist’s experience had actually little resonance in archival debate before Costamagna’s seminal studies (1969). For Campi, compliance with the principle of provenance was less the outcome of theoretical reasoning than an economic and feasible solution to the problem of transferring the papers from the chanceries to the archive. Having clarified this aspect, it is now useful to evaluate the real impact of Campi’s method of arrangement on the physical archive by analysing the structure of the research tools he implemented. Admittedly, Campi’s activity had fewer consequences on the material shape of the archive than had the work of Sorba and Viceti. However, Campi applied his method in two significant endeavours which were undertaken in the Genoese archives: namely, the general inventory of Archivio segreto and the inventory of the cartographic collection. The general inventory, called Pandetta generale dell’archivio segreto (ASG, Manoscritti, 313bis; Roccatagliata, 2014, 179–272), is a location index that describes series or single items according to their physical position in the archive’s rooms, irrespective of the logical position of series and items: many homogeneous items located in the same position were described together in one series, but similar items in different places were described individually. Old and well-sedimented items were often described together with their own finding aids, while the arrangement of newer items shows the growing confusion in the archive. This finding aid illustrates well the beginning of this crisis that, in the second half of the 18th century – for many reasons but mainly due to lack of space and staff – led to an undisciplined growth of the government archives. The solution adopted by Campi was to provide numerous access points to the information, irrespective of the physical order of papers, through an alphabetical index placed in the second part of the inventory. The inventory of the cartographic collection, called Indice de’ tipi moderni, is a second interesting finding aid elaborated by Campi (ASG, Archivio dell’Archivio, G164; Caroli and Gardini, 2012, 141–75). This finding aid, which describes such documents as topographical maps, is composed of two different parts. The first contains document-identifying elements and descriptions, arranged according to the chancery of provenance: about 20 rolls of 5 to 42 maps per roll received from official cartographers of the Republic .

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(Spiga, 2012). The second is composed of an alphabetical index of any place name mentioned in the first part and other significant names (religious bodies, fortresses). To this we can add some further considerations. The fact that the initial order was maintained means that the documents provide additional information, helping us, for example, to understand the difference between a map and its seemingly identical copy, the only difference between them being the purposes for which they were prepared. The alphabetical order of the index presents an important innovation when compared to earlier systems: it is a real alphabetical index, whereas in previous cases the entries were simply grouped only by the first letter, not unlike an address book where all names under the same letter are listed in insertion order. It also indirectly shows the first use of an important information technology in the Genoese archives: the card index. It has to be noted that these indexes aimed to satisfy only heuristic needs, since they differed from the previous indexes elaborated by Viceti, which provided very analytical descriptions. It follows that Campi’s indexes were not intended as a replacement for direct consultation of the original documents. It is no mere coincidence that Campi was probably the only archivist of the Republic who was not a notary; none of his predecessors or successors, all of them notaries, could ever have contemplated devising such an innovation in order to preserve and order documents, for the simple reason that they had learned traditional systems handed down from generation to generation through apprenticeship. However, in the end, Campi’s theoretical and technological elaboration did not have any deep influence on the physical setup of the documentation, since in the last decades of the 18th century no substantial work of archival reorganization or description was undertaken (Gardini, 2012, 46), partly because of the chronic lack of staff, which was repeatedly lamented by the archivists themselves (Roccatagliata, 2003).

The long path towards a cultural use

In 1797, the aristocratic Republic of Genoa became the democratic Ligurian Republic, and eight years later its territory was annexed to Napoleon’s Empire; thus it lost its sovereignty. Genoa was no longer a city which ruled over other subaltern towns and communities: after 1805, it was merely one of the many cities of the empire, and therefore it could not develop its own foreign policy. With the end of the Giunta’s activity the relationship between its archives and the new government changed radically. Papers and finding aids lost almost all of their importance in defending the public interest, partly

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because what once were the Republic’s boundaries with external states had now become borders between administrative districts of the same state. The cessation of this function enabled the development of a cultural use of the archive, even if this occurred after a long and troubled history, common to almost all public archives of continental Europe. The development of this new use of the archives coincided with the shift in the perception of the archive from an arsenal de l’autorité to a laboratoire de l’histoire (Bautier, 1968). In 1812, the bulk of the Archivio segreto was transported to Paris to be included in the Imperial Archive. In 1816, following the prescripts of the Congress of Vienna, the Genoese archives were returned not to the Ligurian city but to Turin, the capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which had been granted sovereignty over Genoa and Liguria. These documents were kept in the archives of the Crown until 1865. It was only a few years before the Unification of Italy (1861), therefore, that the Genoese archives began to be brought back to their original home (Caroli, 2009). The transfer of the Archivio segreto was not complete: some sections of material which probably were in disorder had remained in Genoa. The material sent to Paris and then to Turin, as well as the documents that had been left in Genoa, were once again reorganized. Between 1861 and 1865 archivist Giuseppe Emanuele Arata was entrusted with the task of rearranging the sections of the Archivio segreto that were kept in Genoa – among these also a series comprising 76 bundles of documents pertaining to the Giunta dei confini (Gardini, 2015, 32). Arata organized the documents according to two criteria: the papers of cartographer Matteo Vinzoni were grouped according to the principle of provenance, while the other documents were grouped according to a principle of pertinence based on place names. A similar fate awaited the papers sent to Paris and then to Turin. Between 1816 and 1865, the documents produced by the Giunta dei confini which were kept in Turin were only partially reordered. This rearrangement was implemented according to three criteria: The sections of the Giunta archives, equipped as they were with strong finding aids, and the documents which were unequipped with such finding aids but were chronologically ordered were not rearranged. As such, the existing finding aids were still considered to be useful for the contemporaneous heuristic needs, while the chronological order was regarded as feasible enough. 2 The later sections, as we have said, were neither equipped with finding aids nor ordered chronologically. These sections were reorganized into 1

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the Paesi diversi series and arranged in alphabetical order by place name. A few other series, such as the cartographic collection, despite being equipped with good finding aids, were also reordered following the same criterion, merely because the inventories and indexes had mistakenly been left in Genoa and were unknown to the archivists in Turin.

A rearrangement which follows the alphabetical criterion, however, leads to a serious bias in document interpretation. Every procedure for the definition of borders necessarily involved two or more communities, usually identified by the names of the villages or territories where they were established. Ostensibly, however, the choice of the place name to be used as an identification element is never neutral, for it reflects the point of view of one of the parties involved in the dispute. It is only by resorting to an alphabetical index which includes all of the place names that it is possible to maintain neutrality. For a long period of time, the border separating Genoa from the Kingdom of Sardinia was the longest border between the Republic of Genoa and any other state. Most of the negotiations undertaken by the Giunta involved communities under Genoese sovereignty, as opposed to those communities which were dependencies of Turin. Since the Genoese territory had been annexed to the Kingdom of Sardinia, when the archivists in Turin reordered the documents alphabetically, they clearly made choices which were different from the original ones. Specifically, they always chose the name of the community belonging to the Kingdom of Sardinia, instead of the name of the community that was subject to Genoa (Quaini, 1987, 1186–9). The reorganizations undertaken during the 19th century, after the fall of the Republic, were inspired by different needs: the link between production, use and conservation was now irrevocably broken, and therefore an administrative use of these papers was very unlikely. However, the management of archives, and of the memory contained therein, gave important support to several collective entities in representing themselves and, in our case, in the construction of the new Italian national identity which sprang from the sum of the previous regional specificities. This new, identitybased use of the archive must be seen as the historical premise of a real cultural function: from the perspective of the Italian Risorgimento, historical narration was not yet a scientific form of prose, but rather an ideologically oriented literary genre aimed at forming a national consciousness. After 1874, the organization of the state archives administration of a now unified Italy was not based on a centralized conservative model according to the

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characteristics of the ancient Italian states (Giuva, 2014, 106). This shows that the state recognized the role of public archives and records in shaping Italian identity, and implicitly recognized the existence of a link between papers, places and local communities. For a long time, however, the development of a real local history was obstructed by the predominating historiographical current centred on aspects of political history which could emphasize the national character of Italian civilization. The discovery of these materials as a suitable source for the history of local communities occurred in a meaningful and curious way, as a by-product of studies on Christopher Columbus, a figure who, at the beginning of the 19th century, attracted the interest of Genoese scholars due to the significant importance of his geographical discoveries. In 1937, Paolo Revelli edited a three-volume opus on Columbus and cartography. The third volume was a catalogue of the cartographic collection of the Genoese State Archives edited by archivist Emilio Marengo (d. 1930) and published posthumously in 1937. A detailed study of the manuscript maps kept in the archive allowed Marengo to understand how they were logically related to the documentation preserved in the series Confinium of the Archivio segreto. In this way, he rediscovered the effectiveness of 18th-century indexes, stimulating a renewed usage of these finding aids, which began to be considered useful also for the purposes of historical research. So much so, that from the 1970s a photostat of Viceti’s index (ASGe, Manoscritti, 160) had to be made available to users in the reading room of the State Archives in order to preserve the original manuscript from damage due to continuous consultation. Thus the archive of the Giunta dei confini progressively became the primary source for the local history of these communities – a heterogeneous but interesting assortment of localities within the Republic of Genoa – once involved in territorial disputes. Despite the development of these studies, 20th-century archivists never experimented with making new physical rearrangements of the papers, and the Giunta’s archive is still arranged in the seemingly bizarre and largely irrational order derived from the sum of the previous and partial rearrangements which have been illustrated here.

Different actors, different needs, different uses

The structural features of the research tools that were developed during the successive rearrangements described above, no less than the internal organizational structure of the series, reflect the changing heuristic needs of

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the community of reference, i.e. chancellors, archivists, government members, and also historians and scholars. The chancellors, initially involved in the production of documents, managed the papers, alongside cartographers and government delegates, during and after the conclusion of the procedure relevant to such papers. Even when they were responsible for the preservation of public archives, these individuals were mainly concerned with the production of documents, and thus they failed to give any particular attention to the possible need to reuse the documentary material. Conversely, full-time archivists did not participate in the initial phases of the archive’s formation. The need to manage information preserved in an archive organized in a way that hindered them from fully mastering such data forced these archivists to experiment with new forms of order and new finding aids. Rather than being involved in the organization of the papers at the conclusion of the relevant procedure, the archivist’s main aim was to extract and use the data in order to find a solution to possible controversies. It was an exercise of administrative memory by means of which the state was able to oversee its subject territories, despite its distance from these areas, by using information from a distant past which concerned the object of contention. Members of the aristocratic class that governed the Republic through the Senate and the various Giunte and magistracies, apparently detached from both territory and papers, pursued their political agendas and exercised control over subject areas by means of the information provided by the archive and through the mediation of the archivists’ work. They were obviously interested in an optimal management of the archives, conscious that efficiency was beneficial to the state. However, the government fostered reorganization operations only when the expected results seemed economically proportional to the costs incurred. It follows that the choice not to increase the human resources dedicated to the management of the archive, in spite of the uncontrolled increase in the production of documents, may be interpreted as a political decision, based on the awareness that the possible damage caused by inefficient management of memory was in fact less cumbersome than the cost of more efficient management. Historians and scholars started to consider the relevance of these documents as historical sources much later. Their interest was mainly focused on the information contained in documents rather than on information on the archival context that could explain the reason behind the drafting of documents and their preservation. From the 1970s onward, any visitor to the Genoese State Archives would consult Viceti’s inventory as if it had been

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devised for the purpose of scientific research; they often failed to realize that the instrument identifies points of access to the material that have been selected to meet the needs of someone else, and certainly not a contemporary scholar. If we consider the economic factor as an element of orientation of any research project we realize that scholars might consider this possibility to be more economical than the full consultation of series. The voice of local communities, certainly present in these papers, emerges only through the aforementioned levels of mediation (i.e. chancery, archives, politics and history), thereby losing its spontaneity. Before the French Revolution, all the efforts at administering the papers were directed towards ensuring the defence of the central power. On the other hand, from the Risorgimento until the present, such an effort to reconstruct the history of local communities has been directed towards building collective identities. Beneath the scientific nature of each research lie new forms of identity self-affirmation, which can be different from national ones (Meriggi, 1996, 3–8). Analysing documentary non-use could direct contemporary scholars to documentation that was considered useless or potentially harmful to the early modern state, and hence cleverly excluded from the selection by chancellors, archivists and government members.

Conclusion

The use and reuse of documents, or, rather, the change in their use, is an important and well known phenomenon in archival studies which, as many case studies demonstrate, is often connected with institutional changes or historical watersheds. However, the case study which has been illustrated shows how this connection at times may be false. In order to establish what constitutes an institutional change, we might try to consider change as it exists at any level of the hierarchy of laws, from constitutional reform to the administrative decree, and also try to analyse the organizational structure and workflow, so as to highlight moments of discontinuity compared with moments of persistence, but we would soon realize that this complicated effort does not lead to satisfactory results. As a matter of fact, as we consider the lower levels of the institutional hierarchy, we realize that both persistence and change are expressed in the daily work of individuals. Individuals interpret the regulatory framework and implement instructions received from their superiors, but sometimes they introduce unforeseen novelties that cannot be explained by changes occurring at the upper levels of the hierarchical ladder.

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The examples given in this chapter confirm that, generally, it is impossible for archives to maintain their shape perpetually unchanged. In spite of, or thanks to, the efforts of contemporaneous archivists, the archive is subject to human action, besides being subject to time. Therefore we have to agree with Zanni Rosiello’s (1987, 44) idea of the distinctive history of each documentary complex, to which Bologna (2014, 223) has added that ‘similarly to each single individual’s personal history, the sedimentation process is unique and unrepeatable for every single archive, and therefore very specific’. Following Bologna’s line of thinking, it is certainly useful to ‘try and identify, and define those elements which are constant and therefore applicable to most cases’ (ibid.).

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Denise Bezzina for helping me to improve and polish the language of the text.

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CHAPTER 7

The bumpy road to transparency: access and secrecy in 19th-century records in the Dutch East Indies

charles Jeurgens

T

Jede auf Kontinuierlichkeit eingerichtete Herrschhaft ist an irgendeinem

entscheidenden Punkt Geheimherrschaft.

(Max Weber)

the archive attracts much attention from scholars, who view archives as sites of epistemological power. The postmodern and anthropological attitude towards archives is appealing to those who are captivated by the elements of power they hold and the social significance of archives. Researchers who are interested in colonial archives unhesitatingly use fetching metaphorical descriptions of the archive as ‘a well regulated paper empire’ (Bowen, 2006, 180) or as a ‘collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable, a fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern, a virtual focal point for the heterogeneous local knowledge of metropolis and empire’ (Richards, 1993, 11). Ann Laura Stoler even attributes almost human qualities to the archive in her search for its ‘pulse’ (Stoler, 2009, 17–53). However important and innovative these approaches may be, and notwithstanding the claim many authors make about their focus on archiving-as-a-process rather than on archives-as-things, they generally pay little attention to the daily routines, debates and dilemmas of recordkeeping in the past. In this article I investigate the daily practices of, dilemmas about and debates on record management in the colonial bureaucracy of the Dutch East Indies in the late 19th century. Historical research into the daily practices and dilemmas not only contributes to a better understanding of the continuities and discontinuities in the management of records but also helps us to comprehend the conceptual changes to the archive over time. HE CONCEPT OF

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Open access, freedom of information and the right to know versus secrecy, privacy and the right to be forgotten: these conflicting issues play an important role in our present-day information society and largely determine the degree of government transparency. The concept of transparency has a long history, having been an offshoot of the Enlightenment. Transparency is related to the concept of a knowable government, and access to government information is one of the key manifestations of transparency (Scholtes, 2012, 28–35; Frissen, 2016, 31–32). In the Netherlands, the earliest right to access the records of central government was regulated via the issuance of a royal decree in 1856, which was implemented with a companion regulation for the state archive that stated that ‘inhabitants of the kingdom as well as foreigners have access to the archives of the state’ (Ketelaar, 2003, 190–6). The General State Archive in The Hague served as the principal instrument used by the state to give access to government records, which were transferred from the government to this agency. In this article I discuss the laborious process of granting and preventing access to government records in the 19th-century Dutch East Indies. The Indies lacked an institution comparable to the General State Archive until the Landsarchief [state archive] was established in Batavia in 1892. Prior to this, access to and use of government information was severely limited, due to the issuance of a royal decree on the matter in 1854. Quoting from documents that belonged to the records in the colonies without explicit prior permission from the colonial government was regarded as a crime. Implementation of the decree led to great indignation among scholars and journalists, and even caused a commotion in official circles. Interestingly enough, at the same time the government took the initiative to publish certain documents from the colonial records. The questions I address in this chapter are related to these ostensibly contrasting actions. What motives did the government have for these seemingly inconsistent positions? How did the government reconcile these two principles of access and secrecy? How was the process of the active publication of government records organized? And finally, how did these two contrasting policies affect records management practices in governmental offices?

The 1854 decree

In January 1854 the ‘Royal Decree on the enforcement of the property rights of the state over Government archives in the colonies’ was issued. The Decree stated that, without the explicit permission of the government, no one in the

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colonies was allowed ‘to access or to provide copies or excerpts of government records or records of any other institution of public administration, […] [and was] not allowed to publish […] or to possess any record that is not required for conducting his duties’. Any servant leaving the colonial service in the Indies or another colony was compelled ‘to submit all government records, the originals as well as copies, extracts or draft versions in his possession to the government with a clear inventory’, after which the government would decide whether to partly return or to keep the documents. The penalties imposed for disobeying this decree were severe. Civil and military servants violating this regulation would be dismissed. The payment of pensions would be suspended until all documents were returned and pensions would be refused should the content of documents be published or otherwise announced in print or writing. Former civil and military servants who had not retired would be sentenced to a fine of between 1000 and 3000 guilders. This clause even applied to the heirs of the said servants if they were in possession of such documents, for up to 30 years after the death of the original holder of the document (NL-HaNA, 2.02.04/836, Royal Decree 13 January 1854/6). From the title, it would be expected that the royal decree was concerned with the property rights to state records, but most of its stipulations were about access to the records and the publication of information from them. This made the decree controversial and it generated a lot of debate after 1854. There was, however, a prior history to the passing of the decree. Ten years earlier, in May 1844, the governor-general of Batavia, Pieter Merkus (1787– 1844), had issued an ordinance to stop the uncontrolled circulation of government records and the uncontrolled dissemination of information from these records. Merkus had expressed his concern about the evolving custom of civil and military servants collecting reports, maps and other documents that belonged to the colonial archives. The colonial government wanted to stop this high-handed collecting because it meant that it had lost control over the records and information. According to the government, only it was authorized to decide whether or not to publish items from the records. The unauthorized exchange of records and their publication in writing or in print without the government’s explicit consent was regarded as theft of government property. The restrictions imposed on the colonial servants by this ordinance of 1844 were comparable to those imposed by the royal decree in 1854 (Veth, 1993, 144; Van Hoëvell, 1849, 23–25). However, the 1844 ordinance had not been very effective. There were many complaints about civil servants who violated the regulation by continuing to provide government records to journalists. Therefore the royal decree of 1854

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was probably a coalescence of two separate projects. During the autumn of 1853, when the government in the Netherlands was preparing a decree to enforce the property rights of government records, it received a dispatch from the governor-general in Batavia about the continuing betrayal of secrecy by civil servants in the Indies. In response to this, the governor-general had issued a new ordinance which reminded civil servants of their duty not to publish government information without authorization and that compelled the heads of departments to report all violations (NL-HaNA, 2.10.02/7148, decision 31 August 1853). Thus it appears that the minister of colonies decided to take the opportunity to combine the topics of property rights and the unauthorized publication of government information, and issued the controversial decree of 1854.

Reaction in the newspapers

Two weeks after the royal decree was issued, the influential liberal newspaper Algemeen Handelsblad published an article on its front page entitled ‘Colonial State Copyright’, in which the new decree was characterized as a violation of justice. If the decree had been what the title suggested (decree on enforcement of property rights of the state on Government archives in the colonies), the Handelsblad would have supported the regulation. The newspaper condemned the theft of records because it went without saying ‘that government records, public instruments, the original and authentic documents should be kept undamaged in the archives, bureaux, registries and other state repositories and all violations of this principle should be prosecuted as theft’. The article continued by saying that it would be an act of perfidy not only against the government, but also against the state, history, the nation and the truth to raid archives or bureaux just to collect rare documents for private purposes (Algemeen Handelsblad, 27 January 1854). According to the Algemeen Handelsblad, the result of the royal decree would be a far-reaching increase of the power of the state over government information in order to protect the secrecy of government activities in the colony. These restrictions would affect the accessibility of information not only in the colony but in the Netherlands too, since the decree clearly stated that it was illegal to ‘provide access to, or copies or extracts of records to unauthorized persons’. Thus, sending a copy to someone in the Netherlands was also liable to be punished. Another liberal newspaper, the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (NRC), judged the decree more generously. It acknowledged the appropriateness of the decree to punish civil servants who

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took documents from the state archives or published them without permission, but added that the decree should be enforced only loosely (NRC, 14 November 1858). In the Dutch East Indian press the decree generated little reaction initially. The only newspaper that frequently paid attention to the necessity of having access to government information was the Surabaya newspaper De Oostpost. In several editorial comments the newspaper discussed the relevance of government secrecy. However, after the governor-general imposed even stronger limitations on the publication of information by the imposition of an additional regulation in which it was explicitly stated that the decree was also applicable to scholars doing research on behalf of the government, the Oostpost turned against the government. The Oostpost had initially had some sympathy for the ban on the unauthorized publication of government information because ‘improper publication of government archives – we completely agree – often results in the violation of public order and the colony should take care that this does not happen’. However, the newspaper’s editors could not think of any risk related to making public scientific information produced for or by the government (Oostpost, 29 November 1858). On the contrary, the Oostpost argued for easier access to statistical information, which could have a stimulating effect on the economy in the Indies (Oostpost, 14 October 1858), and strongly disapproved of this new measure. Over time the decree received more attention in the Dutch East Indian press. In 1864, De Locomotief depicted the decree of 1854 as ‘excessive and severe’ (Locomotief, 30 December 1864). At the same time, however, it expressed an understanding of the need for secrecy for specific kinds of government information. The newspaper mentioned two obvious reasons for secrecy, which sound rather modern: mutual trust between a civil servant and his superior, on the one hand, and state interest, on the other. De Locomotief supported secrecy with respect to national interests such as military defence, but could not understand why there was a ban on publishing all documents. The newspaper explained to its readership that civil servants needed to be able to communicate with their superiors about persons and cases without any reservation and without being afraid that what they wrote down would become public. It would be disadvantageous for future communication between civil servants and their superiors if this confidentiality was no longer guaranteed (Locomotief, 30 December 1864). In the 21st century the Dutch Freedom of Information Act still recognizes this as a valid reason for keeping government information secret. The personal views of civil servants recorded in documents are kept confidential to guarantee the free exchange of ideas.1

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There was also concern about the effects of these restrictions on science and research. To some scholars the decree heralded a return to the mentality of the VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company) era, when everything was wrapped in a veil of secrecy. The archives kept by the colonial government came to be regarded as impregnable bastions because of this decree. In his correspondence with the famous Dutch Javanologist P. J. Veth, the controversial historian from the Dutch East Indies, Johannes Hageman (1817–71), referred more than once to these absurd restrictions imposed by the government. Hageman provided Veth, who never went to the Indies himself, with all kinds of data he had extracted from the archives, and when delivering some details he wrote ironically: ‘You should read this in isolation, in secrecy, with double doors closed behind lattice-work, because this touches the paper measure that designates us as thieves when we stir the archive’ (UBL-BPL 1756, Letter Hageman to Veth, 30 April 1855).

Implications of the decree for former civil servants

The royal decree of 1854 revealed the difficult relationship between the colonial government and access to government information. In the following paragraphs I analyse several particular cases so as to provide a better understanding of the points of view and lines of reasoning held by the state with regard to the ownership and publication of records. After his retirement in 1856 as a medical doctor and director of the medical service in the Dutch East Indies, W. Bosch returned to the Netherlands. At the time he still had copies of documents, extracts and notes on meteorology, medical topography and the history of disease, as well as reports on patients, epidemics and other medical matters in his personal papers. Once back in the Netherlands, he realized that these papers might cause him a lot of trouble, as the royal decree of 1854 threatened to abolish the pensions of those former civil servants from the Indies who wrongfully possessed or published government documents. Because Bosch was not sure whether his documents were regarded as those referred to in the royal decree, he sent a request to the minister of colonies. He asked for clarification, but in case the answer was in the affirmative, in the same letter he requested permission to use the documents for a study of public health in the Indies. Bosch wanted to investigate the role of the colonial government in the years 1847 to 1849. During those years a fatal epidemic had swept over the mountainous areas of Central Java, followed by famines in Demak and Grobogan, which cost the lives of 80,000 and 100,000 people, respectively. Bosch wanted to find out

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whether the lack of intervention by the then government had contributed to the number of casualties. Pending a final decision on whether he was allowed to keep and use these documents, Bosch was forced to submit a complete list of the documents he possessed. It was more than a year and a half before the minister of colonies finally concluded that most would be confiscated. Bosch disagreed and decided to send a letter to parliament (Algemeen Handelsblad, 17 April 1857), in which he complained about the injustice of his treatment, especially as only a few months earlier the minister of colonies had stated in parliament that if civil servants wanted to keep certain documents, all they needed to do was to submit a request. According to the minister, such requests were made on a daily basis and – if there was no urgent reason to reject them – many civil and military servants were allowed to keep documents that had a permanent value for them or for their children (Parliamentary Proceedings, 10 December 1856). On 17 March 1859 the Dutch parliament debated the case. A parliamentary committee of inquiry proposed that the members of parliament should vote in favour of returning all documents to Bosch. In the parliamentary debate it became clear that Rochussen had conflicting interests in this case. He was minister of colonies (1858–60) at the time of the debate but had been governorgeneral of the Dutch East Indies (1845–51) during the years of the epidemic and famine. The documents that Bosch wanted to use related to an issue that Rochussen himself had been involved in when he was governor-general. Although the debate in parliament was exclusively about the question of whether the documents should be returned to Bosch and no one in parliament had asked to review the content of these documents, Rochussen started to defend in detail his role in dealing with the epidemic in Central Java and concluded that he had done everything in his power to prevent further disasters. This produced the cynical statement from the critical Van Hoëvell, a parliamentary representative who could boast of many years of experience in the Indies, that he had never heard the minister speak with so much passion. Van Hoëvell could only explain this emotion as being due to a strong disagreement between the former governor-general and Bosch (who had been director of the medical services) over the policy in the case at issue. He concluded that only by retaining all the documents and not allowing Bosch to have any would the minister be able to defend his actions. Although the debate was sometimes venomous, in the end the proposal of the parliamentary committee of inquiry to return the documents to Bosch was rejected. In line with the views of most representatives, the government was authorized to guarantee that the records remained what, based on their

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purpose, they should be: tools of communication between government officials in service and between minister and parliament; and not between government and retired civil servants. Furthermore, it was agreed that it would be inexpedient to allow citizens to approach parliament following every single disputable decision (Parliamentary Proceedings, 17 March 1859).

Implications of the decree for newspapers

Bosch’s case was the result of his own initiative to throw light on his situation. Until the 1870s the decree was not enforced. For a long time this meant that the impact of the decree was more symbolic than real. However, in the early 1870s there were suddenly two cases of enforcement. The first related to the 1871 publication in the Sumatra Courant of a circular letter written in 1866 by the first government secretary to the district commissioners and local administrations in the Indies about the admittance of ‘Foreign Orientals’ [Vreemde Oosterlingen] into the Indies and the obligation for them to live in designated quarters (Sumatra Courant, 9 September 1871). The second case concerned the publication in October 1873 by the Algemeen Dagblad voor Nederlandsch Indië of an article about the unsuccessful mission of Government Commissioner Frederik Nicolaas Nieuwenhuijzen (1819–92) to the Sultan of Aceh earlier that year. The purpose of the mission was to enforce the obedience of the Aceh sultanate to the government’s orders. The newspaper published – contrary to all rules – the text of the instructions to the commissioner. Both publications resulted in prosecution and extensive political debate and discussion in the newspapers. I will briefly describe and analyse the two cases.

The case of the Sumatra Courant: prosecution of editor-inchief Chatelin

In 1871 the editor-in-chief of the Sumatra Courant, L. N. H. A. Chatelin, published the text of a (printed) circular letter from the government to the local administration which included a clause that stated that the obligation to bring ‘Foreign Orientals’ together into designated quarters should ‘be understood with the same liberal intention as the ordinance of 6 June 1866 and that imposing unnecessary and severe limitations should be avoided’. After the letter’s publication, the Public Prosecutor in Padang opened a judicial inquiry, which resulted in the court’s imposing a fine of one thousand guilders, to be paid by Chatelin (Sumatra Courant, 25 October 1873). After an

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appeal, the High Court confirmed the decision, but decided to reduce the fine to 25 guilders in consideration of the fact that no one had previously been prosecuted for violating this decree. One of the important issues discussed in the court case was the question of whether this published circular letter was a record as defined by the royal decree of 1854, because only then could a violation have occurred. Chatelin was charged with having published a document ‘that belonged to the archives of the government’, but the royal decree did not give a clear definition of what kinds of documents belonged to an archive. The defence argued that a document such as this, which was meant to be circulated, by its nature could not belong to the archive because ‘an archive is a collection of original documents related to the history of the government’. The defendant referred to definitions given in the Conversations Lexikon and in the Rechtslexikon, written by the Berlin law professor Dr Franz von Holtzendorff.2 The defence concluded that the term ‘archives’ exclusively applied to written deeds and explained that as even a written circular letter could not be regarded as a written deed, then this was certainly true for a circular letter that had been printed and distributed. Of course the prosecutor disagreed with this interpretation and argued that the ‘term archive in ordinary language is used for the place where the documents belonging thereto are kept together’ and explained that a document is a part of an archive if it is clear that the document is kept to be able to make use of it if there is a need to do so (Sumatra Courant, 25 October 1873).3 The prosecutor referred to the Corpus Juris Civilis when explaining that the archive was the place for the public deposition of writings, instruments or records.4 The meaning of the term instruments, the prosecutor continued, was very broad and included all kinds of different documents. According to him there was no doubt about the status of this circular letter, the original of which was preserved in the archive of the General Secretariat. It was part of the archive and fitted completely within the meaning of the term archives as stated in the royal decree. The fact that the government had decided to print the circular in order to inform its civil servants had not changed the nature and status of the document (Sumatra Courant, 25 October 1873). The judge ruled accordingly. This legal dispute shows the relevance of delineating the concept of the archive. The proponents and opponents agreed that the concept of the archive was associated with ‘a place’ where documents were kept; they disagreed about the kind of documents that an archive comprised. In spite of its victory, the colonial government was not very happy with the prosecution of Chatelin. The governor-general called the prosecution an act

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of overzealous behaviour by the prosecutor in Padang and felt compelled to write to the president of the High Court to ensure that the royal decree was henceforth interpreted and employed ‘in a broad sense’ (NL-HaNA 2.10.02/2646, 15 December 1873/41). After Chatelin was taken to court, the publisher of another Dutch East Indian newspaper, De Indiër, made a request to the king to revoke the royal decree of 1854 or to adapt the decree in a way that meant that publishing harmless information would no longer be regarded as a crime (NL-HaNA, 2.10.02/2646, 15 December 1873/41). This request resulted in the direct involvement of the Dutch government. Minister of Colonies Fransen van de Putte (1822–1902) sought the advice of the governor-general in the Indies regarding this request. James Loudon (1824– 1900), who had been governor-general since 1872 and who had a difficult relationship with the Dutch East Indian press, advised against a change, because there was no proof that the royal decree impeded the publication of government records. He received support from the president of the Council of the Indies, who stated that withdrawal of the decree would ‘imply general consent for making everything public’ (NL-HaNA, 2.10.02/ 2646, 15 December 1873/41). The minister finally decided to ask the advice of the Council of State in the Netherlands. Before the Council was able to finalize its report, however, another case of unauthorized publication roused the emotions of the colonial government.

Case Dagblad van Nederlandsch Indië: secret documents on Aceh

The second case relates to what turned out to be the beginning of one of the bloodiest colonial wars in Dutch history: the submission of Aceh. According to reports from the Dutch consulate in Singapore in the early 1870s, the Acehnese rulers were trying to secure political support from Italy and the USA in order to keep their independence. Once this became known to the Dutch government, Minister of Colonies Fransen van de Putte telegraphed to Governor-General Loudon to say that it would be improper to delay sending a military mission to Aceh if the reports from Singapore were correct (De Jong, 1998). Loudon proposed sending Commissioner Frederik Nicolaas Nieuwenhuijzen to present an ultimatum to the Acehnese sultan that demanded his submission to the Dutch government within 24 hours. However, Fransen van de Putte did not agree with this course of action. In his opinion an ultimatum would give the impression of an aggressive and provocative Dutch policy. Loudon, however, persisted and sent

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Nieuwenhuijzen to visit the sultan. Nieuwenhuijzen’s mission failed and, to make matters worse, the content of the orders for Nieuwenhuijzen became known and was published in the Dagblad van Nederlandsch Indië: On arrival at the roadstead of Atsjin [Aceh], the government-commissioner will –

in compliance with formalities – announce to the Sultan the reason for his visit.

This will be done via a document in which the Sultan will be asked to clarify the

ambiguous attitude of the ‘Atsjinsche’ delegates in Singapore, where they have

clearly demonstrated treacherous behaviour. The King’s colonial government [...]

will no longer tolerate this policy and demands, within 24 hours, full recognition

by the Sultan of His Majesty, King of the Netherlands.

(Algemeen Dagblad voor Nederlandsch Indië)

This publication generated great indignation. The Java-Bode, the most critical of all Dutch East Indian newspapers about the developing war in Aceh, accused the government of outrageous behaviour. According to the newspaper, it was sheer madness to send such a message to a ruler who had been independent for more than three centuries and to expect the sultan to acknowledge the supremacy of the Dutch within 24 hours (Java-Bode, 8 November 1873). After the content of the orders became known, the Dutch parliament asked the minister of colonies to clarify the situation. Fransen van de Putte simply explained that he had never agreed to send the ultimatum, which made Loudon furious and his position even more difficult. He could not understand why the minister had made the difference of opinion between them public, and he handed in his resignation. Although the political effects of this crisis are very interesting, below I focus on the aspects that relate directly to the 1854 decree. After the publication of the orders, the colonial government tried to find out who was responsible for providing a copy of the document to the press. The editor-in-chief of the Dagblad van Nederlandsch Indië, Conrad Busken Huet (1826–86), refused to reveal the name of the source. Although an investigation was launched to find the civil servant who was responsible, it was unsuccessful. For civil servants working at the General Secretariat it was easy to access records, and who had done so was not recorded (NL-HaNA, 2.10.02/2711, 12 September 1874/11). This would change once the Aceh war was well underway, when a special section for Acehnese Affairs was established and was made responsible for keeping all records on the sultanate.

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Governmental dilemma: to prosecute or not?

The governor-general, still engaged with the Padang case, asked the Council of the Indies whether it would be expedient to start a prosecution in this new case. The members of the Council of the Indies had mixed opinions about this request. The majority were against prosecution because publication of the text did not violate ownership and prosecution would not contribute to finding the real culprit. However, one of the councillors, Henri Andrée Wiltens (1823– 89), argued that the government did not have a choice, simply because the royal decree required prosecution. Furthermore, it was a secret document which would not even have been communicated to parliament if it had not been leaked. The director of justice and the attorney general agreed with this assessment. In their view there was no other option than to start prosecution proceedings. If not, the principle of equality would be at stake: why was legal action taken against Chatelin and not against Busken Huet?5 When we look in more detail at the arguments put forward by the director of the department of justice in his advice to the governor-general, it is interesting to note that the director tried to initiate a fundamental debate about secrecy and openness. While naturally he was very much against the illegal act of civil servants making government information public, on the other hand he was convinced that ‘there is no need to keep secret most of what is discussed and written at government desks’, and that it would be very unwise ‘to make secret cabinets of all the government offices’ (NL-HaNA, 2.102.02/2711, 12 September 1874/11). In his analysis, even if government information was leaked, it rarely harmed the interests of the government. In the current climate, he said, there was a growing pressure and need to make government information public. He went on to say that ‘this tendency has not reached its peak yet, and I side with those who favour the openness of government information because it does more good than harm’. The attorney general had a completely different opinion. In order to suppress the growing abuse of the decree, he believed that offenders should be prosecuted. Enforcement was needed to prevent further problems and he disagreed with the governmental letter that stated that the royal decree should be enforced in a flexible way (NL-HaNA, 2.102.02/2711, 12 September 1874/11). The advice given to the governor-general was far from unanimous, and in the meantime journals in the Indies started to publish more government documents about the evolving Aceh war. By early 1874 three of the four newspapers that circulated in Batavia had published government documents. The attorney general was reluctant to prosecute all of these newspapers at the same time because of the wave of criticism this would provoke against the

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government. At the last moment, when the writs were ready to be served, he decided instead to send a circular letter to the editors-in-chief of all newspapers in the Dutch East Indies to warn them against violations of the royal decree of 1854. The letter announced the strict observance of the decree (NL-HaNA, 2.102.02/2711, 12 September 1874/11).

Questionable regulation

Once the government started to enforce the 1854 decree, the effectiveness and desirability of the regulation immediately became an issue which was debated among government officials. What were the implications of this debate for the future of the decree? The question of how to move forward with regard to the enforcement of the decree became an issue that the minister of colonies had to settle. The Council of State, the supreme advisory body for the Dutch government, was unable to offer much help, as opinions within it were split. The majority of the Council wanted to uphold the decree, although agreeing that the unacceptably severe penalty clauses should be rendered inoperative. However, one of the councillors, Cornets de Groot, disagreed and pleaded for a complete revision of the decree (NL-HaNA, 2.102.02/2711, 12 September 1874/11). Based on the many different views held, the civil servants at the Ministry of Colonies tried to compose a well considered proposal for the minister. On several occasions their advice had to be adjusted or removed because of newly received information from the Indies. Since the governorgeneral had also asked his advisers to create some concrete proposals to moderate the decree, the inconvenient time lag in communication between The Hague and Batavia became clearly visible. The civil servants at the ministry were dissatisfied with the arguments that the General Secretariat in Batavia put forward in its communications about the royal decree, which clearly shows the simmering resentment between Batavia and The Hague. The civil servants in The Hague felt that the ‘government in Batavia puts more energy into controlling the activities of the newspapers than in finding the civil servants who passed the documents to the journals’ (NL-HaNA, 2.102.02/2711, 12 September 1874/11). They strongly condemned the failed attempts of the governor-general to trace the culprits because, according to the Dutch civil servants at the Ministry of Colonies in The Hague, it could not be very difficult to find the civil servants involved, since only a few of them had had access to the documents that were leaked. In August 1874 the minister of colonies received a dispatch from the governor-general in which he explained his decision to moderate the effect of the royal decree. The

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attorney general was asked not to prosecute offences against the royal decree in future ‘without preceding explicit approval from the government’. The newly appointed Minister of Colonies Willem baron van Goltstein van Oldenaller (1831–1901) decided to drop the matter and, rather than starting a procedure to revise the royal decree, instead accepted the decision of the governor-general with the intention of seeing how the change would work (NL-HaNA, 2.102.02/2711, 12 September 1874/11). With this decision, the case that had started in early 1871 with the unauthorized publication in the Sumatra Courant could finally be closed after three years. It would take another 25 years before the situation in the Indies would start to change. From 7 August 1901 the directors of departments in the Indies were allowed to give access to the records for scientific research, and after 20 April 1905 access was permitted for general use (Maters, 1998, 57). The establishment of the Landsarchief (state archive in the Indies) in 1892 also contributed to better access to the historical government archives.

The unexpected implications of the royal decree

In the same year as the royal decree was issued, the governor-general informed the minister of colonies about the problems that he had had in finding a proper settlement for the political affairs in the Indies because of the inadequate use of the records by civil servants. This had become a pressing problem, since the expansion of the colonial state had increased the need for reliable information to be extracted from the records about political issues, and decisions about and agreements with local rulers. This more extensive use of the records required better classification of them because, as the general-secretary affirmed, the current system of records management did not guarantee the prompt delivery of the required political information. There were ‘no indexes and summaries’ and ‘access to political information was restricted to one or two civil servants employed at the General Secretariat’ (NL-HaNA, 2.10.02/374, 17 October 1854/1). Every time these servants were posted to another unit or retired, a lot of knowledge disappeared. Another drawback was the growing dependency of the machinery of state on the monopolized knowledge of these few servants (NL-HaNA, 2.10.02/374, 17 October 1854/1). All this would become even more problematic under a stricter enforcement of the property rights over government records. It was expected that less information would become available to anyone other than those who had the exclusive rights to work directly with the records. General-Secretary De Waal

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noted that ‘even civil servants who administer the many districts in the Indies are unable to access the important deeds and records which relate to the districts they are responsible for’. Because it was impossible to loan the records to the ever-changing administrators – as this would be tantamount to destruction – De Waal suggested printing the most important records (NLHaNA, 2.10.02/374, 17 October 1854/1).6 Based on De Waal’s analysis, Governor-General Duynmaer van Twist (1809–87) proposed a set of measures to improve the accessibility and usability of (political) information from the records. The first proposal aimed to reintroduce the ‘Oordeelkundig Register’,7 which was an index of political issues that had existed in the early decades of the 19th century. The other proposals aimed to standardize the format of political reports; to start a ‘chronicle of the Dutch East Indies’, working forward from the oldest records and to keep the annual chronicle up to date;8 to compose a register of all Dutch East Indian possessions and another annual one containing genealogical information on the regenten [local regents] since 1816; and to print the most important records for distribution among the civil servants (Kappelhof, 2008). The governor-general supported the idea of publishing records for ‘practical and scientific reasons’, and even the suggestion of ‘making historical information discreetly accessible to the citizens’ (NL-HaNA, 2.10.02/374, 17 October 1854/1). Publication would generate practical benefits for the quality of governance, as young civil servants in the Indies would be able to become familiar with the latest observations and descriptions of the countries and peoples they had to govern (NL-HaNA, 2.10.02/612, 12 June 1857/15). Publishing could be undertaken either by the Landsdrukkerij [State Printing Office] in Batavia or via the Ministry of Colonies at the Instituut voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde [Institute for Ethnography of the Indies] in the city of Delft in the Netherlands (NL-HaNA, 2.10.02/374, 17 October 1854/1). In December 1854, the minister of colonies decided to support the publication of important records, which would be performed by the Dutch Institute in Delft. In his dispatch to the governor-general he wrote that ‘disclosure of information from these colonial records should only be limited if the content of the records is not suitable for publication for the sake of national security’. If there were no apparent reasons to keep records secret, ‘the date of the record should not play any role in the assessment of whether or not to publish them’ (NL-HaNA, 2.10.02/389, 22 December 1854/3). The purpose behind the whole operation was to make it easier for the civil servants in the Indies to deal with political issues and to reduce the monopolization of knowledge by the few civil servants working within the

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General Secretariat (NL-HaNA, 2.10.02/389, 22 December 1854/3). In 1856 the first records from Batavia were shipped to the Netherlands to be printed by the Institute for Ethnography in Delft. This process generated a lot of new discussion between Batavia and The Hague about how to select records for publication, since the Delft Institute had noticed that it was receiving irrelevant records. These practical problems ushered in the end of the ambitious project. The aim to publish all important records was not realistic. After the Delft Institute made remarks about the poor quality of some of the records received, the governor-general wrote to the minister of colonies to say that it would be impossible to expect the staff of the General Secretariat to be able to appraise and select the records for publication. The task was simply too great to be carried out by the General Secretariat and, furthermore, the governor-general explained, it would require professionals such as the state archivist in the Netherlands to assess the relevance of the records and to decide which should be ‘saved from oblivion’ (NL-HaNL, 2.10.02/550, 23 October 1856/38).

Conclusion

I started this essay with some critical remarks about the postmodern gaze on the archives as bastions of power. One may contend that archives are instruments of power and mirror the pulse of record-creating agencies and their relationship with society, but dependent on the perspective one takes, the power and the pulse will be stronger or weaker. The perspective I have taken in this chapter is the perspective of legal access to and use of government records beyond the realm of government. The 1854 decree seemed to be the result of a somewhat careless combination of two different principles: the state’s ownership of government records, on the one hand, and state control of access to and publication of government records, on the other. The combination of these two principles caused uncertainty, irritation and criticism among civil servants, journalists and administrators. This explorative research reflects on some of the discussions that were the result of the limited access to and use of government information in the Indies and in the Netherlands. The default position of the colonial state was secrecy. Although the state was not completely impervious to criticism and pressure, the governmental reaction to the cases reveals a strong inward orientation. It is likely that the colonial state did not know how to cope with the changing attitude of the press in the Indies and the growing pressure from journalists and newspapers to use and publish government

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information. In the 1850s the Indies press was still poorly developed, but it was becoming a critical voice; by the 1860s and 1870s it occasionally made trouble for the colonial government. The relationship between the government and the press had changed and the atmosphere had become much more hostile than previously. It was in this context that some public prosecutors decided to take a stricter approach than they had before, which generated a lot of discussion about the appropriateness of prosecution within government circles. When the default position of secrecy was challenged, for instance by the illegal publication of government information, the wheels of government bureaucracy clogged more than once. Instead of trying to find the culprits – the civil servants leaking the documents – the colonial bureaucracy closed ranks. The colonial administration directed its energy predominantly towards strengthening government control over the press through legislation and the threat of prosecution. Attempts to access and publish records generated nervousness within the colonial administration. The cases presented in this article clearly show this colonial anxiety. The uncontrolled publication of government information disrupted the colonial system primarily because of the fear of losing authority. As the Netherlands experienced slow and fragile development towards more liberal public access to historical records, the Indies experienced the opposite. While in 19th-century Dutch society the concept of the archive gradually developed to become a place for access to and the disclosure of (historical) government records, the concept of the archive as a public space did not exist in the Indies until the 1890s. Records served the interests of the state, and the 1854 royal decree stressed the imperative of the records as arcana imperii. The decree obstructed almost every form of public use of government information unless the government gave explicit permission. The only generic way to offer citizens access to government information was via the publication of records. The colonial authorities supported this idea, initially motivated by the expected benefits of better informed civil servants and only secondarily for the benefits to citizens. However, the project of publishing colonial records failed because there were neither the mechanisms nor the procedures in place for releasing the records. The appraisal and selection of records became a major problem as soon as the government decided to start publication. Without trained staff it appeared to be impossible to decide which records were worth publishing, and the project was stopped. Researching the history behind the daily routines of records management unveils the dilemmas and inner debates of bureaucracy. Taking that perspective not only displays the tension between the different interests of

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the archive but also shows the political clumsiness of decision making because of diverging opinions and ideas. Although the colonial state tried to keep up an image of resoluteness and strength, in reality government was not confident at all and its dealing with information reveals anxiety. In that respect the pulse of dealing with the archive was irregular, and as bumpy as was the road to transparency.

Notes 1

Wet Openbaarheid van Bestuur [Freedom of Information Act], Section 11, paragraph

1, says that no information will be provided from documents about personal

views in policy-making processes. Section 1 of this law defines a personal view

as a view, proposal, recommendation or conclusion of a person about an

administrative matter and the arguments used. The reason for this provision is

2 3 4 5

to secure the free exchange of ideas in policy making.

The Lexikon was quoted: ‘Archiv heiszt die geordnete Sammlung schriftlicher

Urkunden, welche sich auf die Rechtsverhältnisse einer Familie, Corporation,

Gemeinde, Stadt, Provinz oder eines ganzes Staates beziehen’.

Reference was made to the Dictionnaire de l’Academie Française in which archives

were defined as ‘anciennes minutes, pièces et documents, que l’on rassemble et

que l’on garde, pour les consulter au besoin’.

Reference was made to Digest 48.19.9.6 ‘quo in publico instrumenta

deponuntur’.

It is possible that the attorney general and the director of justice were extra

sensitive on the subject of equality because the case was about Conrad Busken

Huet. Busken Huet had been involved in a scandal in 1868 in which then

Minister of Colonies J. J. Hasselman played a role. After Busken Huet was

appointed as editor-in-chief of the Java-Bode, a secret deal was made between the

minister and Busken Huet. Busken Huet’s passage to the Indies was paid for by

the government in return for a more government-friendly attitude from the Java-

Bode. (See Maters, 1998, 37, fn. 10. This is confirmed by a letter from the attorney

general to the governor-general dated 11 December 1873 (NL-HaNA, Kolonien,

2.10.02/2711), in which he stated: ‘de niet vervolging van den redacteur Huet bij

een zeker gedeelte van het publiek voedsel geven aan de reeds in den Java-Bode

geuite meening, dat hij alleen daarom niet wordt vervolgd omdat hij in den

laatsten tijd als lofredenaar van de Regeering is opgetreden […]’ (‘the non-

prosecution of the editor-in-chief Huet will nourish the idea, as was expressed in

the newspaper Java-Bode, that he will not be prosecuted because he has acted as

the spokesman of the government’).)

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In his letter to the governor-general, dated 16 July 1854 general-secretary De

Waal added: ‘After printing there is no further need to keep the handwritten

materials’.

This Oordeelkundig Register was a politically oriented index, based on an idea

developed by Governor-General J. C. Baud in 1835. He criticized the quality of the

general index as insufficient to fulfil the needs of the government to retrieve

information from the records concerning political affairs, since the subjects in the

indexes were too general. Because of a lack of human resources the ‘oordeelkundig

register’ existed only for the years 1816–38. In his recommendation of 1854 the

general secretary urged the continuation of this register but recommended that the

way forward was not to start by updating the gap between 1838 and 1854, which

would take about six years to do, but to start in 1854. Unfortunately, these registers

8

still cannot be found today. See also Koloniale studiën (1938).

In the opinion of the general secretary, the chronicle was one of the best means

of reducing the dependence of the administration on the few civil servants who

had daily access to the records. The chronicle was to be simple, recording the

year and month, event and source.

References

Bowen, H. V. (2006) The Business of Empire. The East-India Company and imperial Britain, 1756–1833, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

De Jong, J. (1998) Gezag, macht en prestige. Het ontslag van James Loudon als

gouverneur-generaal van Nederlands-Indie in 1874 in het perspectief van de

veranderende politiek cultuur, BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review 113 (2).

Frissen, P. (2016) Het geheim van de laatste staat. Kritiek van de transparantie, Amsterdam, Boom uitgevers.

Kappelhof, T. (2008) Archieven als fundament voor beleid. Nederlands-Indie 1816– 1942, https://www.academia.edu/538374/Archieven_als_fundament_voor_

beleid._Nederlands-Indië_1816-1942

Ketelaar, F. C. J. (2003) De nationale archiefpolitiek van Bakhuizen van den Brink 1851–1865. In Molen, J., Bent, A. and Woelderink, B. (eds), Een vorstelijk

archivaris. Opstellen voor Bernard Woelderink, Zwolle, Waanders uitgevers, 190–6.

Koloniale studiën (1938) Koloniale studiën, tijdschrift van de Vereeniging voor studie van koloniaal-maatschappelijke vraagstukken, 22 (1), 21 January 1938.

Maters, M. (1998) Van zachte wenk tot harde hand. Persvrijheid en persbreidel in Nederlands-Indië, Hilversum, Verloren.

Richards, T. (1993) The Imperial Archive. Knowledge and the fantasy of empire, London and New York NY, Verso.

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Scholtes, E. (2012) Transparantie, icoon van een dolende overheid, Den Haag, Boom Lemma, uitgevers.

Stoler, A. L. (2009) Along the Archival Grain: epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press.

[Van Hoëvell, W. R.] (1849) Het Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië, in zijnen

oorsprong, lotgevallen en tegenwoordige strekking geschetst, Tijdschrift voor

Nederlandsch Indië, 11.

Veth, P. J. (1848) De openbaarheid in koloniale aangelegenheden [The public nature of colonial matters] De Gids. Reprinted in Aerts, R. et al. (eds) (1993) Een

Ereschuld. Essays uit De Gids over ons koloniaal verleden, Amsterdam, Meulenhoff.

archives

Nationaal Archief Nederland (NL-HaNA), 2.10.02. Ministry of Colonies, 1850–1900

University Library Leiden, Special Collections (UBL-BPL)

Parliamentary Proceedings: see www.statengeneraaldigitaal.nl

Newspapers

Algemeen Dagblad voor Nederlandsch Indië

Algemeen Handelsblad

Java-Bode

De Locomotief

Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (NRC)

De Oostpost

Sumatra Courant

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CHAPTER 8

Archival ethics and indigenous justice: conflict or coexistence?

M

Melanie Delva and Melissa adams

made in the last two decades of the ‘decolonization’ of institutions, theories and practices in the Western world. Archives are no exception. Broadly speaking, decolonization refers to the undoing of colonialism. Within professions it can refer to the recognition of professional theories and practices as being formed by a colonial mind-set, and continuing to assert and maintain the power and interests of the dominant culture. Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999, 39) notes in her seminal work, Decolonizing Methodologies: research and indigenous peoples, that decolonization ‘does not mean and has not meant a total rejection of all theory or research or Western knowledge’, but instead ‘is about centring our [Indigenous] concerns and world views and then coming to know and understand theory and research from our own perspectives and for our own purposes’. Given the preponderance of records relating to Indigenous peoples currently held in Western archives, it is necessary to consider how archives may perpetuate colonialism, as well as steps which can be taken towards decolonization. Archivists have long taken pride in the implicit and explicit link between archives and justice, but what happens when justice and long-held archival principles are in direct conflict? Using a case study as a launching point, this chapter examines how archival theories of creation, ownership and authorship – born out of Western colonial thought and philosophy – together with archival values of access and preservation, may actually serve to undermine archivists’ efforts to pursue justice and nurture relationships with historically oppressed peoples. It contends that the archival community would do well to consider pushing beyond its current practices and Codes of Ethics when making decisions UCH HAS BEEN

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which impact on Indigenous communities, and that true justice may actually lie in the rejection of some of its own long-held theories and practices in favour of actions which respect Indigenous ways of knowing and perspectives of recordkeeping. We will begin by setting the stage for the case study by providing contextual information about Indigenous peoples in Canada and about Indigenous knowledge systems.1 This will be followed by the case study itself, which is an example of an interaction between a non-Indigenous archival institution and Indigenous community members. Finally, we examine how archival ethics and practices were applied and consider tools, namely the United Nations’ (2008) Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials (First Archivists Circle, 2007), which could have offered guidance in that situation.

Indigenous peoples in Canada

As the case study occurs in Canada, we will provide a brief description of the present Indigenous population in that country. According to results of the 2011 Canadian National Household Survey, Indigenous peoples make up 4.3% of the Canadian population; approximately 1.4 million out of 33.5 million people (Canada, Statistics Canada, 2013, 4). Indigenous peoples in Canada are diverse, composed of many different languages and cultures; for example, there are over 60 different Indigenous languages in Canada, plus dialects (Canada, Statistics Canada, 2013, 9). The population is also young and growing; 46.2% of the Indigenous population are aged 24 and under, compared with 29.4% of non-Indigenous youth (Canada, Statistics Canada, 2013, 5). The Indigenous population increased by 20.1% between 2006 and 2011, compared with 5.2% for the non-Indigenous population (Canada, Statistics Canada, 2013, 8). However, Indigenous people in Canada are also facing challenges. For example, the majority of Indigenous languages are considered endangered, with ten languages making up almost 90% of the languages spoken by those with an Indigenous mother tongue (Canada, Statistics Canada, 2012, 2). There are a higher number of children in foster care. Despite being only 7% of all children (i.e. aged 14 and under) in Canada, Indigenous children make up 48.1% of all children in foster care (Canada, Statistics Canada, 2013, 5). Indigenous people also have higher incarceration rates. Indigenous offenders are 23.2% of the federal inmate population, a rate which is ten times higher than for the non-Indigenous population, and there was an increase of 56.2%

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in the federal Indigenous inmate population from 2000–1 to 2010–11 (Canada, Office of the Correctional Investigator, 2013.). As well, Indigenous people have lower high school graduation rates than the rest of the Canadian population; 29% of the Indigenous working-age population have less than high school completion, compared with 12% of the non-Indigenous population (Canada, Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, 2013). These issues have resulted from the treatment of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Canada’s recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015a, 1) states in the Executive Summary to its Report that: For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to

eliminate Aboriginal governments, ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the

Treaties; and through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease

to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities.

Methods of doing this included restricting movement and access to traditional territories, banning ceremonies, preventing hiring of lawyers and fundraising for land claims, and removal of Indigenous children from their families (Canada, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1996; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015b). And yet, despite such efforts, and the consequences they have had, Indigenous peoples are still here; Indigenous peoples still exist. In the past 25 years there have been two major national commissions which examined issues related to Indigenous peoples in Canada, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Both commissions produced multi-volume reports and made numerous recommendations – 444 in the case of RCAP and 94 ‘Calls to Action’ by the TRC. Both documents are rich with data related to Indigenous peoples and issues in Canada; however, few of the RCAP recommendations were implemented and how the TRC’s Calls to Action will be handled remains to be seen. In the context of talk of renewing the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada, this is also an opportunity to examine the relationship between archivists and Indigenous people.

Indigenous knowledge systems

Indigenous peoples have their own knowledge systems; these can differ from Western ones, but they are no less valid. As scholars Marie Battiste (Mi’kmaq) and James Youngblood Henderson (Chickasaw) note in their book, Protecting

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Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: a global challenge (2000, 71–2), this includes having ‘their own laws and procedures for protecting their heritage and for determining when and with whom their heritage can be shared’. These laws and protocols may be complex and ‘vary greatly among different Indigenous peoples’. However, the authors do note some broad similarities between Indigenous legal systems, including that: ‘Indigenous knowledge is ordinarily a communal right and is associated with a family, clan, tribe, or other kinship group’; ‘heritage can never be alienated, surrendered, or sold, except for conditional use’; and ‘there is usually an individual who can best be described as the custodian or caretaker of each song, story, name, medicine, sacred place, and other aspect of people’s heritage’, but this is not the same as the Eurocentric concept of ownership or property rights. Battiste and Henderson (2000, 144) also emphasize that ‘Indigenous knowledge and heritage are sacred gifts and responsibilities that must be honoured and held for the benefit of future generations, rather than commodities or the property of Western nation-states’. Heiltsuk librarian Kim Lawson (2004, 1) also notes that some of the ways Indigenous and non-Indigenous people ‘know the world’ vary greatly, including in terms of how they ‘authenticate and validate information or records’ and ‘the ways that they assess meaning and reliability’. Unfortunately, these knowledge systems have been negatively impacted on by colonization. The report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015a, 1) uses the term ‘cultural genocide’ to refer to the destruction of the structures and practices which allow a group to continue as a group. With regard to record and knowledge keeping, this includes conscious, deliberate and concerted efforts to destroy Indigenous knowledge systems, including how Indigenous people acquire, manage, preserve and access information. Examples of means of disrupting knowledge systems include the potlatch ban, the creation of Indian residential schools and land dispossession. The feast system or potlatch, an important aspect of society for Northwest Coast nations, was banned by the Canadian government between 1884 and 1951. Potlatches include speeches, stories, songs and histories which are shared according to specific protocols and within a specific juridical context. Guests attending the feast and receiving gifts are being paid to serve as witnesses, not only to the event itself but also to the knowledge shared at it. Anthropologist Antonia Mills (1994, 43), writing about one of these nations, describes the feast as being at the ‘core’ of Wet’suwet’en2 society and central to Wetsuwet’en ‘government, law, social structure, and world view’. She continues,

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It is in the feast that people are given their titles (and authority over the territory

associated with them), their robes, and their crests. This succession is witnessed

by the Witsuwit’en and the neighbouring peoples, the Babine, the Nutseni, and

the Gitksan. At the same time that the feasts make the jurisdiction of the high

chiefs clear to all concerned, they demonstrate that such jurisdiction is based on a

deep appreciation of the spiritual qualities of the land, the animals, and the

holder of the titles.

Nisga’a also practice the feast system, explained briefly as follows (Boston, Morven and School District No. 92, 1996, 36): When a chief who is hosting a feast shows one of his crests, he needs to tell the

adaawak [oral history] that explains it. The crest and the adaawak go together.

Together they prove that the wilp [extended maternal family] owns the property.

After the crest has been shown, and the adaawak has been told, one of the guest

chiefs must make a speech telling the host that he supports what the chief said.

The guest chief agrees the adaawak belongs to the chief who told it. By being at a feast and eating the food provided, guests show their agreement with the host’s

adaawak. The guests state that the host has the right to the resources of those

ankw’ihlwil [the property where the family gets its resources].3

Thus, by banning the potlatch, this system of passing on and verifying information was disrupted. Another means of disrupting Indigenous knowledge systems was through the Indian residential schools system. For over 150 years, Indigenous children in Canada were removed from their families, cultures and communities and placed in government-funded, church-run residential schools where they were forbidden to speak their language (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015a and 2015b). Battiste and Henderson (2000, 48) note that Indigenous languages ‘provide direct and powerful ways of understanding Indigenous knowledge’. In addition to other abuses, these children were separated from both those family and community members who shared this knowledge and the language which embodied this knowledge. Dispossession of land also affected knowledge transmission, as land plays an important role in the preservation and passing on of knowledge and information. The land is central to Indigenous identity and knowledge. According to Battiste and Henderson (2000, 9), ‘As Indigenous peoples, we invest the ecologies with deep respect, and from them we unfold our structure

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of Indigenous life and thought’. Kwakwaka’wakw geographer, Sarah Hunt (2014, 29), also points out the connection between land, knowledge and identity, stating that it is through ‘place-based ways of knowing’ that ‘Indigeneity comes into being’. However, through colonialism, Indigenous peoples were forced to occupy only a tiny part of their territories, limiting access to the land and the information it holds. For example, Cole Harris (2002), in Making Native Space: colonialism, resistance, and reserves in British Columbia, outlines how Indigenous people in British Columbia were dispossessed of their land, and the shifting discourses and policies which led to this dispossession. Yet the importance of the land for Indigenous knowledge systems remains. Regarding efforts to reclaim and revive cultures, Anishinaabe scholar Leanne Simpson (2011, 17–18) writes, ‘Building diverse, nation-culture-based resurgences mean significantly re-investing in our own ways of being: regenerating our political and intellectual traditions; articulating and living our legal systems; language learning; ceremonial and spiritual pursuits; creating and using our artistic and performance-based traditions’. All of these activities are related to the successful functioning of knowledge systems. Simpson then goes on to describe how being on the land contributes to their enactment, such as how encountering certain aspects of the landscape leads to the sharing of specific knowledge. This is not to say that Indigenous peoples are concerned only with Indigenous recordkeeping and knowledge systems. As the case study will show, Indigenous people do make use of Western archives. They are also very much captured within this system. For example, due to the paternalistic relationship that the Canadian federal government has over Indigenous people in Canada, individuals and communities have been caught up in its recordkeeping bureaucracy, with records relating to them existing in the fonds and sous-fonds of multiple government departments, not only that of the department of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, and its predecessors (Canada, Library and Archives Canada, 2016). Indigenous people also have information needs that are not shared by the rest of the Canadian population, including conducting land claims research and research to aid cultural restoration. This has led to accessing Western archives, sometimes (or often) far away from traditional territories, and also establishing their own repositories (Lawson, 2004; Jorgensen, 2012). And though Indigenous people may have shifted to a greater use of and production of the written record – or more Western-appearing modes of recordkeeping – this does not mean that Indigenous protocols do not or cannot apply. For example, Indigenous worldviews often involve considering the physical, mental, emotional and

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spiritual aspects of things, including records. As David George-Shongo (2011), archivist for the Seneca Nation, speaking about establishing practices for the Seneca Nation’s archives, has said, ‘We’ve been doing this for a millennium this way. Who am I to change it?’ Although the case study is situated within a Canadian context, Indigenous people elsewhere faced – and continue to face – similar issues and experiences (e.g. the forced removal of Indigenous children and land dispossession) as a result of colonization, which Canada and other colonizing countries have benefited from (e.g. financial gain from resource extraction). This is our shared history, we are still dealing with the effects and this colonialism still continues. Nor are archives neutral in this. Archives have supported institutions and governments that carried out these activities, and these records exist because Indigenous peoples existed to become the ‘subjects’ of these records. Smith (1999, 1–2) notes that Indigenous people’s ‘collective memory of imperialism has been perpetuated through the ways in which knowledge about indigenous peoples was collected, classified and then represented in various ways back to the West, and then, through the eyes of the West, back to those who have been colonized’. Battiste and Henderson (2000, 12) stress that: Survival for Indigenous peoples is more than a question of physical existence; it

is an issue of preserving Indigenous knowledge systems in the face of cognitive

imperialism. It is a global issue of maintaining Indigenous worldviews,

languages, and environments. It is a matter of sustaining spiritual links with the

land.

The following case study illustrates a situation which arose as the Westernoriented archival profession encountered Indigenous perspectives and needs.

Case study

In 1904, the Rev. John Antle, Anglican priest in the Diocese of New Westminster, provisioned his open, five-metre yacht and, together with his nine-year-old son, Victor, set out to sail up the coast of British Columbia (BC), Canada. Feeling that his ministry was meant to be more than within the four walls of a church building, Antle wanted to understand the physical and spiritual needs of the people inhabiting the more remote coastal outposts of BC. What was born of this first trip was what eventually became the Columbia Coast Mission (CCM). Incorporated in 1907, it was comprised of hospital

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ships which sailed the coast providing medical, dental and pastoral care to remote logging, mining, fishing and First Nations settlements on both the mainland and island which otherwise would have no access to this kind of care. The CCM would become immensely successful in the eyes of both the Church and local populations, and ended up building several permanent, staffed hospitals in these communities – some of which still exist today. The records of the CCM are housed in the Archives of the Provincial Synod of British Columbia and Yukon in Vancouver, British Columbia. The fonds consists of administrative records, correspondence, ships’ logs, publicity and publications, as well as a significant series of photographs. Several of the CCM doctors, nurses and superintendents were avid amateur photographers. The earliest photos in the fonds even pre-date the Mission itself, beginning in the 1890s. They richly detail the rugged life in early and remote logging, fishing and mining camps as well as Indigenous communities. Of particular note and interest are the photo sub-series pertaining to Indigenous communities along the coast. They document the early, post-contact context of these communities – including dress, ceremony, customs and family life. One of these sub-series is a set of approximately 150 photos of Kingcome Inlet. Kingcome Inlet (Ukwanalis Village) is home to the Dzawada’enuxw First Nation, which is part of the Kwakwaka’wakw Indigenous people. Missionary activity in Kingcome Inlet began as early as the 1890s, and although the Anglican church of St George’s, Kingcome was not built until the 1930s, it was typically identified as an ‘Anglican community’ and the CCM ships stopped in frequently to provide medical aid and spiritual care. It was the only so-called ‘native parish’ in the Diocese of New Westminster, and was made more well known as the setting for the novel I Heard the Owl Call My Name, by Margaret Craven (1967), which was later made into a full-length film.

The request

In the summer of 2011, the archivist for the Anglican Provincial Synod of British Columbia and Yukon was contacted by two young members of the community at Kingcome Inlet. They expressed their interest in viewing the CCM Kingcome Inlet photo sub-series (hereafter ‘Kingcome photos’). They came to the archives in person and were given access to the photos. Upon viewing the photos the community members requested that the original photos of the sub-series either be given to the community, or the sub-series be scanned in its entirety and given to the community for its use/control and in order to identify the elders and community members represented in the

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images. The community members asserted that the priests and staff had probably not asked permission to take the photos. Even if the priests and staff had asked permission, certainly the argument could be made that, at best, the request may not have been fully understood due to language barriers, and at worst, the permission would have been given under duress, as it was being requested by the very people who were providing medical care – often in lifeor-death situations. It could not be considered free consent when the person asking could withhold vital medical care if one said ‘no’. In addition, the community could never have known that the photos would end up in an archives where hundreds of people with or without a relationship to the community could freely browse, copy and use the photos. Another case for the removal of the photographs from the archives was that some depicted sacred objects and ceremonies, and the culture depicted in the photos belonged to the community. Finally, even more personal was the plea that because the photos depicted elders and family members, many of whom were deceased with no other images existing of them, the archives were, in fact, holding the ‘family albums’ of the community.

Denial of request and resulting damage

The Archivist denied the request to remove the photos from the archives, and agreed to the reproduction of only a fraction of the Kingcome photos collection. At the time of the request, the archives had an internal policy that only 20% of any fonds or collection could be copied. The policy had been written many years prior to the request, but had never been reviewed or changed. The archivist informed the community members about the policy and told them that if they wanted reproductions, they would have to choose which 20% of the collection they wanted. The denial of the request to remove the photos was based on both archival theory and professional Codes of Ethics.4 Archival theory is clear that records must be preserved, and that they must be preserved within the context and fonds in which they were created. In fact, this theory of records preservation is so embedded into the DNA of the profession that it is arguable that it goes so far as to be unspoken – and therefore unquestioned. Theories of respect des fonds, original order, provenance all assume and presume preservation. To many archives, the giving up of a portion of a fonds or collection outside of the concepts of repatriation or transfer to another archival repository is almost unthinkable – particularly if destruction is part of the equation. As the policy of copying only 20% of any collection is easily reviewed and changed,

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the focus of this case study will hereafter centre on the request by the community to acquire the original set of photos, including physical and intellectual control of the materials, and the possible destruction of some of the originals. The denial of the request to remove the photos, and particularly the denial of the request to copy the entire series, was met with anger, hurt and distress. It damaged the relationship that the repository and wider Church had had with the community for over 100 years. The community members chose the photos it wanted copied that represented the aforementioned 20% of the series, and the archivist scanned and sent them to the members, but the relational damage was done.

Western archival model and issues

The assumption and presumption of preservation is infused into the Codes of Ethics of the archival profession and often does not allow for the dialogues that interactions fraught with cultural and moral grey areas require. The ICA (International Council on Archives) Code of Ethics uses the modal verbs ‘should’ and ‘must’ when referring to the desired and required actions of archivists. The use of modal verbs denotes obligation. When referring to the preservation of records, the much stronger ‘must’ is used; ‘Archivists must [emphasis added] perform their duties and functions in accordance with archival principles, with regard to … the safeguarding, preservation and conservation of archives in their care’ (code 2). The language of the SAA (Society of American Archivists) Core Values takes this presumption to another level, in that the active verb tense is used, as in the preservation section of the Core Values Statement: ‘Archivists preserve a wide variety of primary sources for the benefit of future generations … for the benefit of the future more than for the concerns of the past’. Beyond ‘should’ or ‘must’, which leave room for the opposite to be possible (though not advisable or ideal) the active tense of the SAA Core Value Statement (Society of American Archivists, n.d.) leaves no room for even the imagining that another decision could be made. Finally, the ACA (Association of Canadian Archivists) Code of Ethics (n.d.) also uses the active voice to state that ‘Archivists select, acquire, preserve, and make available for use archival records, ensuring their intellectual integrity and promoting responsible physical custodianship of these records, for the benefit of present users and future generations’ (principle 1), that they do so ‘according to accepted archival principles and practices’, one of which is to ‘protect the intellectual and physical integrity of

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the records in their care’(b1). And yet, within this same set of applications, the ACA Code states that ‘Archivists make every attempt possible to respect the privacy of the individuals who created or are the subjects of records, especially those who had no voice in the disposition of the records’(c2, emphasis added). Each of the Codes also references access as a key principle, which follows from preservation. The ACA Code states that the very reason for the acquisition and arrangement and description of archival records is ‘in order to facilitate the fullest possible access to and use of their records’(c1). The problem with Western archival theory and its resulting Codes of Ethics is that it does not respect, nor take into account, the complexities of conversations involving the rights of Indigenous peoples. By presuming preservation as the ultimate goal, dialogue about whether records should be kept despite cultural traditions which would never want them to exist in the first place and therefore require destruction is not only shut down, it is thwarted completely. Those who not only had no voice in the disposition of the records but also had no voice in their creation in the first place are once again silenced by the stricture of the dominant culture. In fact, in the case outlined above, the application of the principles outlined in the Codes – however imperfect the application may have been – actually undermined the relationship with the Indigenous community. It is arguable that the Code of Ethics actually prevented the making of a more ethical decision.

Archival ethics and Indigenous rights

Issues raised by the case study are discussed by both Indigenous people and some members of the archival profession. Archivist Jennifer O’Neal (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde) (2015a, 15) writes: We should perhaps expand our Western theoretical frameworks and open up to

the notion that perhaps these theories are not useful for all collections, especially

those ethnic communities and other minorities with long histories of oppression

and injustices. This expansion will ensure that the profession considers and

explores a variety of perspectives and ways of knowing that can positively

influence the stewardship of these collections.

Librarian and professor Loriene Roy (Anishinabe) (2015, 199) states that professional values need to be critically challenged in order to: ensure that the Library and Archives profession no longer reflects western

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colonialized views of interactions with Indigenous peoples. A cultural heritage

representative must not only learn to advocate for the security and well-being of

the cultural material they house; they must also shift their ways of thinking in

order to make sure that their use and access place traditional lifeviews as

primary.

As the case study has shown, considering records only in the context of Western archival understandings can be harmful to both communities and the relationship between archives and those communities. We will now situate the case study within two particular documents, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials, in order to illustrate additional issues and perspectives to consider when seeking guidance regarding the care of archival materials related to Indigenous peoples.

United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations, 2008) was adopted in 2007 by a vast majority, with the four votes against it coming from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States (Amnesty International, 2015). It bears noting that these are all countries which have contributed significantly to the scholarship on and development of Western archival theory and practice. Canada (2010) would later issue a ‘Statement of Support’ for the Declaration, although contending that it was but an ‘aspirational’ document.5 The overall purpose of the document, according to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples, is to ‘emphasize the rights of indigenous peoples to live in dignity, to maintain and strengthen their own institutions, cultures and traditions and to pursue their self-determined development, in keeping with their own needs and aspirations’ (United Nations, n.d.). Although the spirit of the entire document (United Nations, 2008) is applicable to this case study, Articles 11 and 31 are most pertinent. Article 11 states that: 1 Indigenous peoples have the right to practise and revitalize their cultural

traditions and customs. This includes the right to maintain, protect and develop

the past, present and future6 manifestations of their cultures [emphasis added],

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such as archaeological and historical sites, artefacts, designs, ceremonies,

technologies and visual and performing arts and literature.

2 States shall provide redress through effective mechanisms, which may include restitution, developed in conjunction with indigenous peoples, with respect to

their cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property taken without their

free, prior and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and

customs.

The language of UNDRIP is clear and would apply directly to the series of photos, which are obviously a past manifestation of culture. If one agreed that the priests and staff took the photos without ‘free, prior, and informed’ consent, it follows that the redress requested by the community members who asked for the original photos was entirely appropriate and should have been taken seriously in a way that it was not. The document goes on to assert in Article 31 that: 1 Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural

expressions … They also have the right to maintain, control, protect and

develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional

knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions [emphasis added].

Control over intellectual property would certainly apply in the case of the Kingcome photos. Although the Provincial Synod may ‘own’ the photos in a Western archival understanding of ownership and authorship, the cultural heritage and traditional cultural expressions portrayed within and manifest in the photos would certainly be the intellectual property of the Kingcome community. In the wake of UNDRIP, Indigenous rights have emerged as a key issue in many areas of the world. Certainly in Canada, the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has elevated the uniqueness of human rights in the Indigenous context. At the close of its mandate, the TRC released its summary report together with 94 Calls to Action. A number of the Calls to Action address archives specifically, including number 70 (2015a, 203) which calls for a national review, involving both archivists and Indigenous peoples, that examines archival policies and best practices in order to: Produce a report with recommendations for full implementation of these

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international mechanisms [specifically, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights

of Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations Joinet-Orentlicher Principles]7 as a reconciliation framework for Canadian archives.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples offers a lens through which interactions between Indigenous peoples and nonIndigenous archival institutions can be assessed; however, this is not the only tool available.

Protocols for Native American archival materials

Guidelines addressing specific situations which non-Indigenous archival institutions might face when dealing with Indigenous records also exist. A particularly relevant example for this case study is the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials. The Protocols (First Archivists Circle, 2007, 1– 2) were developed in 2006 by a group of 19 archivists, librarians, curators, historians and anthropologists, 15 of whom were Indigenous. The group met in Flagstaff, Arizona to ‘identify best professional practices for culturally responsive care and use of American Indian archival material held by nontribal organizations’. The introduction to the document notes that human rights themes ‘such as understanding Native American values and perspectives and providing contexts for Native American archival materials’ emerged repeatedly in discussions. The Protocols built on existing ethical codes and other guidelines in both archival and related professions,8 including the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives, and Information Studies, which was developed for use by Australian information professionals in 1995. The Protocols are intended to ‘inspire and foster mutual respect and reciprocity’, with the idea that ‘North American libraries, archives, and American Indian communities will benefit from embracing the power of conversation, cooperation, education, negotiation, and compromise’ (ATSILIRN, 2012). The Protocols are grouped into a number of categories. These are: ‘Building Relationships of Mutual Respect’, ‘Striving for Balance in Content and Perspectives’, ‘Accessibility and Use’, ‘Culturally Sensitive Materials’, ‘Providing Context’, ‘Native American Intellectual Property Issues’, Copying and Repatriation of Records to Native American Communities’, ‘Native American Research Protocols’, ‘Reciprocal Education and Training, and ‘Awareness of Native American Communities and Issues’. Within sections there are ‘guidelines for action’ both for archives and libraries and

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for Native American communities,9 and there is a glossary of terms. We will shortly examine some of the specific guidelines through their application to the case study. In 2007, the Native American Archives Roundtable of the SAA requested that the SAA Council endorse the Protocols; however, the Council asked that membership opinion be solicited first. This resulted in a 140-page report (Boles, George-Shongo and Weideman, 2008) which included comments received, analysis of these comments and draft motions for Council consideration. Of the 39 comments received, 9 endorsed or leaned towards endorsing, 7 were unclear regarding endorsement and 19 opposed or leaned towards opposing (however, this includes 8 responses from non-archivists, mostly archaeologists, who were mainly opposed to the Protocols). Criticism of the Protocols included their breadth and lack of specificity, conflict with current laws and standards (including archival practices and intellectual property laws), privileging of Indigenous perspectives and the practicalities of applying the Protocols. Support for the Protocols tended to focus on their fostering of respect and the need for guidelines and inclusion of Indigenous perspectives when dealing with Indigenous materials. In 2008, the SAA Council voted against endorsing the Protocols (O’Neal, 2012, 1–4) and instead passed a motion to hold three annual forums related to them. These took place at the SAA Annual Meetings between 2009 and 2011. The first forum served as an opportunity for SAA members to comment further on the Protocols; the second forum focused on projects currently using the Protocols, particularly the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal (PPWP);10 the third forum looked at the Protocols in the context of UNDRIP and education, as well as next steps for the Protocols. In 2012, a final report was offered to the SAA Council from the Native American Protocols Forum Working Group, outlining the development of the Protocols, activities that took place at the 2009–2011 forums and suggesting next steps. These suggestions included reconvening the original authors of the Protocols and possibly other interested individuals to ‘make clarifying alterations to the language in the document based on the forum conversations (and other meetings), [adding] an appendix with numerous case studies, and [including] information about UNDRIP’, after which the document would be presented to the SAA Standards Committee for potential endorsement as an External Standard. Most recently, in September 2015, a day-long Archives Summit was held prior to the 2015 International Conference of Indigenous Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Washington, DC. The Protocols for Native American Archival Materials was the subject of this Summit, which included

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presentations from original drafters of the Protocols, research related to their use and examples of their application.11 Afternoon breakout group sessions were not recorded, but Jennifer O’Neal (2015b) gave a summary of outcomes at the conference the following day. Next steps proposed included: producing a collection of case studies or an implementation guide illustrating both success and lessons learned as a result of using the Protocols,12 the use of more inclusive language that represents all of Indigenous North America rather than a primarily US focus and improving collaboration with related professions, such as the museum and library communities, who are also dealing with similar issues related to the care of Indigenous heritage. Despite the lack of endorsement from SAA, archival institutions have looked to the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials for guidance. As previously noted, the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal makes use of them, and a research study conducted by Elizabeth Joffrion and Natalie Fernandez (2015) received responses from 31 institutions referencing and incorporating the Protocols during their work, 23 of which were non-Indigenous. Other institutions have drawn on the Protocols to draft documents specific to their institution; e.g. the American Philosophical Society (n.d.) has its own Protocols for Treatment of Indigenous Materials. Still other institutions reference the Protocols in the context of their activities; e.g. the Digitization Centre of the University of Victoria Libraries (University of Victoria, n.d.) identifies the Protocols as a document to look to when considering legal and ethical concerns while deciding whether a collection is appropriate for digitization. It is clear from ongoing discussions and the number of institutions that are looking to the Protocols that this document continues to have relevance. The document is very much applicable to our case study. As such, and to answer one of the issues raised with regard to the Protocols – namely this document would benefit from associated case studies – we briefly offer our case study as an example for how the Protocols could have provided assistance when parties came to this situation with differing points of view at a nonIndigenous archival institution. As discussed regarding the application of UNDRIP to the case study, the Protocols (First Archivists Circle, 2007) ask that archives consider how materials – the Kingcome photos in this case – came into the possession of the institution, whether this was done ethically and with the understanding and consent of the community, and noting that if this should not be the case, the rights of the Indigenous community must take precedence. The Protocols also address culturally sensitive materials, stating both that ‘traditional [i.e.

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Indigenous] knowledge systems possess equal integrity and validity’ to Western ones, and pointing out, regarding restrictions, that Western archives and libraries, too, can contain restricted, classified and secret materials. Should the community wish to discuss restricting access to the Kingcome photos depicting ceremony, the archives should seriously consider doing so, and in no instances should such restricted material be made publicly available online. While one might argue that, legally (depending on copyright), the archives could publish material that the community considers restricted, the archives is certainly not legally required to publish it. In regard to the community’s original request to copy the photos, the Protocols specifically state that archives should ‘respond cooperatively to requests for copies of records for community use and retention’, as ‘resources held at a distance may become estranged from the people to whom they are most relevant’. As well, critics of the Protocols who believe they are one-sided should note that the Protocols also encourage Indigenous communities to learn about how archives and libraries manage collections and to recognize that ‘libraries and archives can help preserve documentary materials, promote revitalization, and support community goals for the continuation of a positive culture based on a strong cultural heritage’. In the case study, points of view about how archival materials should be handled were put forward by Indigenous community members; however, adherence to perceived archival standards allowed them to be disregarded. The Protocols encourage mutual respect. Although disagreement may occur, this should not be as a result of one group dismissing the other without considering the validity of alternative understandings and perspectives. Developing specific and detailed instructions for the handling of Indigenous-related archival materials is next to impossible when laws and protocols differ between individual nations. The Protocols draw attention to general similarities between Indigenous peoples for non-Indigenous archival institutions to be aware of; however, their application happens in the context of relationship.

The need for new approaches to archival ethics

As highlighted by the conflict seen in the case study and the examination of the case in light of UNDRIP and the Protocols, there is a need for new approaches to archival ethics. Arguably, given the deliberate attempts to destroy Indigenous culture and knowledge and the present discussion of reconciliation, new approaches are even more relevant and necessary.

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Baxter (2012, 10) notes that conversations surrounding the Protocols are about power, with the non-Indigenous archival institutions holding the majority of that power. He writes that although ‘archivists cared for Native American archival materials in their holdings, they made them accessible as they saw fit and described them based on our [his emphasis] professional best practices’. Hunt (2014, 30) comments on how this power imbalance can be used to dismiss Indigenous understandings: ‘The potential for Indigenous ontologies to unsettle dominant ontologies can be easily neutralized as a triviality, a case study or a trinket, as powerful institutions work as self-legitimating systems that uphold broader dynamics of (neo)colonial power’. As well, Roy and Trace (forthcoming, cited in Roy 2015, 200) point out that it is not enough to merely ‘consult’ with Indigenous communities about their cultural heritage; power also needs to be shared. We would also caution, as Roy (2015, 199) does, that while there is a need for ‘continuing discussion on what it means to hold and care for Indigenous cultural heritage’, such discussion should not be limited to those with the resources to travel in order to take part in these discussions or to those with ‘elite’ professional connections. Despite – and because of – this power imbalance, the inclusion of Indigenous ethics is necessary when examining the management of Indigenous archival materials held by non-Indigenous institutions. Battiste and Henderson (2000, 143–4) discuss how ‘Indigenous peoples’ own languages, knowledge systems, and laws are deeply interconnected with ethical issues’. They write: Over the past centuries, Eurocentric researchers have examined and dissected

Indigenous peoples. Every facet of their existence has been examined, their dead

have been dug up by the thousands for medical research, and their ceremonies

have been described in the literature. Almost all these efforts have been filtered

by Eurocentrism, its professional organizations, and their views of ethics rather

than by Indigenous laws and ethics.

Willie Ermine (Cree) (2007, 202) discusses the importance of ‘ethical space’, which is created when those with differing worldviews encounter and engage with one another, writing: The ethical space offers itself as the theatre for cross-cultural conversation in

pursuit of ethically engaging diversity and disperses claims to the human order.

The dimension of the dialogue might seem overwhelming because it will involve

and encompass issues like language, distinct histories, knowledge traditions,

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values, interests, and social, economic and political realities and how these

impact and influence an agreement to interact. Initially, it will require a

protracted effort to create a level playing field where notions of universality are

replaced by concepts such as the equality of nations.

Within the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, sociology and anthropology, the idea of inter-subjectivity is used to describe relational understandings of concepts – where each party brings their subjective understanding to the table to create a shared meaning. It is understood (Sucharov, 2013) that ‘by virtue of our continuous being in the world, we all stand, at any given moment, at the centre of a complex totality of experience that is informed by multiple and interweaving contextual relational systems’. In order to truly honour Indigenous ways of knowing, as well as the rights of Indigenous peoples to ‘maintain, control, protect and develop’ their cultural heritage, there is a desperate need for this kind of inter-subjectivity to inform archival theory and Codes of Ethics.

The importance of relationship

The importance of developing relationships also underlies engaging with these issues. The documents we have discussed are guidelines only, and also not legally enforceable (although, we note, so too are existing Codes of Ethics). As discussed at the start, Indigenous peoples are diverse peoples; there is not a ‘one size fits all’ set of instructions telling archivists exactly how to manage records related to Indigenous peoples. Applying these tools means working together. And working together means building trust. Distrust and fear can exist on both sides: archivists may fear that suddenly all records will be destroyed or restricted, or they may fear making mistakes. There can also be fear on the part of Indigenous people of approaching an intimidating institution, especially one that may hold records that can impact on their lives. However, as Karen Underhill (2006, 137) has written regarding applying the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials: A strong partnership between a Native American community and a collecting

institution involves communication, negotiation, patience, respect, and

concurrence. A good meal from time to time is also helpful. Developing an

essential trust relationship may take years. ... The potential rewards of

cooperation, such as the identification of mutually beneficial solutions to

common problems, new opportunities for joint projects and resource sharing,

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and community recovery of traditional knowledge, are worth the effort.

Allison Krebs (Anishinabe) (2012, 189) echoes this sentiment, asking: What will it take to transform the information practices, policies, and procedures

around Indigenous information and knowledge held outside Indigenous

communities? The short answer is it will take time, respect, and patience from

both sides of the divide. It will take open hearts and minds ready to search for

win/win solutions located potentially outside the comfort zones of existing

practice. It will take conversation, lots of it. It will take compromise, perhaps

from those who have never needed to before. It will take a will toward

consensus.

Battiste and Henderson (2000, 71–2) also note that sharing knowledge creates a relationship between the givers and receivers of that knowledge. Guidelines and relationship development are both important aspects of addressing encounters and issues such as those which arose in the case study.

Conclusion

Two years after the original request was received by the archivist, she issued a heartfelt apology to the community members and Kwakwaka’wakw people, which was fully and graciously accepted. The archivist digitized the entire series of the Kingcome photos, and a disc of the images was hand-delivered with a letter of apology from the archivist to the community by the bishop of the diocese, who made a trip by boat across the Johnstone Strait in order to make an official episcopal visit. The relationship has mended well. The archivist has been in contact with the community since, and specifically asked the community members’ permission and ‘blessing’ to share the case study with the wider archival community in an effort to raise awareness and prevent further insensitivity of this kind. The community members graciously gave their blessing, and hope that, through sharing this experience, the wider archival profession can come to better understand its cultural and ethical responsibilities.

Notes 1

There is discussion amongst Indigenous people, both within and outside of

Canada, about the most appropriate terminology to use when referring to

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themselves. The 1982 Canadian Constitution (Canada, Department of Justice,

2012, 13) uses the term ‘aboriginal’, and subdivides this term into Indian (First

Nations is also currently commonly used, but ‘Indian’ has certain legal and

policy associations), Inuit and Métis. At present, the federal government

department charged with policies related to Aboriginal people in Canada is

named ‘Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada’. Multiple Indigenous authors

have put together guides explaining terminology meaning, and outlining both preferred and improper terms (Gray, 2011, 161–2; Kessler, 2009,

http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/identity/terminology.html;

McCue, n.d., http://riic.ca/the-guide/on-the-air/lexicon-and-terminology/; Vowel,

2012, http://apihtawikosisan.com/2012/01/a-rose-by-any-other-name-is-a-

mihkokwaniy/).

Regarding use of terminology in this paper, in cases where we refer to a

specific individual or nation, we identify them by that nation. When we refer to

the first inhabitants of the land more broadly, we use the term ‘Indigenous’.

Although this chapter is centred on a Canadian case study, the issues we raise

should be considered by those outside the Canadian archival community. As

well, we also draw on international documents; therefore, we use terminology

that is as encompassing as possible. The guides produced by Indigenous people

noted above are also broadly supportive of the term ‘Indigenous’, including

when it is used to refer to the first peoples of what is now Canada. In cases

where we are quoting directly from a source, we do not change the terminology

which the author uses. We encourage readers to view the documents cited here

in order to gain a greater understanding of the complexities of identification and

how this has been impacted by interactions with colonial authorities, and we

2 3 4

reiterate that calling people what they call themselves is always preferable. The preferred spelling is now Wet’suwet’en, www.wetsuweten.com/, but

Witsuwit’en was used at the time of publication.

Please note that these are very simplified explanations of feast or potlatches, and

that there are very specific protocols and procedures to be followed which vary

between nations and between types of feasts.

Namely, the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) Code of Ethics,

http://archivists.ca/content/code-ethics, the Society of American Archivists

(SAA) Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics,

http://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-

ethics and the International Council on Archives (ICA) Code of Ethics,

5

www.ica.org/5555/reference-documents/ica-code-of-ethics.html.

Canada, Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (2010) Canada’s Statement of

Support on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,

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PaRT 2 ❖ ENGaGING REcORDs aND aRcHIVEs November 12, 2010, www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1309374239861/1309374546142.

Australia also revised its position in 2009, https://www.humanrights.gov.au/our-

work/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-social-justice/projects/un-declaration-

rights, New Zealand in 2010 www.justice.govt.nz/policy/constitutional-law-andhuman-rights/human-rights/international-human-rights-instruments/drip; and

the USA in 2010, www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/dec/16/obama-adopts-

un-manifesto-on-rights-of-indigenous-/?page=all.

6 Note the inclusion of the word ‘future’ in relation to manifestations of culture, thus acknowledging that Indigenous cultures are living cultures and that any

changes do not mean that Indigenous peoples – and their rights – cease to exist.

Hunt (2014, 30) writes that the ‘future of Indigenous rights and political

struggles depend on the ability of Indigenous knowledge to retain its active,

mobile, relational nature rather than the fixity it is given in colonial law, stuck at

the point of contact with colonizers’, and Battiste and Henderson (2000, 33)

criticize the idea of the ‘timelessness of Indigenous culture’ which perceives ‘any

change in material reality [as equating] the demise of Indigenous

consciousness’.

7 The United Nations Joinet-Orentlicher Principles set out remedial measures for

states to guard against impunity in the case of past human rights violations and prevention of their reoccurrence. This includes the role of archives in the

preservation of and provision of access to information for victims of human

rights violations.

8 A list of documents consulted is available at the end of the Protocols document (First Archivists Circle, 2007, 23–5).

9 A criticism levelled against the Protocols has been that they should include

greater ‘proactivity’ on the part of Native American communities (Bolcer, 2009,

6); however, the Protocols do include guidelines and actions for Indigenous

communities to take.

10 More information about this project can be found in Kim Christen’s (2011)

article, ‘Opening Archives: respectful repatriation’, American Archivist, 74 (1),

185–210.

11 These presentations were audio recorded and are now available on the

Sustainable Heritage Network website: www.sustainableheritagenetwork.org/.

12 This addresses a criticism of the Protocols that they were too broad and not

specific enough to be very useful. The need for examples of application was also

identified as a need of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library

Information Resource Network’s Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information

Services upon a review of those protocols ten years after their development

(Byrne and Nakata, 2006).

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References

[Where applicable, we have also identified the nations of Indigenous authors in brackets immediately following their names.] American Philosophical Society (n.d.) Protocols for the Treatment of Indigenous

Materials, https://amphilsoc.org/library/protocols-for-indigenous-materials.

Amnesty International Australia (2015) Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, www.amnesty.org.au/indigenous-rights/comments/20815.

Association of Canadian Archivists (n.d.) Code of Ethics, http://archivists.ca/content/code-ethics.

ATSILIRN (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library Information Resource

Network) (2012) ATSILIRN Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services,

http://atsilirn.aiatsis.gov.au/protocols.php.

Battiste, M. (Mi’kmaq) and James (Sa’ke’j) Youngblood Henderson (Chickasaw)

(2000) Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: a global challenge, Saskatoon

SK, Purich Publishing.

Baxter, T. (2012) NWA and the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials: five year reflections, Northwest Archivists: Easy Access, 38 (2), 10,

www.drive.google.com/file/d/0BzoDk5oO_jSLWkVTWWt3U0hoUlE/

view?pref=2&pli=1.

Bolcer, J. (2009) The Protocols for Native American Archival Materials:

considerations and concerns from the perspective of a non-tribal archivist,

Northwest Archivists: Easy Access, 34 (4), 3–6, http://northwestarchivistsinc.

wildapricot.org/resources/documents/eavol34issue4_jan2009.pdf.

Boles, F., George-Shongo, D. (Seneca) and Weideman, C. (2008) Report: Task Force to Review Protocols for Native American Archival Materials, Society of American Archivists Council Meeting, 7–10 February, Washington, DC,

www.archivists.org/governance/taskforces/0208-NativeAmProtocols-IIIA.pdf.

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Byrne, A. and Nakata, M. (2006) Mapping the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services, Australian Academic

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Canada, Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (2013) Fact Sheet – 2011 National Household Survey Aboriginal Demographics, Educational Attainment and Labour

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recensement/2011/as-sa/98-314-x/98-314-x2011003_3-eng.pdf.

Canada, Statistics Canada (2013) Analytical Document: Aboriginal Peoples in Canada: First Nations People, Métis and Inuit. National Household Survey, 2011, http://

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Archives, Libraries, and Museums.

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CHAPTER 9

History and development of information and recordkeeping in Malawi

C

Paul lihoma

OLONIALISM, DECOLONIZATION AND economic adjustments in Africa are

some of the major factors that have enabled public administrations in sub-Saharan Africa to experience four distinct eras. These are: the period prior to colonization; the period around the late 1880s when original African institutions were radically altered and replaced by the Western bureaucratic models; the 1960s, when the colonial bureaucracy was redefined and expanded after independence; and the period from the 1980s and beyond (structural adjustment and New Public Management programmes) when Africa’s economic situation tumbled to its lowest ebb and needed major interventions for recovery and growth. A sub-Saharan African nation, Malawi (formerly Nyasaland) has experienced four administrative epochs – the pre-colonial, colonial, postcolonial one-party and post-colonial democratic administrations. Through a careful analysis of the literature and official archival records, this chapter traces information sharing and recordkeeping practices during the four administrative dispensations in order to see how information generation and recordkeeping have evolved. While the chapter builds on the works of Mazikana (1986), who presents the development of archival services in Central Africa from the 1920s to the 1960s, and Lovering (2010), who discusses the development of Secretariat registry systems in Zambia and Malawi from the early colonial period to the early 1960s, it looks at pre-colonial information generation, sharing and preservation and offers a more detailed account of the developments of recordkeeping during the colonial and post-colonial periods than is provided by these two authors.

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Pre-colonial administration and ‘record’ keeping

A description of the native system of government in the Yoruba country by ‘A Native of Yoruba’ (1902) is analogous to most of the pre-colonial tribal governments, such as those of the Chewa, Ngoni and Yao in Nyasaland. According to ‘A Native of Yoruba’, each tribe in the Yoruba country occupied a particular territory, which was regarded as a country on its own. At the apex of the native government was the supreme ruler, the king of the tribe. Different areas of the country were ruled in the name of the king by subordinate chiefs. Under each subordinate chief’s jurisdiction were a number of villages, which were headed by village headmen. The king and the subordinate chiefs constituted the governing council for their native government. This system of governance has been classified as chieftaincy of the centralized political system, as opposed to the consensus-based decentralized political system (Economic Commission for Africa, 2007). Other native governments were administered along the lines of the decentralized political system, whose central feature was consensus-based governance by the ruling authorities, which were lineage groups, village communities or age-sets. Baker (1978) states that during the pre-colonial period people were governed along tribal lines and Africans themselves were responsible for government and administration. Duff (1903) confirms that before British rule in Malawi, a perfectly definite, intelligible but rude system of government, which resembled that of much more advanced forms, was in place. A pertinent question that must be addressed is the role that records played in this system of government in particular, and, in general, the system of capturing, preserving and utilizing information as an essential feature of the social and administrative process. In Malawi, like in most parts of Africa, writing was not known during the pre-European era, as observed by Curtin (1960), Mair (1962), Franklin (1963) and others. Due to the absence of literacy, the pre-colonial culture in Malawi was predominantly oral, whereby all official and social activities were transacted orally. In governing his people the chief in the different centralized systems of native government was responsible for allocating land to his people for both cultivation and settlement. The land remained the property of the recipient unless the recipient was banished from the village, chose to leave the village or ceased to cultivate it (Duly, 1948). In this process, no documents were produced as evidence of the land transaction and ownership of the land by the recipient. Instead, the transaction was witnessed and always remembered by both the chief and his officials and the recipient and his/her

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family. In these societies, as pointed out by Duranti (1997), individuals were entrusted with the task of memorizing rules, contracts, sentences and transmitting them by recitation to their juniors. As a permanent estate of the recipient, the piece of land was inherited by the recipient’s offspring. Different areas allocated to various individuals in the village, as well as the boundaries of different villages, were demarcated by such natural features as trees, streams, anthills and rocks (Duly, 1948). Besides the natural value and usages of the trees, streams, anthills and rocks, the society ascribed some extra value to these natural features. Individual and societal entitlements to land rights were permanently preserved in these natural features, thereby enabling successive generations to exercise their right to ownership of the land of their ancestors and at the same time ‘[show] a proper respect for each other’s rights’ (Duff, 1903, 195). At different important ceremonies a chief invited his/her fellow chiefs who were friendly to him or her. Instead of sending invitation letters to the special ceremonial cerebrations or communicating important matters with other chiefs through letters, the chief traditionally sent his trusted messengers to travel long distances on foot and deliver the messages orally. Besides the messengers, drums were also used as another effective means of transmitting important messages to the community. Cole-King (1972, 77) relates some anecdotes in which chief Chiwere’s warriors in Dowa, Central Malawi, would go to the foot of Mvera hill to ‘listen for the summons to arms drummed out from the chief’s headquarters’. Through this means of communication, the first Kyungu of the Ngonde was able to scatter his enemies by beating his drum from the top of the sacred Mbande hill in Karonga. Every tribal society had a system of educating its children and inculcating in them the societal norms and traditions. After graduating from the traditional schools, the children were expected to behave as responsible citizens and regarded as mature people who would then preserve the norms and values of the society and pass them on to succeeding generations. Such norms and values were not documented for the benefit of the succeeding generations but, instead, they were handed down from generation to generation through annual ceremonies, such as the initiation for boys and girls. Through the annual Yao initiation ceremonies, for instance, the initiates ‘were taught to conform to the values of the Yao society, how to respect the elderly people and how to live peacefully with other people’ (Phiri, Vaughan and Makuluni, 1977, 5). As Rangeley (1948, 7) states, ‘the chief was the state and the government and the treasury of the people’ in his country. The tribal customs were

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preserved in the institution of the tribal chief, ritual and religious ceremonies. Ethical societal norms, which were learned from childhood, and through ritual training during the annual initiation ceremonies, eventually turned into tribal customary laws. Gluckman (in Chanock, 1985, 30) agrees with this argument by stating that pre-colonial customary law judges in Malawi and Zambia, ‘cite[d] not past court decisions but actual instances of upright behaviour ... law ... [wa]s instantly exhibited in the conformity of upright people to norms’. As such, the customary laws needed no written documentation for purposes of wider community awareness, adherence, remembering and preservation for subsequent generations. Most of the government business conducted at the chief’s headquarters by government officials – the chief, his councillors (governors) and assessors – consisted of dispensing justice by hearing cases and passing judgments. To carry out this important task effectively, besides the chief’s councillors, the chief identified exceptionally talented individuals and appointed them as court assessors, whose primary function was to sift the evidence of the witnesses of the complainants and defendants who had come to seek justice at the chief’s court. Among the court assessors, one would be appointed to be in charge of the day’s court proceedings and report back to the chief. This task demanded outstanding skills, because the head assessor was required to summarize details of the cases and advise the chief (Rangeley, 1948). As skilled officials, assessors ‘held office only so long as they were astute in sifting the evidence of witnesses in disputes’ (Mitchell, 1951, 25). In order to dispense justice no documents were ever produced or relied upon in the customary law courts, and yet justice appears to have always been delivered fairly. What Wallis (1905) had observed during the native court process in West Africa explains why the native court processes did not require any records. While Wallis took notes during the court proceedings to assist him in arriving at a possible judgment, the chiefs who heard the case took no notes but relied on their memory; but, to Wallis’ surprise, after a long hearing, his judgment matched that of the native judges when he and the chiefs conferred before the judgment was pronounced. As a result of the absence of literature in the predominantly oral societies, the pre-colonial natives of Malawi committed everything to their memories, which have been described as ‘marvellous’ (Wallis, 1905) and ‘long’ (Franklin, 1963). For this reason, the assessors, chiefs and councillors had developed sharper memories than those of the average citizens of their country. It is on account of this competence that native judges were able to effectively dispense justice orally without recourse to written records.

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In general, public functions within the tribal society were carried out by the chief, the chief’s councillors, court assessors, village headmen, messengers, initiation teachers and priests. Since all able-bodied men would be called up to fight when war broke out or when a raid had been planned, the men constituting the tribal army would also be considered as public servants for the tribal governments. Continuity of the native public service was made possible by a succession of new officials to replace those who had retired or died. Mitchell (1951), Wilson (1972) and Phiri (1975) agree that successors to chiefly or ritual titles and senior advisors to chiefs were given formal instructions orally about their duties and responsibilities by their retiring predecessors. The handing- and taking-over briefs between the retiring and incoming officials were unwritten but oral and were memorized by the incoming officials. In this way, information about various public offices was preserved in the minds of serving public officials and passed on to the succeeding generations. Biabaku (in Phiri, 1975), Wilson (1972) and Pachai (1972) distinguish between official historical information and general community historical information in the pre-colonial era. These authors appear to agree that the need for preservation of the former type of historical information was officially acknowledged. Responsibility for the management of vital public information was placed on such officials as the chief’s councillors, advisors on community matters and shrine officials. In the Ngonde kingdom, this responsibility was held by ‘the notables famous for their knowledge of history and custom’ (Wilson, 1972, 139), while the chief’s court historians performed this task among the Ngoni people in Malawi (Pachai, 1972). Within the Kerebe clan of East Africa, for instance, the Omwanzuzi was an individual officially recognized by the Kerebe Omukama (chief), and therefore by the community, as someone possessing reliable historical information about all Kerebe clans. The history of the Kerebe clan as told by the Omwanzuzi and a member of the royal clan was accepted and treated differently by the Kerebe clan (Hartwig, 1974). Through the succession plan of the public officials, as already noted, tribal information and history were preserved from generation to generation. It is on account of this system that the early European officials were able to compile the detailed tribal histories recorded in the District Notebooks by recording the oral accounts of the tribal chiefs, councillors, elders and those who were officially recognized by the chiefs as keepers of reliable tribal historical information. In so far as preserving pre-colonial African tribal history is concerned, District Notebooks serve as the primary and authentic source of information because

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they are the product of the historic encounter between the literate and oral cultures at the dawn of colonization, as the colonial administrators had to learn the local languages in order to administer effectively. People obtained the general historical information about their tribe through exposure to stories about the heroic deeds of their immediate ancestors (Phiri, 1975) and to the developments during their own time, and passed it to their children, who in turn passed it on to successor generations through oral tradition. Some aspects of the tribal history and customs were also learned by young people and others from the initiation ceremonies, at the chief’s or village headman’s court, where disputes among quarrelling sides were settled, or at special ceremonies, such as sacrificial offerings at the communal shrines. Axioms, folktales and family histories were normally passed on to succeeding generations within family circles through oral trading by senior family members. To obtain general historical information about one’s own tribe, therefore, it was not necessary to have access to written records, since various occasions laden with the information naturally presented themselves. In addition to obtaining this type of information, those who carried out public functions and those close to the chiefs also knew more about ‘the development of the royal authority and bureaucratic institutions’ (Phiri, 1975, 11) of their tribal government than did other community members.

The colonial period and recordkeeping

Establishment of the British administration in 1891 was so transformational that all the tribal governments that existed prior to this date were unified and brought under British rule. The pre-colonial ‘information keeping system’ was altered and replaced by recordkeeping systems that were modelled on the British system and were established at all levels of the government. Between 1891 and 1893, the Nyasaland colonial administration consisted of seven departments: the administrators’ office; police; residents; commercial department; medical department; legal department; and office of works, with a total number of British officers ranging from 20 to 35 (Baker, 1988), while that of Europeans in general ranging from 57 in 1891 to 300 in 1896 (Pachai, 1973). Before the recruitment of the Private Secretary in 1893, correspondence and other clerical work in the administrator’s office was carried out by the Commissioner-General himself, or the botanist whenever the Commissioner was away on tour (Baker, 1988), while records of government accounts were handled by the chief accountant, although the Commissioner also handled

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accounts work before the accountant was recruited. With such a small number of staff and a limited number of important functions to carry out, it is likely that the official records generated during this time were far fewer than those generated in later years, when government activities increased and the staff complement was expanded accordingly. Although the colonial administrators understood that the administration of public affairs is largely based on papers, on the basis of Sir Charles Jeffries’ (1938, viii) argument that until the beginning of the 20th century ‘colonial administration was still in the stage of tentative endeavour, if not of rule of thumb’, it is doubtful if recordkeeping was systematic during the early colonial days. The remoteness of Nyasaland and its undeveloped communication system must have contributed to sporadic correspondence between the Protectorate and the Foreign Office (from 1904 onwards, the Colonial Office) in London and between it and other colonies. Additionally, officers’ preoccupation with military campaigns during the formative years of the administration would have left the administrators with little time in the office to attend to recordkeeping. Occasionally, memoranda on recordkeeping were issued in London to all the colonies. Such memoranda gave the colonial governments the impetus to design and promote good recordkeeping systems. One such memorandum was issued by Colonial Secretary Sir W. Ormsby-Gore in a 1936 colonial dispatch to all colonies which emphasized that: The preservation of its records in a satisfactory state must be regarded as one of

the first duties of a colonial government; a duty which derives greater urgency

for the delay in the institution of suitable protective measures may and does lead

to the inevitable loss of documents of value.

(Ormsby-Gore in Mwiyeriwa, 1983, 221)

Apart from the memoranda on records management issued from London to all the colonies, British Civil Service filing systems were also exported to the colonies. Moss (2005) mentions that the filing system which was adopted at the beginning of the 20th century across the whole Civil Service in the United Kingdom was imposed on imperial and colonial governments.

Departmental recordkeeping

Locally, the Nyasaland Government regulated the creation, use, maintenance and disposition and preservation of public records through regulations on

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records management, which were first issued in 1920 (Lovering, 2010). The regulations, which were revised in 1922, were incorporated as part of the provisions of the Nyasaland Protectorate General Orders, which were revised from time to time and issued to all heads of department. Among other important matters, the General Orders required every head of department to be responsible for all aspects of records management in his department (Nyasaland Protectorate, 1951). From 1919, the Secretariat instituted systematic disposal and preservation of ephemeral and vital non-current records and maintained a record of such record disposals and preservation. Before the establishment of the National Archives in 1947, the Secretariat preserved all the vital non-current records in the basement of the main Secretariat block, which had been designated as an area for the preservation of government records. From 1891 to 1964, the functions of the government were carried out by various government departments, whose heads were commonly designated as directors. The heads of departments reported to the Chief Secretary, who co-ordinated all the government departments. The departmental heads had specialist training and experience relevant to their respective departments. While the heads of departments had overall responsibilities for their respective departments, recordkeeping in each department was specifically handled by the registry section, as was the case in the home civil service. Out of the seven departments, between 1891 and 1893 only two (Administrators Office and the Legal Department) had a clerk each (Baker, 1988). By 1908, the number of government departments had increased to 14, of which 8 had provision for the post of clerk, as follows: Department of Government Secretary (3), Nyasaland Agency (1), Treasury (5), Customs (1), Transport (1), Legal Department (2), Military (1) and Public Works and Survey (2). In 1910, the number of clerks increased by one in the Department of Government Secretary to serve in the Native Affairs section (Nyasaland Protectorate, 1910). From this analysis, it is debatable whether in 1910 the quality of recordkeeping in the eight departments which had clerks was better than or the same as that in the other six departments that had no registry clerks. It would not be surprising if the quality of recordkeeping was lower in the departments that had no clerks to handle filing and other recordkeeping activities, because the very few administrative officers, who already had too many assignments to attend to, would have had little time to attend to recordkeeping. Perhaps because of such inequalities in the systematic management of public records among the departments, in 1920, as Lovering (2010) has

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observed, the Secretariat reviewed its registry system. It may also have reflected parallel reviews that were taking place in the home civil service. This review led to the release, on 1 March 1922, of the Regulations for the conduct of official correspondence, to all government institutions by the Chief Secretary. The Regulations, which were approved by the Governor, remained in force as the guiding principles for standardizing recordkeeping within government until 1932, when they were revised and incorporated into the first edition of the Nyasaland Protectorate General Orders.

Recordkeeping in the provinces

Besides records management systems being established at the central government level, they were also established at the provincial, district and native authority levels. In June 1921, the Nyasaland Protectorate was divided into three provinces: the Southern, Central and Northern Provinces. Each province was administered by a Provincial Commissioner, who was a medium of communication between the District Residents in the province and the Secretariat. The Provincial Commissioners communicated policy instructions they had received from the Secretariat to the District Residents (Murray, 1932). In 1929 the provinces were increased to four, but in 1931 were reduced to two (Colonial Office, 1928). A few years later, the provinces were again divided into three, the Northern, Central and Southern Provinces, and the situation has remained the same until the present, except for their renaming as regions. Frequent changes in the status of provinces might have had some slight implications for recordkeeping in the Provincial Commissioners’ offices, in that when the number of provinces increased from three to four, the new Provincial Commissioner (PC) had to obtain the records of the districts in his new province from the PC who had administered the districts previously, in order for him to apprise himself of past developments. Likewise, when the provinces were amalgamated into two, the two PCs had to obtain records from the other two phased-out provincial offices. Since the provincial offices were a link between the Secretariat and the district offices, they did not generate much by way of records, but their recordkeeping had to be up to date. The PCs received monthly, quarterly and annual reports from the District Commissioners and in turn reported to the Chief Secretary. Any poor recordkeeping in the PCs’ offices might have resulted in ill-informed and inaccurate reports. Personal experiences of Baker (2010) and Strachan (2010), both District Commissioners in the late 1950s in Malawi, would seem to

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indicate that recordkeeping in the PCs’ offices was problematic, because the two admit to their frustrations when they failed to obtain copies of important correspondence from the PCs’ offices. At the beginning of 1891, Sir Harry Johnston, the first CommissionerGeneral of Nyasaland, recruited eight political officers in order to effect the consolidation of the Protectorate of Her Majesty over the native chiefs, advise the native chiefs on their external relations with each other and with foreigners, and secure peace and order in Nyasaland, as he had been instructed. The officers, who were officially entitled Collectors of Revenue, were deployed in eight administrative stations. Their primary task was the collection of revenue, customs duty, licence fees (firearms, big game hunting, importation and sale of alcohol, etc.) and the sale of Crown land. Other duties included magisterial functions, postal, customs and excise duties, roadmaking and building and regulation of the importation of spirituous liquor (Baker, 1988). The number of administrative districts was increased from 8 to 12 in 1894, and more districts were established later, and today the total number of districts is 28.

Recordkeeping in the districts

Unlike the Secretariat and other government departments that had registries, it would appear that during the early period of the colonial administration, the district offices did not have registries of an elaborate nature. The nature of records of the district offices in Nyasaland varied, but generally each district kept its District Books or Political Notebooks, district census and Native Court files, besides ‘a range of correspondence files and other records, including annual reports’ (Tough, 2009, 9). Before the establishment of the offices of the Provincial Commissioners in 1921, District Commissioners (DCs) corresponded with and submitted reports directly to the Secretariat. The DCs were assisted by African clerks and messengers in carrying out records-related work, and as there appear to have been no formal policy guidelines stipulating the management of district office records until 1922, recordkeeping at the district offices depended on the competence and interest in recordkeeping of individual officers who were in charge at a particular time, and those who succeeded them (Curtin, 1960; Baker, 2010; Harvey, 2010; Strachan, 2010). Owing to this fact, the quality of recordkeeping in district offices varied over time in the same district, depending on who was the DC, and from one district to another, within the same Protectorate. Tough (2009, 7), for instance, finds that ‘the Residents,

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Administrative Officers and District Commissioners in charge at Dowa created and used a relatively sophisticated recordkeeping system’, while ‘Residents, Administrative Officers and District Commissioners in other districts were not all equally enthusiastic about recordkeeping’. Baker (2010), Harvey (2010) and Strachan (2010), Assistant DCs and later District Commissioners in the mid-1950s in Nyasaland, provide a picture of recordkeeping at the district level between 1950 and 1960. The three appear to agree that the situation in urban districts such as Blantyre and Zomba was much better than that in remote districts such as Karonga, where office administration was somewhat primitive. As Harvey confesses, ‘the spoken word probably counted for more at that time’. There is agreement among the three former DCs that during this period there were no formal instructions about retaining files for archival purposes and, as such, proper preservation of past records in the districts was left to the discretion and initiative of the administrator in charge. For instance, Jones (1964) mentions that in 1954 in Mzimba District there was one confidential file into which everything was put. In remote districts, past files, some going back many years, could be found in dusty cupboards (with bats overhead) but not much attention was paid to them, apart from historical documents that the administrator deemed worthy of careful preservation. From the district offices, past files were not transferred to an official archival repository, and, according to Harvey (2010), ‘certainly in the D.C.’s Boma [they] would burn out-of-date old files when they no longer had any value, simply to make space for the more recent ones’. As far as recordkeeping at the district level was concerned, Harvey’s experience was that it was reduced to essential official communications, and he points out that funding, staffing and even the sense of longer-term history did not allow for developing archives in district work. Comparatively, however, Baker (2010), Harvey (2010) and Strachan (2010) agree that at higher official levels – the Secretariat, the Registrar, Provincial and Legislative Councils and the Law Courts – better recordkeeping systems were maintained. The government enacted the Native Village Regulation Ordinance in 1910 with the aim of reviving among the natives ‘something of a fast-decaying power of local government [by appointing Native Headmen to act] as media of communication between the mass of native populace on the one hand and the District Administration on the other’ (Jones, 1964, 73). Among other duties, the headmen were to assist in the collection of tax from their villagers. For this service, the chiefs were given a subsidy of 10% of the hut tax collected from their areas (Lord Hailey, 1957; Baker, 1978; Pachai, 1973). In 1912 the Legislative Council enacted the

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District Administration (Native) Ordinance, which provided for the establishment of Sectional Councils of principal village headmen in order to assist the government in local administration (Jones, 1964; Pachai, 1973). Between 1910 and 1930, the government did not enforce recordkeeping measures at the local administrative level. The 1928 PCs’ conference, for instance, had recommended that no records should be called for from village courts. However, the situation changed in the early 1930s when the principal headmen were required to maintain records. The 1930 District Administration (Native) Ordinance stipulated that, among other duties, principal headmen should ‘record and report all births, marriages by native law and custom, and deaths and other statistical data which [might] occur in or refer to his section’ (Nyasaland Government Gazette, 1930, 4(e)). In his annual report for 1932, the Provincial Commissioner (South) observed that in several districts a start was made with the keeping by principal headmen of records of cases dealt with by them during that particular year. On the basis of the quality of such records, which was described as only fair, the PC was of the view that with more experience and the assistance of native court scribes, principal headmen’s records would be satisfactory.

The Native authorities

In 1933, two important ordinances, the Native Authority Ordinance and the Native Courts Ordinance (Nyasaland Protectorate, 1933a and 1933b), were enacted, which marked the introduction of indirect rule in Nyasaland. Through these ordinances, the administration established Native Authorities which consisted of small tribes or sections of a tribe that were grouped together to form a single administrative unit (Pachai, 1973). A Native Authority (NA) comprised a chief as the superior Native Authority, and the chief’s advisors and sub-chiefs. The sub-chiefs were appointed by the chief and were responsible for ruling over a certain well-defined area within the Native Authority. The advent of indirect rule had a bearing on recordkeeping. Through the Native Courts Ordinance, each NA, with the assistance of his advisors, presided over the NA court. As a requirement, the NA courts were supposed to maintain court records of the case judgments passed, and for this reason NAs employed scribes or clerks for the maintenance of court records. Hall (1938) observes that, as a minimum, native court records indicated the names of parties, a brief statement of the subject matter and a short judgment, signed by the holder of the court, who was usually the NA himself. Judgments from

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the NA court could be appealed to the District Magistrate. A District Magistrate and District Commissioner occasionally inspected the NA court records. Before the promulgation of the Native Courts Ordinance in 1933, principal headmen conducted their court sessions orally without any requirement to document their judgments. The Native Authority Ordinance empowered the NAs to maintain their own treasuries, from which they could finance a number of social-economic projects such as building bridges and roads and paying social workers from the revenue collected by the NA from a number of sources. The predominantly oral people, who used different modes of oral transmission to transact social and official business, were now offered a platform to transact official business where the modus operandi was nontraditional. This naturally introduced the basics of official recordkeeping to the Africans who participated in NA affairs, and oral tradition now lived in partnership with the written culture, each of which was to influence the other. On a larger, national scale, indirect rule contributed to the generation of more public records because, besides those that were already being generated by the Secretariat, government departments and other establishments, the provincial and district offices and Native Authorities throughout the country started the regular production and maintenance of public records.

The post-colonial one-party state and recordkeeping

From 1930, when the Nyasaland Protectorate General Orders first came into force, recordkeeping in the civil service was regulated by these General Orders. The specific sections of the General Orders that regulated the management of records in the public service were Orders 190–232, which outlined detailed steps for managing public records systematically from classification, creation and use to preservation and disposition. Additionally, the Orders prohibited deliberate destruction of government records by any officer, while each head of department was required to ensure that no aspect of the General Orders was violated by his officers. As part of the localization of the public service after independence in 1964, the new Malawi Government repealed the Nyasaland Protectorate General Orders. Instead, new regulations, the Malawi Public Service Regulations (MPSR), which came into operation on 15 June 1966, were introduced and distributed to all government ministries and departments. To date, the Malawi public service is regulated by the MPSR and circulars from the Office of the President and Cabinet, along with circulars from the Department of

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Human Resource Management and Development that are issued from time to time. While the MPSR was a renaming and revision of the Nyasaland Protectorate General Orders to reflect the newly independent nation, an important provision similar to the Nyasaland General Orders 190–232 covering all aspects of records management in the public service was omitted. All amendments to the MPSR from the 1966 edition to the current 1988 edition have excluded any provision for records management. The omission of the records management provision from the MPSR effectively meant doing away with the policy guidelines and standards for the management of public sector records. Due to a lack of appreciation for good recordkeeping, the early Malawian administrators did not consider records management an aspect worth incorporating into the MPSR. This perception, which still exists today, has contributed to the generally low standard of records management in Malawi (Lihoma, 2009). Thurston (in Kukubo, 1986, 225) corroborates this argument by painting recordkeeping in the East and Southern Africa region generally and in Malawi in particular in the following manner: papers are misfiled or sent to the wrong action officers, ephemeral papers (many

of which need never be registered) are mixed with policy papers on registered

files, too many ‘general’ files are opened and files tend to run on for long periods

(which delays their opening when they reach the Archives); files are allowed to

become overfull and unwieldy (endangering the contents) and they often pass

from office to office without movement control, which results in their being lost

or misplaced and large numbers of temporary jackets being opened ...

access to the National archives

Independence, and particularly the autocratic one-party rule, led to the government’s strong control over the National Archives. The national archivist, J. D. C. Drew, described the situation in August 1964 as ‘a pity ... [because] Archives [was] no longer the quiet backwater it used to be’ (NAM, 1964). The Home Affairs minister showed increasing interest in the National Archives, to the extent that a number of strict conditions for accessing public records were imposed. Between 1964 and 1966 researchers wishing to conduct research in the Archives and whose applications had been accepted provisionally were required to appear before the minister for interviews. In order to secure an appointment for an interview with the minister, researchers had to exercise patience, given the busy schedules of the ministers. As such,

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most researchers ended up abandoning their research plans and looked elsewhere. From 1966, authority to grant permission for researchers to access public records was vested in the state President. Assumption of this responsibility by the President introduced even tougher research procedures. Before reaching the President, any research application had to be scrutinized by a threemember committee comprising a well known public figure, a representative from the Ministry of Justice and a representative from the security forces (NAM, 1968). The primary function of this committee was two-fold: ‘to screen rigorously all persons applying for access to closed files in order to prove that they [had] not been engaged at any time in political activity [and] that their researches [would] be of palpable benefit to Malawi as well as to themselves’ (NAM, 1968). Where researchers were summoned to appear before the President, it was not automatic that the permission would be granted. In 1969 alone, the President refused two research professors permission to conduct research in the Archives after the two had appeared before him for further interrogation (NAM, 1969). From 1965 to 1993, the National Archives was closed on a number of occasions, each of varying duration, for different reasons as the President saw fit and directed accordingly. These closures affected researchers and other interested users of the National Archives in different ways. For instance, the President ordered closure of the Archives on the following dates: between May and July 1965; between July and October 1966; and between April and September 1972, when Mr Drew, the national archivist and only Archives official trusted by the President, was away on holiday overseas (NAM, 1965, 1966, 1972). Besides the annual holidays, whenever the national archivist was away from his post for any official business either locally or outside the country, the National Archives was under the President’s instructions to be closed to all researchers. From 5 March 1967 to 22 November 1968 (20 months) the Archives was closed following publication in 1966 of The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa: the making of Malawi and Zambia 1873–1964 by Rotberg, a researcher who had conducted research in the Archives for his book. Critical remarks against the Malawi Government that were contained in the book’s postscript irked the President, who consequently banned the author from entering Malawi and ordered the closure of the Archives to all researchers. The Archives was further ordered to close between 1 June and 13 December 1993, apparently to hinder the public from accessing public information and free speech, but under the guise of the Archives undergoing fumigation, when in fact no single fumigation activity took place.

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Public records were first made open to the public in 1951, but the nationality of researchers wishing to consult such records was not an issue until 1966. After completing the necessary formal application procedure, researchers were granted access to the public records in the National Archives, irrespective of their nationality. This trend was reversed as Dr Banda became more autocratic and intolerant of criticism of himself and his government. Since it proved difficult to prosecute Rotberg for his breach of regulations in publishing The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa: the making of Malawi and Zambia 1873–1964, from 1967 onwards all requests from foreigners wishing to conduct archival research in Malawi were refused. Later, in 1972 when the minister responsible for the National Archives sought the President’s approval for a doctoral student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, to conduct research in the Archives, the President responded: No. We no longer allow outsiders to do research here. Our materials are now for

our own students. Only under very special circumstances do we allow research

by foreigners now. This is for a number of reasons, which I cannot give here.

(NAM, 1972)

One of the reasons that the President did not give, but had indicated to the Office of the President and Cabinet, Local Government ministry and Archives officials earlier in 1968, was that even though they satisfied the access requirements, ‘persons from countries considered “unfriendly” to Malawi [would] not be given access’ (NAM, 1968) to the Archives. This also applied to all researchers from countries whose foreign policies differed sharply from those of the Malawi government. A few months after gaining independence in July 1964, and following the Cabinet Crisis, the government, and especially Dr Banda, became more autocratic and intolerant of any criticism. As such, the government employed different mechanisms to ensure that access to any unpublished or published material that portrayed or would portray the government negatively, whether explicitly or implicitly, was restricted. Apart from enacting the censorship law and declaring any suspicious literature as prohibited material in the country, the government imposed restrictions on the subjects which anyone was allowed to research in the National Archives. Only research whose results the government could make immediate use of was permitted. For this reason, research of a purely historical nature was normally not allowed. To ensure that this condition was complied with, all

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researchers were required to send lists of all the files they wanted to consult for presidential scrutiny and approval. After the approval was granted, the researchers could consult only those files that the President had approved. Due to the subject restrictions, many researchers found the archival material not useful enough for their research and resorted to oral data instead (Woods, 1990). However, field research had its own restrictions. The government allowed researchers to conduct field research only on condition that the research workers confined their activities strictly to dances and should not in any way, either openly or secretly, indulge in political activity. By limiting researchers to the subjects with which the government was comfortable and demanding lists of individual files which the few approved researchers could consult, the government was actually hiding the archival resources from public access and scrutiny. As long as the limitations were in force, the greater proportion of the archives that should have been available for public access remained virtually closed to the public and grossly underutilized. This prompted Woods (1990, 259) to argue that ‘the National Archives of Malawi were for all intents and purposes closed from the late 1960s until the early 1980s’.

The post-colonial democratic era and the archive

In 1994, Malawi adopted multi-party democratic governance. Being ‘the most brutal civilian regime in Africa’ (Mutharika, 2000, 204), Dr Banda’s government committed many atrocities. Common human rights abuses during that period included detention without trial, ‘disappearances’, torture in custody, punitive confiscation of property, judicial interference, sexual and work-related exploitation of women, dismissal from work and complete controls on freedom of expression and religion. Given the country’s postindependence past, accountability as entrenched in the 1994 Constitution had to be two-fold, as argued by Mutharika (2000). On the one hand, the Malawi government was retrospectively responsible for the human rights violations between 1964 and 1994 and, on the other hand, it is proactively responsible for the prevention of both present and future violations. In order to account for the atrocities committed during the one-party era, the Constitution provided for the establishment of the National Compensation Tribunal (NCT). The objective of the NCT was to ‘entertain claims with respect to alleged criminal and civil liability of the Government of Malawi which was in power before the appointed day [18 May 2004]’. (Malawi Government, 1994, Section 137). To achieve its objective, the NCT

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was given all powers of investigation necessary to establish the facts of any case before it. Between January 1995, when it started receiving claims against the government, and July 2003, when it stopped receiving new claims, the NCT registered 24,363 claimants. Of this number, 8% received full payments, 40.8% received interim payments, additional information was required from 23% of claimants, 1.3% of claims were rejected for lack of documentary evidence and 22.7% of claims were yet to be assessed. Between 1964 and 1994 hundreds of public servants had their employment terminated orally on political grounds. Documentary evidence to validate claims of political dismissals were mostly claimants’ departmental personal files. However, some former civil servants who were victimized by the Banda regime and qualified for compensation had passed away by 1995, while others could not manage to register their claims in person. In both cases, the government allowed relatives of the victims to lodge claims on their behalf. Between 1994 and 2004 hundreds of former civil servants who had been dismissed on political grounds, or their relatives, thronged the National Archives to obtain certified copies of their employee personal files as documentary evidence for presentation at the NCT. Accountability for human rights violations committed during the one-party era demonstrated the value of archives to a society which had been oppressed by the totalitarian regime. The records that the regime created in the process of officially carrying out violations such as detention orders, property confiscation orders, prison registers, police charge sheets and court records, turned out to be the instruments through which the oppressed held the oppressors accountable for the pain suffered during the dictatorial rule and made them pay for it in order to bring healing. Furthermore, this accountability has led to the generation of a comprehensive database of the extent of various atrocities that the post-colonial government committed between 1964 and 1994.

Conclusion

While oral transmission was the hallmark of the predominantly oral preEuropean societies, colonialism introduced literacy and laid the foundations for modern records management systems. When the colonialists left the scene, for Africans to govern themselves as had been the case before, while it maintained the colonial recordkeeping, the government sadly removed public records management regulations and standards from its system, which had deleterious effects on the quality of recordkeeping in Malawi. Furthermore,

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the autocratic one-party government turned the National Archives into an instrument of political oppression through stringent access conditions, censorship, frequent closure of, and selective admission into the Archives. Besides unmasking the once-hidden Archives, the democratic dispensation has turned the Archives into an instrument of accountability for atrocities suffered during the post-colonial dictatorial regime. This chapter therefore argues that Malawi’s information and recordkeeping is better understood through the country’s administrative spectrum from way back in the precolonial times to the present. As developments that have taken place during all four administrative epochs have had an immense bearing on recordkeeping, a direct relationship seems to exist between administrative developments and recordkeeping.

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CHAPTER 10

History of community archiving in Poland

H

Magdalena wiśniewska

ISTORICALLY, ARCHIVISTS IN

Poland have not paid much attention to community archives. Nowadays, however, this challenging area has become a more and more popular field of study for those engaged in research in archival science. I believe, and am supported in this belief by other Polish archivists (e.g. Stępniak, 2012; Czarnota, 2014; Chorążyczewski, 2015), that community archives play an important part in Polish archival reality, due to their considerable number (estimated to be several hundred) and remarkable variety. Moreover, this type of activity – setting up a memory institution from below, spontaneously – is intertwined with a specific stage of development of civil society, as well as historical/archival consciousness. This community archives phase got underway in the West in the latter half of the 20th century (Gilliland and Flinn, 2013; Vitali, 2015), but started much later in Poland, due to its recent history. The definition of ‘community archive’ still causes some debate, both in countries that have longer traditions of research in grassroots archiving endeavours (Letimer, n.d.; Flinn, 2007; Flinn, Stevens and Shepherd, 2009; Flinn, 2011; Gilliland and Flinn, 2013; Newman, 2012) and in Poland (Czarnota, 2011; Czarnota, 2012; Ziętal, 2012a; Ziętal, 2012b; Czarnota, 2013; Wiśniewska, 2013; Ziętal, 2013; Chorążyczewski, 2015). In this chapter I use the term ‘community archive’ to describe archives endeavouring to ensure ongoing preservation (or at least those that believe their materials deserve long-term preservation) and set up at the grassroots level, often housed by non-governmental organizations, but also by informal groups and, in some cases, private individuals. There has not been any research to date exploring the history of community archiving in Poland as a whole, complex phenomenon, although in the

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archival literature one can find isolated studies on individual community archives (mostly the large and influential ones) that touch also on the issue of their origins and history. However, they are not rigorous case studies but are rather superficial and of little value. Minimal work has been done relating to the history of individual community archives; similarly, it is not possible to write a complete history of community archiving in Poland, treating grassroots documentary endeavours as a whole phenomenon. This chapter is an attempt to present an outline of the history of two of the most influential Polish community archives: the KARTA Centre Foundation and the Elżbieta Zawacka Foundation, in order to give examples of how community archives came into being in Poland. I also present an example of an older archive – the Polish War Archive – to show that the phenomenon of independent documenting endeavours has a deep-rooted tradition in Poland. By making reference to the history of these archives, as well as to Polish history, I also attempt to relate the Polish community archives movement to the theory of Pierre Nora about the decolonization and democratization of history. In this context I propose an approach to studying the phenomenon of community archiving in Poland, according to the present state of the discipline.

Poland in the 20th century

In 1795 Poland lost its independence for 123 years, regaining it only after the Great War, in 1918. After 20 years of peace and development, on 1 September 1939 Poland was attacked by German troops in what was the beginning of World War 2. The following years were tragic as they witnessed the German and Russian occupations, the Holocaust and also the organized resistance movement. In 1945 the Russian ‘liberation’ motivated the period of the Polish People’s Republic, where a dictatorial, one-party communist system of government dominated and Poland became part of the post-war Soviet sphere of influence. The system oppressed former activists of the resistance movement, especially soldiers of the Home Army, as well as political opponents. Economic problems, censorship, police brutality and propaganda occurred on a daily basis. In 1980, a big wave of strikes resulted in the founding of the independent self-governing trade union Solidarity. In 1981 the government declared martial law. In 1989 the Round Table Talks, negotiations between the government and its opponents, led to Solidarity’s participation in the parliamentary election. That marked the beginning of a transformation that spread across Central and Eastern Europe. This rich and turbulent 20th-century history of Poland inevitably influenced

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the phenomenon of grassroots archiving. This is particularly apparent when examining the main foci of topically based archives. Many of them document events of World War 2 and the activity of anti-communist opposition in the Polish People’s Republic. The following are some examples of such endeavours: ■

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‘Wizna1939’ Association in Wizna: materials concerning the defence of sector Wizna during the September Campaign in 1939, as well as the citizens’ life and engagement in struggles during the German and Soviet occupation, deportation of Wizna citizens to Kazakhstan and activity of the Home Army in the region (www.wizna1939.eu). Society of Individuals Born in German Imprisonment in Włocławek: materials concerning Poles born during World War 2, in the Third Reich (between 1940 and 1945) and sources for the history of forced labour camps (www.archiwa.org/as_archiwa_szukaj.php?co=polskie&id=436). Auschwitz Memento Association in Oświęcim (German: Auschwitz): memories of former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp prisoners and accounts of residents of Oświęcim and the surrounding area, who lived through the German occupation in the shadow of Auschwitz (www.auschwitzmemento.pl). Foundation of the Polish Underground State in Warsaw: materials on the Polish Underground State – a network of military and civilian resistance organizations in Poland during World War 2 (www.fundacja-ppp.pl). Jan Karski Association in Kielce: photographs from World War 2 and of a pogrom against Jews that took place in July 1946 in Kielce (www.jankarski.org.pl). Society for Commemoration of Victims of the Ukrainian Nationalists’ Crimes in Wrocław: materials concerning genocide against Poles committed by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army between 1939 and 1947 (www.stowarzyszenieuozun.wroclaw.pl). ‘Jaworzniacy’ – Foundation for Help for Juvenile Political Prisoners from 1944 to 1956 in Warsaw: among others, accounts of former prisoners from the prison in Jaworzno (www.jaworzniacy.pl). ‘Poznań June 56’ Society in Poznań: materials on the mass protests of workers against the communist government that took place in Poznań in June 1956, brutally put down by the state military (www.archiwa.org/as_archiwa_szukaj.php?co=polskie&id=186). ‘May 77’ Society in Cracow: materials on opposition activity and the

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underground students’ movement, especially Student Solidarity Committees since the 1970s (www.maj77.org.pl). ■ Film Archive of ‘Road to Independence’ Foundation in Gdańsk: film heritage of the Solidarity trade union, concerning the period of the ‘Solidarity carnival’ (period between August 1980 and the declaration of martial law), the period of martial law, the Round Table talks and the political transformation (www.archiwa.org/as_archiwa_szukaj.php?co=polskie&id=78). ■ Orange Alternative Foundation in Warsaw: materials concerning the Orange Alternative – an anarchistic socio-cultural movement created in 1981 in Wrocław (www.pomaranczowa-alternatywa.org). ■ Puławy Society for Individuals Repressed Under Martial Law in Puławy: materials from the 1980s on repressions and opposition to the communists (www.represjonowani.pulawy.pl). Also, the two largest and most influential Polish community archives, the KARTA Centre Foundation and the General Elżbieta Zawacka Foundation, collect materials relating to World War 2 and the anti-communist opposition in the Polish People’s Republic.

The KARTA Centre

The documenting activity of the KARTA Centre began in 1982 by collecting memories of martial law in Poland (1981–3), then also memories about those oppressed by the communists. This is believed to be the beginnings of KARTA’s Opposition Archives. In 1987 the independent Eastern Archives was established. It was a dispersed social movement, led by KARTA, that documented the concealed ‘eastern’ history, in particular, the memories of Poles oppressed in the USSR. In February 1990 two foundations were established, the KARTA Foundation and the Eastern Archives Foundation, and these were combined in 1996. Since 2004 the Foundation has been a public benefit organization. The KARTA is situated in Warsaw. It conducts various activities relating to archives such as oral history projects, and also puts on exhibitions, historical contests and other educational projects (Gluza, 2006). Since 2012 KARTA has been undertaking the project Community Archives in Poland, which ‘professionalizes grass-root documenting activities, gathers information about community archives, provides educational tools, strengthens and promotes this field of public life’ (Archiwistyka społeczna, n.d.).

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In co-operation with the Libraries Development Programme, KARTA created over one hundred Digital Archives of Local Tradition, a network of digital community archives located in district libraries which document local history and tradition (Wilkowski, 2012; Kudełka, et al., 2014). Another KARTA project underway since 2014 is entitled Stabilization of Community Archives in Poland. One of the goals of this project is ‘working out a model of cooperation between community archives and the state and organizing the legal state of community archives’ (Projekt stabilizacji, n.d.). Thanks to these projects the KARTA Centre is seen as an advocate for Polish community archives. The holdings of KARTA comprise four main parts: ■ The Eastern Archives documents the history of the Eastern borderlands

and stories of their residents under the German and Soviet occupations and after World War 2, including the post-war armed underground resistance movement, especially repressions of Poles by the USSR between 1939 and 1956 – executions, deportations, relocations, internments, forced conscription into the army (Archiwum Wschodnie, n.d.; Gluza, 2006). Examples of the holdings include reminiscences, diaries, lists of the repressed and hundreds of personal collections (which include documents, notes, correspondence, photos, sketches). ■ The Opposition Archives documents social life in Poland between 1956 and 1989. It collects mainly records of the opposition’s activity in the period of the Polish People’s Republic, and traces of the opposition to totalitarianism. The materials comprise donations from over 2000 people. The Archives contains numerous underground publications (over 5000 books, almost 3500 journals and newspapers), dozens of personal collections, hundreds of environmental and topically based collections and hundreds of posters, photos, reminiscences and diaries (Archiwum Opozycji, n.d.). ■ The Photo Archives consists of over 180,000 photographs covering the entire 20th century (and sometimes even the late 19th century). The Photo Archives documents events and phenomena like the first free election in Poland in 1989, the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, forming the Polish Army in the USSR, the beginnings of cycling in Poland, women in the Polish People’s Republic, Warsaw in the 1950s and many more (Archiwum Fotografii, n.d.). ■ The Oral History Archives consists of almost 5000 audio and 100 video recordings (Archiwum Historii Mówionej, n.d.).

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The General Elżbieta Zawacka Foundation

The second community archive is the General Elżbieta Zawacka Foundation: the Pomeranian Archive and Museum of the Home Army and Women’s Military Service, which is situated in Toruń. General Elżbieta Zawacka was a courier from occupied Poland, a soldier trained in the West and the only woman parachuted over Nazi-occupied Poland to join the resistance forces (in Polish she is referred to as ‘cichociemna’). She also fought in the Warsaw Uprising. From the 1960s Elżbieta Zawacka collected materials on three main topics: the history of conspiracy in Pomerania (the northern part of Poland), the military service of Polish women and the history of the Department of Foreign Contacts of the Home Army Headquarters ‘Zagroda’. These materials now constitute the core of the Foundation’s archival holdings. To begin with the archive was situated in Zawacka’s apartment. Because of the amount of correspondence with former soldiers and conspirators, Elżbieta Zawacka was kept under surveillance by the Security Service in the 1970s and 1980s (Minczykowska, 2014, 248). As time passed, the collection grew bigger and Zawacka realized that the archives should be properly described and stored (Minczykowska, 2014, 255). In 1990 she, together with two historians, Stanisław Salmonowicz and Grzegorz Górski, established the Foundation. Initially it was called ‘The Pomeranian Archive of the Home Army’ Foundation (Minczykowska, 2000, 8). Subsequently the archives were transferred from Zawacka’s apartment to the Foundation. At that time the archives consisted of documentation relating to several hundred soldiers of the Department of Foreign Contacts of the Home Army Headquarters ‘Zagroda’ and almost 900 dossiers of Pomeranian conspirators (Minczykowska, 2014, 271). General Elżbieta Zawacka died in 2009, two months before her 100th birthday, but the Foundation continued. Currently, holdings consist of over 6500 personal dossiers (over 2400 from the archive of the Women’s Military Service, 4000 concerning conspiracy in Pomerania and over 230 concerning soldiers of ‘Zagroda’), over 5300 books, almost 450 museum exhibits and several thousand photographs. The Foundation is an active publisher, and contributes to raising awareness of the history of the Home Army soldiers, conspiracy in Pomerania and the Women’s Military Service, among others, by organizing conferences and exhibitions (Minczykowska, 2014, 278–90; Strzelecka, 2007, 122–3; Minczykowska, 2012, 173).

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Archival activism in Poland

It has been said that archival activism, in the form of community archives, really began in Poland after the 1989/90 transformation, when Poland became a fully independent, democratic country (Czarnota, 2012; Czarnota, 2014). Numerous initiatives emerged after the democratization of public life and restoration of freedom of association. However, it must be emphasized that 1990 cannot be seen as the beginning of community archives in Poland in general. That year should be considered as a critical date, when the development of grassroots archives (inextricably connected with everyday life, associations, civil liberties and democracy) gained significant momentum. The fact that after 1990 numerous initiatives came to light represents two phenomena. Firstly, new initiatives came into being, people were willing to organize themselves and, under new political and social conditions, they were not at risk of interventions from the Security Service. This means that after 1990 numerous completely new initiatives arose, and those taking part in some kind of archival activity either formalized their work in foundations or associations or worked on an informal basis. Secondly, after 1990 many groups that until then had been acting under cover decided to come out into the open and legalize their activity. This second scenario was the situation for the KARTA Centre and the Zawacka Foundation.

The Polish war archive

However, grassroots documentary initiatives in Poland are much older; for example, the Polish War Archive. This archive was created in 1915, on the initiative of an outstanding Polish historian, Władysław Semkowicz, ‘in order to collect historical material, concerning the Polish case in the world war and the Polish participation in this war’ (Semkowiczowa, 1966, 63). This activity was widespread and had numerous branches abroad (e.g. in Constantinople, Paris, Salzburg, Prague, Budapest), but also on Polish territory (Władysław Semkowicz’s wife wrote ‘no bigger city lacked it’). In 1922 the holdings of the Polish War Archive were deposited in the Central Military Library in Warsaw in perpetuity, where they were described and supplemented on an ongoing basis. The archive included 112,025 objects, including 268 manuscripts, 3988 journal volumes, 6294 brochures, 22,468 public notices and 78,925 press cuttings (Bieńkowska et al., 1994, 91). The Central Military Library was situated in the centre of Warsaw, in one of the buildings of the General Inspector of the Armed Forces. Because it was an important target of attacks by artillery and air forces, the complex suffered numerous air strikes in the first weeks of World

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War 2. Sadly, the library, and with it the Polish War Archive, burned down completely on 24 September 1939. The Central Military Library, which stored 408,938 volumes of books, journals and magazines, old prints, manuscripts, photographs, cartographic and other materials, lost its holdings almost entirely – its losses are estimated at around 406,000 volumes, which was 99% of all library holdings (Bieńkowska et al., 1994, 103, 327).

Earlier endeavours

The history of Polish independent archival endeavours even pre-dates World War 1. In 1795 Poland ceased to exist as an independent country, as mentioned above, and was partitioned between Russia, Austria and Prussia. But the Polish community was still strong and active, despite the fact that Poland as a country did not exist on any map. In the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century many Polish associations were actively preserving Polish heritage, including archival materials (e.g. Gałkowski, Kurjata and KrajewskaTartakowska, 1994, 40–6). I am convinced that such endeavours could also be described as ‘community archives’, because they were independent, led by individuals or non-state organizations, and collected valuable historical materials. Nevertheless, these archival initiatives which were underway before World War 1 have never been described by Polish researchers as a part of the manifestation of community archiving. Also worthy of mention here are the independent grassroots archives set up by the Polish community abroad. Some of these initiatives are over 100 years old; for instance the Polish Library of Paris (Bibliothèque polonaise de Paris), set up in 1838 by the Polish Historic and Literary Society which was founded by Poles who had fled to Paris following the November 1830 Uprising in Warsaw, or the Polish Museum in Rapperswil, Switzerland, founded in 1870 by a post-November 1830 Uprising Polish émigré, Count Władysław Plater (Czarnota, 2013, 146). These examples (the Polish War Archive from the mid-war period and archival endeavours of the 19th and early 20th century organized on Polish territory or abroad, but by Poles) suggest that the phenomenon of independent archiving is deep rooted in Polish archival reality. But this does not negate the fact that the truly significant increase in community archives occurred in the final decade of the 20th century. The end of 1989 and beginning of 1990 was a crucial moment, when many grassroots archival initiatives came into existence or legalized their activity after years of acting under cover. Another turning point occurred about 15 years later, when the

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democratization of technology, coupled with access to the internet, facilitated the rise of community archiving.

Reading the history of Polish community archiving through Pierre Nora’s lens

Polish community archives are wide ranging. They document local or national history, the whole of the 20th century or just a small part of it, or even the present time; they focus on every aspect of the past, or on only a small fragment of it. They may focus on various topics, but one topic is guaranteed: many of them document the history of World War 2 and the anti-communist opposition. They are evidence of the Polish fight against occupying forces, of self-organization against the Poles’ own country ruled by foreign parties. The theories of the eminent French historian, Pierre Nora, suggest motivations for developing such community archives. Nora posits that we are experiencing an ‘upsurge in memory’. He lists symptoms of this state: criticism of official versions of history and recovery of areas of history previously

repressed; demands for signs of a past that had been confiscated or suppressed;

growing interest in ‘roots’ and genealogical research; all kinds of commemorative

events and new museums; renewed sensitivity to the holding and opening of

archives for public consultation; and growing attachment to what in the English-

speaking world is called ‘heritage’ and in France ‘patrimoine’.

(Nora, 2002, 1)

Pierre Nora calls the phenomenon ‘memorialism’ or ‘the age of commemoration’ and believes that it started in France, followed by Eastern Europe’s ‘recovery of memory’ after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union; he claims that the phenomenon occurred also after the fall of the dictatorships in Latin America and at the end of the apartheid era in South Africa (Nora, 2002, 1). Nora proposes that memorialism corresponds with the so-called acceleration of history – a phenomenon first put forward by Daniel Halévy (Nora, 2002, 4). Paradoxically, one thing that at present is the most constant is change, ‘an increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that is gone for good’ (Nora, 1989, 7). As a result of these continually faster and farreaching changes, the past is more uncertain than ever before. The future is also vague and impossible to anticipate. We do not know what future

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generations will need to know about us, when we will be only part of a past which can be explored only through ‘vestiges’. As a result, we feel ‘an obligation to stockpile’, to record our world in a way which Nora refers to as ‘pious and indiscriminate’ (Nora, 2002, 4). We feel distanced from the future but, what is even more significant, we are cut off from the past. ‘We no longer inhabit that past, we only commune with it through vestiges [...] We are no longer on very good terms with the past. We can only recover it by reconstructing it in monumental detail with the aid of documents and archives’ (Nora, 2002, 4–5). Pierre Nora regards the increased creation of memory institutions, including archives, as an outcome of the acceleration of history. Pierre Nora thinks that our memory is, above all, archival, and relies on the materiality of the sources. He thinks that contemporary societies are affected by the obsession with the archive that consists of ‘attempting at once the complete conservation of the present as well as the total preservation of the past’ (Nora, 1989, 13). This materialization of memory results in massive creation of archives: No society has ever produced archives as deliberately as our own, not only by

volume, not only by new technical means of reproduction and preservation, but

also by its superstitious esteem, by its veneration of the trace. Even as traditional

memory disappears, we feel obliged assiduously to collect remains, testimonies,

documents, images, speeches, any visible signs of what has been, as if this

burgeoning dossier were to be called upon to furnish some proof to who knows what tribunal of history.

(Nora, 1989, 13–14)

The French historian also points out that in the classical period there were three main producers of archives (the state, the Church and the great families), but in the present day everyone feels obliged to document their own life and experience; this applies to ‘not only the most minor historical actor but also his witnesses, his spouse, and his doctor. The less extraordinary the testimony, the more aptly it seems to illustrate the average mentality’ (Nora, 1989, 14). This can easily be related to community archives and the fact that many of them engage in or create oral history projects focused on recording so-called ordinary people, and not presidents, well known professors or eminent artists. An example of such an initiative in Poland is the Digital Archive of Łódź Citizens ‘Miastograf’ (the name alludes to describing the city). This independent endeavour, led by the Topografie Association, documents the city of Łódź by collecting postcards, photographs and oral histories from residents.

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Pierre Nora also formulates the concept of the democratization of history. He calls it ‘a marked emancipatory trend among peoples, ethnic groups and even certain classes of individual in the world today’, which is connected with the emancipation of different minorities ‘for whom rehabilitating their past is part and parcel of reaffirming their identity’ (Nora, 2002, 5). On account of that, Pierre Nora brings up the issue of decolonization and proposes three distinct types. The first type is the international decolonization which causes the creation or regaining of memory and stirs the consciousness of societies which had been repressed by colonialism. The second type is the domestic decolonization of minorities (sexual, social, provincial or religious), that can be seen in classic Western societies. By ‘declaring their own memory’, minorities may, on the one hand, win popular acclaim from the rest of society (the majority), or, on the other hand, stress their otherness. The third type of decolonization is a phenomenon occurring in states that experienced 20thcentury totalitarianisms and dictatorships – in Russia, in Central-East Europe and the Balkans, and in Latin America and Africa. This type of decolonization was called by Nora the ideological decolonization, and it is connected with the fact that freed nations regain their old traditions and memory, which were forbidden, destroyed or manipulated by regimes that offered only an official state memory (Nora, 2002, 5–6). In Poland examples of community archives created as a result of the domestic decolonization are the Archive of Polish Armenians, the Romani Historical Institute and the Association Ola-Archive, that is, the National Feminist Lesbian Archive. A consequence of the ideological decolonization is the creation of the KARTA Centre, especially its actions before legitimization, when the archive’s staff collected materials concerning the so-called ‘eastern’ history, which were forbidden by the state – mainly reminiscences of Poles repressed in the USSR, but also materials about the anti-communist opposition in the Polish People’s Republic.

Conclusion

There are at least three levels of interest which researchers may have in studying Polish community archives. Firstly, researchers (mostly historians, but also other professionals such as journalists) may be interested in source materials collected and stored by such initiatives and, more precisely, in the information they contain. In numerous cases these materials are unique and historically valuable and cover many different research topics, like family history, local history, the history of anti-communist opposition, the Holocaust

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and, more generally, World War 2, the 1989/90 transformation, the history of Polish music, student associations, sport and many more. Secondly, community archives are a promising subject for researchers in archival science not only because of the information they store, but also due to their features as archives. How do they collect their materials? Do they select them? What are their criteria? How are these materials arranged and described – according to official guidelines given by archives or museums or, more intuitively, relying on personal experience, knowledge of the archive and instinct? All these questions, and many others, can be answered if we look beyond the information contained in collections kept by community archives. Thirdly, community archives can be studied from the broader perspective of the culture of memory. A researcher must then look for reasons for creating independent archiving endeavours. Answering these questions might also provide insight into the current state of social attitudes to history and to the past. There is an endless variety of community archives in Poland. After the digital turn, when technical means such as computers, cameras and voice recorders became frequently used, the numbers of such grassroots documenting initiatives increased significantly. But Poland has traditions of community archiving that are much older than personal computers or the internet, and they date back to 1915 or even earlier. Now in Poland there are several hundred community archives. There are archives that are big and influential, but also many small and low profile initiatives. They are all worthwhile studying, not only because of their holdings, but also because of their organization and the reasons for creating them. After the 1989/90 turn, this kind of citizen activity was an attempt to regain the ‘true history’ that had been possessed and manipulated by the communists; during the period of the Polish People’s Republic it was also a form of resistance to the existing authorities. Thus, I strongly believe that there is a reason for archival activism, and this reason can in some cases be an even more interesting object of research than the archival materials collected by such projects.

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CHAPTER 11

Reflecting on practice: artists’ experiences in the archives

I

sian Vaughan

T IS NOW MORE than a decade since attention was drawn to the presence of

a distinct archival impulse in contemporary art (Foster, 2004). This chapter examines how the practices of the archive and archiving have been encountered and reframed by contemporary artists. As well as the artistic practice there is a growing body of literature in which it is receiving critical attention. However, as Breakell (2011) notes, the majority of publications on art and archives tend to focus on the artists and critical theorists and do not include writings by archivists. The example she gives is The Archive (Merewether, 2006), a compilation of texts on the subject by 30 different authors, not one of whom is an archive professional (Breakell, 2011, 35). This chapter explores what can be learned from reflecting on artists’ practice with archives from a perspective that combines within and without the archival field. It explores the theorizing of archives through practice by artists via one particular thread of artists’ engagement with archives – artists’ experiences with archives where the subject matter itself is art. The artist-in-residency model is examined through Bob and Roberta Smith at the Epstein Archive at The New Art Gallery Walsall. The commission was to reawaken an archive and the project also set out to explicitly explore new ways of collaborating between an artist and an archivist. What, if indeed anything, can be learned in terms of theory and practice by professional archivists from such creative artistic activations of the archives? Brixton Calling! was a collaborative, participatory project to explore and archive the history of Brixton Art Gallery and Artists’ Collective in London in the 1980s, initiated by former members of the Collective. The self-conscious mediation of legacy through archive creation exhibited in the Brixton Calling! project can be seen as symptomatic of a wider and cultural archival consciousness.

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Using as a lens the particular and self-referential perspective of artists on archives of art practice, can we learn more about the wider archival trend towards participatory practice?

The archival impulse in contemporary art

Over a decade ago, prominent art critic and historian Hal Foster drew attention to the presence of a distinct archival impulse in contemporary art as artists sought to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present by reorganizing bodies of alternative knowledge or counter-memory (Foster, 2004). As Foster admitted, contemporary artists are of course not the first to engage with archives and the archival as the conceptual basis of their work. In The Big Archive Sven Spieker (2008) traces the engagement of artists with archives and the archival from the late 19th century through to the early 21st century, referencing Alexander Rodchenko, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Susan Hillier and others. The engagement of artists with archives thus has an impressive pedigree. Contemporary artists’ explorations of new ways of looking at the archive have highlighted the significance given to the archive, whether official, collective or personal, as the means by which historical knowledge and memory are collected, stored and recovered (Merewether, 2006). At the same time, artists have demonstrated both a creative ambivalence towards, and an informed critique of, notions of authenticity and authority. Jamie Shovlin’s art installations are just one illustration of the creative potential and persuasive power of the display of fictive archives in works such as Naomi V. Jellish (2004), an archive of drawings and documents by a supposedly missing teenager. As the archival continues to be engaged with by contemporary artists, their art has encompassed practices of archive construction, archaeological investigation, recordkeeping, the use and reuse of archived materials (van Alphen, 2014). As Enwezor states in his catalogue essay for Archive Fever, the 2008 exhibition at the International Centre of Photography in New York: Artists interrogate the self-evidentiary claims of the archive by reading it against

the grain. This interrogation may take aim at the structural and functional

principles underlying the use of the archival document, or it may result in the

creation of another archival structure as a means of establishing an

archaeological relationship to history, evidence, information, and data that will

give rise to its own interpretive categories.

(2008, 18)

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As the above suggests, artists undoubtedly engage with archives and the archival differently to our more traditional users such as historians, family historians and genealogists. In comparison, artists see archives differently, questioning what can be archived, what the archive is and can be and how it can be used. Artists are of course not unique in this. Parallel developments are also focusing attention on these questions, including the archival turn in other disciplines (Buchanan, 2011) and within the archival field itself, partly in response to the development of both community archives (Flinn and Stevens, 2009) and archival activism (Vukliš and Gilliland, 2016), even archival banditry (Harris, 2015). Perhaps artists are not strictly unique in their approach; however, the expectation that artists will bring divergent thinking and new approaches to archives means that they are well placed to make ‘an engagement, an interruption in a settled field’ (Hall, 2001, 92, italics in original).

The artist-in-residency model at the Epstein Archive

Perhaps the most common approach to using creative methods and artists to engage wider audiences of non-traditional users with archive collections is the artist-in-residency model (Buchanan, 2011, 50–1). An artist is invited in to engage creatively with an archive over a period of time and to then exhibit or perform the results of their engagement, publicly making visible the collection(s) and repository. The expectation is that an artist will bring an alternative and creative perspective and, by looking at the collection and archival practices differently, will activate and enliven them (Breakell, 2015, 2). For example, in the inaugural artist-in-residency programme at the City of Portland Archives and Records Center in the USA 2013–14, studied by Carbone, the motivation of the archivist is quoted as ‘to view the archives through a different lens’ (2015, 33). The example discussed here situates this creative engagement with archives as an artist engaging with another artist’s archive and in a municipal art gallery, rather than in a traditional archival setting. From 2009 to 2011, Bob and Roberta Smith (also known as Patrick Brill) was artist-in-residence with the Epstein Archive, a large archive about the life and work of sculptor Jacob Epstein (1880–1959), housed at The New Art Gallery Walsall in the West Midlands region of the UK. It was funded as part of a New Ways of Curating initiative from Arts Council England and the then MLA (Museums Libraries and Archives Council) for England. New Ways of Curating was a programme commissioned to run long-term projects between museums, archives and artists to explore how their collaborative activity

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could broaden, deepen and diversify audiences. In Walsall, the artists were commissioned to reawaken the Epstein Archive, and the project also set out to explicitly explore new ways of collaborating between an artist and an archivist. Strictly speaking, in Walsall the Epstein Archive that the project focused on was only part of the New Art Gallery’s significant Epstein collections and is officially titled the Beth Lipkin Archive (being named after the last person who owned the collection before its acquisition). It is primarily a paper records archive of material kept by the second wife of the famous sculptor and contains correspondence between Jacob Epstein and his family, buyers and galleries as well as sketches and photographs. Kathleen Garman was Epstein’s mistress for 30 years and bore him three children before they finally married eight years after the death of his first wife. It was an unusual family set-up; Epstein maintained two houses and two families, with his first wife raising, as her own, three of his children from other, previous extra-marital affairs. Although he was present in their lives, Kathleen’s children were not told he was their father until they were adults and he did not publicly acknowledge them even then, so as to avoid scandal. The archive is the residue of this complex personal family history and Epstein’s career as an artist. The New Art Gallery Walsall only obtained the archive in the late 1990s and formally purchased it in 2006. The New Ways of Curating project was a source of project funding to employ an artist to activate the archive, and also the only source of funding to employ an archivist to catalogue it. The selected artist, Bob and Roberta Smith, has a national and international profile. He is known for artwork that incorporates text as brightly coloured painted lettering and offering a commentary on the subjects of art, politics or popular culture. His art is engaging and accessible to the public, whilst also being intelligent and thought provoking. In collaboration with the archivist appointed, Neil Lebeter, Bob and Roberta Smith produced a series of artworks, exhibitions, events and short films inspired by, and engaging with, the Epstein Archive. The largest resulting exhibition which Bob and Roberta Smith curated, The Life of the Mind: Love, Sorrow and Obsession (21 January to 20 March 2011) was inspired by Jacob Epstein’s sculpture of his daughter First Portrait of Esther (with long hair) (1944) in the gallery’s art collection. Buchanan has noted that outside the archival profession the ‘nature of archival identifications is a problem’ (2011, 42) and here the artist is not strictly maintaining a focus on the official archive as commissioned but is inspired instead by the museum collection. Indeed the exhibition included only a single exhibit from the

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Epstein Archive alongside the works of 28 artists; two slips of paper taken and kept from a Rolodex calendar were exhibited. Bob and Roberta Smith had interpreted the sculpture as the 15-year-old girl resisting her father’s gaze (Lebeter and Smith, 2013). In response he made a four-panel piece entitled ‘See Esther Walsall’s Mona Lisa’ which became the conceptual centrepiece of The Life of the Mind exhibition and through which he sought to expose the myth of the male artist as having special insight into the minds of women. The family history here is a tragic story, as Esther committed suicide in 1954 just 10 months after witnessing her elder brother Theo die suddenly whilst an attempt was made to transport him to a mental institution. The archival exhibit was the dates of the deaths of Theo and Esther kept from a calendar, presumably by one of their parents: archival ephemera with incredibly symbolic and emotional potency when read in the context of the family history. Rather than defending and reinforcing the boundaries between the museological, the artistic and the archival, Bob and Roberta Smith here made visible the interrelationships and connections. The New Ways of Curating project culminated in Bob and Robert Smith’s Epstein Archive Gallery (2011), which is at one and the same time a contemporary artwork and a permanent gallery dedicated to displaying the Epstein Archive to the public. The gallery combines the display of items from the Epstein Archive with the new artworks by Bob and Roberta Smith in a space decorated with wall-paintings in which Bob and Roberta Smith tries to contextualize the Archive in relation to Jacob Epstein’s tangled personal life and also in relation to the art history of the 20th century, although it is admittedly quite a personal take on the art-historical canon, as it includes amongst the artists and art movements the musicians Brian Eno and Mark E. Smith. As well as the artworks and exhibitions created by Bob and Roberta Smith, there were numerous performative elements to the project. These included an Epstein Puppet Theatre made by Bob and Roberta Smith in which shows were performed by the artist and archivist at gallery events and openings. In collaboration, the artist and archivist made over 30 short films which they uploaded to YouTube during the project, as video dairies and also as quite humorous comments on both the Epstein Archive and the archival process. The videos included films documenting the exhibition installations and theatre performances as well as films interpreting the Epstein Archive. For example in one Bob and Roberta Smith toured sites in London pertinent to Epstein’s career. In another he dressed up as Lady Epstein and wandered around Walsall dropping replicas of items in, or described in, the Epstein

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Archive, with notes on them inviting those that found them to return the item to, and thus visit, the Gallery. There are also videos commenting on the archiving process itself that are just as humorous whilst also insightful and critical. In Archiving with Bob and Roberta Smith (2009) he appears to be shredding items from the Archive that, as he explains, could be derogatory for Epstein’s reputation; Neil Lebeter then appears and assists with the shredding. In another, The Archivist Snaps (2010), the archivist when faced with yet another box of miscellaneous ephemera just throws it in the bin, walks out and goes straight across the road to a public house in despair!

Humour and critique

From an art-historical perspective there is something particular about an artist engaging with an archive of art. As Curtis explains, ‘traditionally the artist’s archive told the art historian more about the art. Now increasingly we see how an artist can use it to tell us more about the nature of the archive’ (Curtis, 2013, 8). Bob and Roberta Smith’s residency at The New Art Gallery Walsall shows that artists’ engagement with archives is as subjective and personal as the archival process itself, and also demonstrates the uses of humour and critique in reflecting upon both the archival and the personal. The construction of this project, and the underlying theme of a lot of the artistic outputs, appear to be about power and control. Issues of power and control are central to many contemporary discourses of archivalization in both art theory and practice, in which the archival can be understood as a Foucauldian ‘system of discursivity’ that establishes the possibility of what can be said (Foucault, 1972; Manoff, 2004). Referencing Derrida’s influential deconstructive analysis of authority and the archive in Archive Fever (1995), Enwezor points out that ‘artists enact the archival fantasy as well as the archontic function of the historian, translator, curator, pedagogue’ (Enwezor, 2008, 40). In this residency in the Epstein Archive, the contemporary artist is situated as central, as the archon in the position of power. Buchanan has noted that ‘as deconstructions of the archive, artistic works are often conceptually derivative with little original to say, other than to those who have not previously recognized the fragility of archival truth claims’ (Buchanan, 2011, 42). This may be the case in that the authority of the archive and objectivity of the archival process have to a large extent already been problematized widely within the archival field (e.g. Cook, 2000). However, I would counter that as well as an artist’s ability to communicate these issues to a wider public – those often still unaware of ‘the fragility’ of their assumptions about the

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archive – in this example Bob and Roberta Smith’s artistic approach can still inform an already reflective archival profession. Issues of power and authority are evident in the process by which the project was set up. The artist was appointed first. Bob and Roberta Smith was an established artist with an international reputation and signature style, but who had never before worked with an archive. The artist was then on the interview panel for the archivist post, and in many ways the selection was as much about personalities and who the artist was interested in working with as about qualifications and experience. Neil Lebeter is not a formally trained archivist (his postgraduate degree is in the political history of the mid-20th century). Lebeter admits, however, that the relationship between himself and Bob and Roberta Smith was vital to the success of the project; the key factor was not the hierarchical positioning of the relationship, it was that they were on ‘the same wavelength’’ (Lebeter and Smith, 2013, 135). The project aimed not just to animate the Epstein Archive and increasing public engagement with it, but also to explore the inter-professional collaboration of artist and archivist. Lebeter reflected: ‘I was surprised about how blurred the line between our two disciplines became at times … but I believe that an entirely appropriate line still existed. Bob and Roberta Smith has a very different way of thinking to me; it was his freedom of thought that propelled the directions our project took’ (O’Reilly and Grevatte, 2011). The Gallery published a book about the project written collaboratively by the artist and archivist and the book’s title, How to Let an Artist Rifle through Your Archive (Lebeter and Smith, 2013), again references power and control. The suggestion of letting go and permitting ‘rifling’ through original material rather than mediating access could be interpreted as a refusal and negation of the power of the archivist. However, as the archivist has to willingly surrender control, ultimately, power is both questioned and reinforced in this very act of letting. The video of both artist and archivist ‘apparently’ shredding the archive is both humorous and intended as a comment on the mediation at the heart of archival practice (ibid., 130). It makes public a reality that archive professionals know only too well; material that could be considered potentially archival is often shredded as a result of appraisal processes. As McNally acknowledges, these acts of destruction and disposal alter the status of the materials remaining in the archive ‘From this moment, all items in the collection appear to have been carefully selected when actually it’s just that they weren’t thrown away’ (McNally, 2013, 100). The humour with which Bob and Roberta Smith communicates this point is important, just as important as the emotional poignancy of his selection of a single archival exhibit in The Life of the Mind exhibition.

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The response of artists and of others to their work with archives can surface the relationship of affect and the archival. The subject of a recent special issue of Archival Science (Cifor and Gilliland, 2016), the slippery concept of affect in relation to archives is getting growing recognition. In their work on archives in human rights and post-conflict recovery, Gilliland and Caswell (2016) have foregrounded the ‘archival imaginary’ in relation to affect. The ‘archival imaginary’ for Caswell is the way that communities collectively re-imagine the future through archival interventions in representations of the past (Caswell, 2014). Extending this further, Caswell and Gilliland have identified the ‘impossible archival imaginaries’, archives desired for their lost or neverwritten records that serve political or societal need and whose imagined records ‘can function societally in ways similar to actual records because of the weight of their absence or because of their aspirational nature’ (Gilliland and Caswell, 2016, 53). Of relevance to my reflection on artists’ engagement with archives, ‘such imaginaries are archivally impossible in the sense that they will never result in actualized records in any traditional sense unless they are drawn into some kind of co-constitutive relationship with actualized records’ (ibid., 60). Bob and Roberta Smith creatively uses affect, mobilized through humour and pathos, in the artworks responding to the complexity of Epstein’s relationships with his children, and the societal norms and power dynamics which privileged the primacy of his reputation during his life and consequently formed the absences in the archive. In an admittedly more personal and intimate context than the politically charged post-conflict contexts in which Caswell and Gilliland have defined the impossible archival imaginary, Bob and Roberta Smith demonstrates how artists can reveal and combine the imagined record (found in the gaps in the archive) with the actualized, how an artwork might function as a ‘co-constitutive relationship’. The results of the project are as much about Bob and Roberta Smith as about the Epstein Archive. There is a synergy and synthesis of the two in the final gallery presentation; indeed it could be said that the very visible wallpaintings and works by Bob and Roberta Smith dominate on appearance over the archival materials displayed yet hidden within drawers and cupboards as part of the intentionally domestic-scale gallery installation. This leads to questions about the materiality and content of the gallery and the archive. To the visitor, it is not immediately apparent what is the Epstein Archive and what is Bob and Roberta Smith artwork. What is evident, and becomes more so on closer inspection of and interaction with the Epstein Archive gallery, is the sense of the personal in the stories of Epstein and his family, in Bob and Roberta Smith’s project and in the potential of an individual’s engagement

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with archives and art. Importantly, as well as the historical, the tragic and the critical, with the personalization comes humour and a sense of fun injected into the project and gallery, the foregrounding of affect in archival encounters. In the end, do these distinctions between contemporary and long-dead artist, between archive and its mediation, matter for the public engaging with the project if they are encouraged to smile as well as to think?

Artists archiving themselves in Brixton Calling!

This second example is of artists thinking differently in consciously creating, mediating and presenting their own archives, an artistic-variant of the community archives movement. Brixton Calling! was a collaborative, participatory project carried out in 2011 to explore and archive the history of Brixton Art Gallery and Artists’ Collective in London in the 1980s. It was initiated by BACA (the Brixton Art Collective Archives), a small group of artists who had been active in the Gallery. Founded in 1983 in one of London’s large, multi-ethnic residential districts, the Brixton Art Gallery gave artists the opportunity to exhibit work which at that time would not be shown elsewhere because of the issues that it tackled, or because of the artist’s race, gender or sexuality. The Gallery closed in 2005. The Brixton Calling! project was initiated to bring together artists and community groups in South London to document the history of the Gallery and to explore some of the Gallery’s collaborative artistic approaches to social and political issues to create new artworks relevant to contemporary Brixton. Between March and November 2011, local gallery 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning and artists from the Brixton Artists’ Collective led a series of community engagement projects that focused on the first 50 exhibitions held at the Gallery between 1983 and 1986. The project culminated in a final exhibition of original archive material and new artworks, and an archive being constituted, to use Hall’s terminology (2001), most of which was deposited with the Tate Archive, the pre-eminent archive repository related to British art and artists from 1900 to the present . The Artists’ Collective’s strong belief in equality of opportunity was reflected in the diversity of the exhibitions at the Brixton Art Gallery; half of the shows were organized by and for black artists and two women artists’ groups were based at Brixton Art Gallery and put on annual exhibitions. In 1980s London such exhibition opportunities were still relatively rare. A strand within Brixton Calling! explored the exhibitions by black artists at the Brixton Art Gallery in the 1980s through the creation of a fanzine BAM BAM! by

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Barby Asante with members of youth arts group the Tate Collective. Rita Keegan and Keith Piper, two artists instrumental in increasing the visibility of black artists in the 1980s, met with the group and showed some of their work. They talked about their experiences at Brixton Art Gallery. The group also did research in the Tate Archive to look at its collections relating to work by black artists during the 1980s. During the 1980s, artists at Brixton Art Gallery had made their own exhibition posters, catalogues and leaflets. This had been undoubtedly from financial necessity, but also as part of an alternative DIY-aesthetic amongst arts collectives that was itself a political statement against established institutions and the commercialization of the art market. So, in 2011 the fanzine was made by the youth group using the same methods that would have been available to the Brixton artists in the 1980s – old-fashioned copy, cut and paste techniques with a photocopier and scissors and glue. In September 1983, Brixton Art Gallery had held what was claimed as the first-ever UK open exhibition specifically selected on the basis of the artists’ being queer (that is, not conforming to a norm of heterosexuality). A strong lesbian and gay presence continued with a Gay and Lesbian Artists’ Group putting on annual exhibitions. As part of Brixton Calling! a Queer Pulse community engagement project of photography workshops reflected that photography had been a prominent component of these earlier shows. Participants in the workshops learned about composition, style and studio lighting techniques from a commercial photographer before taking photographs of each other. A number of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender) artists whose work had been shown at the Gallery in the 1980s also came to have their portraits taken, which gave participants the opportunity to talk to them about the history of lesbian and gay artists in London and elsewhere at that time. These conversations were recorded as oral histories to be added to the archive. Another strand of the project, Looking Back, Moving Forward, examined the Gallery’s involvement in the anti-apartheid movement by revisiting two of the early major exhibitions at Brixton Art Gallery, Soweto: the Patchwork of our Lives (May 1986) and Monti Wa Marumo (June 1984). Eugene Skeef, who had shown in Monti Wa Marumo, met with a group of 15- and 16-yearolds from a nearby girls’ secondary school. He talked with them about his experiences both as a young activist in apartheid South Africa and as an artist exhibiting with the Brixton Art Gallery. The schoolgirls were also taken on a visit to the Anti-Apartheid Movement archives at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Artists Barby Asante and Gary Stewart then worked with the

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schoolgirls to devise a multimedia performance based on this history. The various strands of archiving and community engagement projects were brought together in a final exhibition of original Brixton Art Gallery archive material and the new artworks in the autumn of 2011 at 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning in Brixton (Burch and Dupré, 2011). This included five ‘Archives installations’ by members of the BACA group who had led the project (Teri Bullen, Guy Burch, Françoise Dupré, Rita Keegan and Stefan Szczelkun), as well as artworks from the seven community engagement projects (only some of which have been described above). A central feature of the exhibition was an artwork that was presented as an archive itself: Françoise Dupré and Rita Keegan had collaborated on creating a collage timeline ‘archive’ of the Brixton Art Gallery in the period from 1983 to 1986.

Who and what was calling?

There are two key aspects to the artists’ engagement with archives in the Brixton Calling! project. First, there is the emphasis on activating the archive through community engagement. Community archives are frequently connected to an agenda for education for social change, whether as a resource for present and future activism or as a corrective to the absences in mainstream historical accounts (Flinn and Stevens, 2009). The Brixton Art Gallery had functioned in both of these ways during its years of existence, and it is perhaps not surprising that the ethos of activism and engagement also permeated the archive-creation project. The Brixton Calling! project was funded via Arts Council England and the Heritage Lottery Fund, and was run in conjunction with a community-focused gallery. This meant that there was also a funding imperative to focus on community engagement and not just archive creation. Whilst admittedly not all the strands have been described above, we can still see that each strand of the project had a similar trajectory. Something in the past of Brixton Art Gallery is chosen, reconstructed and reinterpreted through new artwork. This involves: research through the gathering of archive material and research in archives elsewhere; the participation of both a relevant community group from Brixton in 2011 and artists who were involved in the 1980s; also the artistic techniques and skills used in the 1980s are rediscovered and shared. It adds to our knowledge further examples of the use of archival materials in participatory art to engage different communities – examples other archive projects and archive practitioners can learn from. The second key aspect of the artists’ engagement with archives is their self-

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conscious mediation of legacy through archive creation. When speaking of the African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive in 2001, Hall noted that ‘in the absence of any sustained attention or critical dialogue within the dominant institutions of the art world, and given a systematic marginalization over the years … practitioners themselves have been obliged to act first as curators, and now as archivists’ (2001, 91). For Hall, this was a political intervention that spoke as much to the future as of the past. His description could as easily apply to the Brixton Artists Collective, practising artists who founded a gallery and became curators to create exhibition opportunities otherwise denied to them. Nearly two decades later they created their archive to add their voice and history to the more mainstream history represented by institutions such as Tate and, as part of doing so, set up engagement projects to encourage contemporary community groups to think politically about past, present and future opportunities in and through art. As Hall stated constituting an archive ‘represents the end of a certain kind of creative innocence, and the beginning of a new stage of self-consciousness, of self-reflexivity in an artistic movement’ (2001, 89). This was evident early in the project during discussions at a 2010 project-launch symposium to which artists and archivists were invited, entitled Archives and Memories (BACA, 2010). Stefan Szczelkun informed the audience that, until another former Brixton Art Gallery member, Andrew Hurman, made the Brixton 50 [http://brixton50.co.uk] online archive in 2010, ‘it existed only as a powerful memory in the hundreds of people who played an active part in it’ (BACA, 2010). As Flinn and Stevens (2009) discuss, the politics of community archives’ relationships with mainstream heritage bodies is problematic and difficult to generalize – some aspire to independence, some to working in partnership and others may entrust their collections to a mainstream institution. However, as they note, ‘at source a strong desire for autonomy may be inspired by either a distrust of or antagonism towards mainstream institutions’ (2009, 6). Szczelkun went on to comment that ‘Andrew’s archive was self-funded … and he is a bit wary about the kind of process by which this phenomena [sic] might be professionalized’ (BACA, 2010). Hurman’s reported qualms led to very open discussions at the symposium about the tensions around archiving a collective enterprise, and demonstrated clear evidence of archival consciousness around issues of legacy amongst the participating artists. It raised questions about who creates and selects the ‘official’ history of Brixton Art Gallery and what role archives and art play in this process. The Brixton Art Gallery was run by an Artists’ Collective, a continuously evolving group sharing the various roles of administrators, curators, writers and exhibiting

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artists. The Collective was also home to a number of groups with distinct identities and agendas, including Women’s Work (a women artists’ group), Black Women in View (a black women artists’ group), the Lesbian and Gay Group (an LGBT artists’ group) and Bigos (a group of artists of Polish origin). Surely there is an inherent tension in trying to officially archive and thus capture a single history of an activist and politically engaged artists’ collective and preserve it in one of the institutional legitimizers of ‘high art’ in the UK, the Tate? The assumed neutrality and therefore authority of the archive has been increasingly questioned within the archival field: ‘archival theoretical discourse is shifting from product to process, from structure to function, from archives to archiving, from the record to the recording context, from the “natural” residue or passive by-product of administration activity to the consciously constructed and actively mediated “archivalisation” of social memory’ (Cook, 2000, 3). The artists participating in the symposium demonstrated that awareness of ‘archivalisation’ as a constructed and mediated process is extending beyond archivists to our depositors. As one participating artist concluded: I understand the slight concerns that some people have about all these individual

voices and individual archives and about getting them into one institution … at

the start of the project when we’re talking about these issues, continuing the

discussion about what we’ll archive, when we’ll archive it, how you archive it

and those discussions will become part of the archive itself which I think is a

really interesting approach to take.

(BACA, 2010)

This avowed intention at the start of the project is a really interesting facet of the Brixton Calling! project, although we might question the extent to which it was successfully realized in the final project and the archives deposited afterwards. The Brixton Calling! project is complex as well as creative. It is simultaneously: an archiving project aiming to collect and catalogue original materials; a history project using archive materials to write an official arthistory and socio-cultural history of Brixton Art Gallery; and a contemporary art project that is part of an archival impulse in which the concept of archive serves as a catalyst for art that speaks to now and possible futures. The BACA group of artists were themselves self-selecting: what we might question is the relevance and impact of this on the eventual archive. In discussing archival

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activism, Vukliš and Gilliland note a danger here: ‘just as “neutral” selfperception in “mainstream” archives may produce a socially unrepresentative record, community archives’ activist drive could also potentially create a record with exclusively self-celebratory and romantic narration’ (2016, 19). The Brixton Calling! project focused on just the years 1983 to 1986, not the entirety of the period up to 2005. The impression given is that this prioritization is hierarchical, suggesting that the most important and/or different exhibitions and activities took place then and that, by implication, what came after was somehow lesser. At the symposium, the explanation given was political, ‘1983 is when Margaret Thatcher was re-elected and 1986 is when the GLC [Greater London Council] was abolished, so they are very important political dates’ (BACA, 2010). Admittedly ‘politics is the messy warp and woof of the archive’, as Harris so eloquently summarized (2011, 118). The period focused on also reflects the period in which the BACA group of artists were themselves more active in the Brixton Art Gallery. So, to some extent, and unavoidably, their personal history overlays and thus obscures the Gallery’s history. It is a conscious history making and the archival materials were sourced, selected and created to support that history and to legitimize it through deposit in the Tate (with the reputational capital that accrues for the artists). This is not to underplay the significance of Brixton Art Gallery in the 1980s, which did facilitate some ground-breaking work in terms of exhibiting art that at the time was marginalized elsewhere. There was no official archival record of Brixton Art Gallery before this project. The individuals working in the Collective and at the Gallery changed over time, and people took things (papers, posters, photographs, etc.) with them as they moved on, and when Brixton Art Gallery closed in 2005 nothing was left. The Gallery’s activities also left little trace in other archival records of the period, as an alternative collective arts space. ‘Brixton Art Gallery, however, existed in an oral realm, by which I mean its activity was little written about and rarely produced any publications other than slim photocopied catalogues. Its heady influence was limited to the people who had direct contact with the collective and the gallery’ (Szczelkun, 2012). So the original archive materials deposited at Tate and elsewhere were sourced from the attics and garages of different people. Original and recreated materials reflect the activist nature of the Gallery’s operation, much as a traditional archival accumulation would. However, they consist primarily of flyers, posters, slides and photographs, personal testimonies and works of art, material more commonly thought of as ephemeral than archival. Again this is a commonality of community archives

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(Flinn and Stevens, 2009; Flinn, 2011). Just as the multiple strands of the Brixton Calling! project reflected the multiple agendas of the artists and exhibitions in 1983–6, the archival matter collected and created was deposited and even duplicated in a number of formal archival deposits with not only Tate but also the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths, University of London; the local authority archives covering the Brixton district, Lambeth Archives; and the Hall Carpenter Archives, a specialist collection of LGBT archives housed at the London School of Economics and Social Sciences. Even at Tate, two separate collections were eventually deposited: a Brixton Calling! collection and one for Bigos, the Polish artists’ group. These were deposited as part of collections that also document the project that collected them, the BACA group artists attempting to evidence and foreground their conscious archivalization. As admitted at the symposium, ‘a huge number of artists that have showed in that space in those three or four years and that is a very different sort of phenomenon to what we were used to in the art world and obviously, as you’ve seen, we’re representing a very partial picture of that today’ (BACA, 2010). In many ways the BACA artists foregrounded and responded to the tensions around creating the archive and official history of an activist collective by at the same time creating multiple and alternative archives. It remains to be seen whether the diversity and plurality of these archives can remain interrelated when held in different institutions, whether dispersal dilutes and eventually erases the complexity of the artists’ self-conscious archivalization.

Lessons from practice

The contention here is that reflecting on the perspectives and experiences of artists in the archives might inform professional archiving practices and the theorization of engagement with archives more widely. The particular focus has been on artists and archives of art because, to quote the editorial of a special issue of Archives and Records on archives in the visual arts: ‘The visual arts community is particularly and increasingly engaged, not only in its awareness of the significance of the archives their activities generate, and the wish to ensure their survival and accessibility, but also in creative approaches to “archiving” and the use of the archive as a site of creative practice’ (Breakell, 2015, 1). Both of the projects discussed are ones that I had early involvement in, and my own position reflects and situates the argument as both within and without the archival field. Trained as an art historian and with no formal archival training, I have nevertheless been employed as

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Keeper of Art and Design Archives for over 15 years with the art school of a British university. My own experience in this context is of continually navigating and blurring the boundaries of insider-outsider, between art practice and its history, between the archival field and the artistic. It was for my archival experience, professional contacts and perceived expertise that I was invited into both projects: in one meeting with and advising the project archivist in the early stages of cataloguing; in the other facilitating the introduction of the artists to staff at Tate Archives and participating in a symposium during the very early stages of the project. I did not sustain my involvement with either project, so in relation to them I am again an insideroutsider. Artists working with archives of art are also simultaneously insiders and outsiders: insiders as part of the art worlds whose records they can read, and outsiders both as non-archival professionals and as non-traditional users. Considering the liminal position of insider-outsiders can prompt reflection not only within and without, but also on boundaries themselves. Reflecting on just these two projects reveals that artists are in many ways just like other users of archives; they are interested in stories. Artists have multi-layered approaches that can engage different audiences. Brixton Calling! is exemplary in showing how a participatory arts approach can integrate local history and facilitate local communities’ engagement with a particular archive, and also with other archives and wider archival contexts. Similarly in Walsall, the Epstein Archive was activated not only within the New Art Gallery and its surrounding urban environment but also through the use of videos and YouTube linked with the London environment in which the archive had originally been created and a potentially global reach. Bob and Roberta Smith’s residency raises different questions about contemporary artists’ practice with archives. It is engaging, but not community engagement in the same way as at Brixton. As Neil Lebeter concluded, ‘contemporary artists are not all connected to a single brain, there are many different types of artists and they are not all frightening or impossible to work with. For what we wanted to do, there will have been some unsuitable artists out there, but that would be true of any job anywhere’ (Lebeter and Smith, 2013, 131). Reflecting on artists’ engagement is important; as Breakell asserted in her editorial, it is important that these new types of users and uses of archives ‘meet with archivists who are alive to issues pertinent to their field and their approach’ (Breakell, 2015, 3.) We also have to be alive to whether current practices of cataloguing facilitate the kind of subjective and nonlinear approaches that creative practitioners may take to the archive (Breakell, 2015; Magee and Waters, 2011). As well as being aware of differences in approach

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to archives, it is also an issue of trust. The artist-residency in Walsall provides an alternative model to counter Breakell’s assertion that if we wish to explore a collaboration with a partner organization as a means of

securing funds for cataloguing, yet the partner’s interest in creative re-

presentations of archival material may bear little relation to the shape and

structure of the catalogued archive, or the process to produce it … from the

archivist’s point of view it is essential to have cataloguing completed before such

creative representations can take place.

(Breakell, 2011, 33)

In Walsall, the Gallery management concluded: ‘if there is anything that we have learnt from working with Bob over the two years, it is that we could trust him, both in the day-to-day care of the archive and also when it came to dealing with some subjects with a delicate touch’ (Lebeter and Smith, 2013, 130). Perhaps rather than seeing the professional archival activity hierarchically as a precursor to any creative engagement, we could be more open to collaboration and representation throughout the process and question the implied assumption that artists would necessarily corrupt cataloguing through their engagement with the archive. We could recognize the potential of inviting the artist as an insider-outsider, not just positioning them as an outsider to the professional archival process. That is not to say that this approach to collaboration would always be possible, or easy. It would depend inevitably on artist and archivist being able to negotiate the boundaries, being on the same wavelength, as Lebeter put it. The artist-residency in the Epstein Archive demonstrates, though, that it is possible. Bob and Roberta Smith’s artistic approach also highlights that engaging with archives can be fun and creative without compromising historical or critical readings of the archive materials or their professional care. The self-conscious mediation of legacy through archive creation exhibited in Brixton Calling! is symptomatic of a wider and cultural archival consciousness that archivists increasingly negotiate. In the UK there is growing interest in archiving recent – that is, contemporary and late 20thcentury – arts practice. The BACA group is representative of a generation of artists who are reaching an age when questions of legacy naturally come to the fore and for whom the archival impulse has prompted active consideration of the rehoming of personal archives and to which the archival profession is responding (The National Archives, n.d.). Whilst the community archive approach of Brixton Calling! may not be unique, it demonstrates the

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tensions that can exist in such circumstances, where artists are simultaneously the subject, object and interpreters of the archive. It also evidences the expanded concepts of archival materials – ephemeral, duplicated, created and re-created – that such community archives embrace. Flinn has recognized this alternative materiality of community archives in questioning the extent to which the community archive movement has challenged the archival field: Notions of permanency, uniqueness, recordness and chains of custody are

ultimately less important than significance and context. In this, the challenge to

archival theory posed by individual and community archives is neither unique

nor particularly innovative. Rather, it is part of a series of challenges … to narrow

business and administrative-fixated thinking which seeks to close down the

possibilities of broader, less defined and more inclusive heritages.

(2011, 165)

Particularly through the Archives and Memories symposium, and the online publication of its full transcript, a key facet of the Brixton Calling! project has been the BACA group’s attempt to question, evidence and foreground its conscious archivalization, problematizing and making visible of the challenges of broadening and constituting a more inclusive artistic community heritage.

Conclusion

Artists’ engagement with archives may not reveal that different a perspective on the nature of archives and the archival than is already evident in much of contemporary archival discourse and archival practice through, for example, the community archives movement. Surfacing the questioning of the authority and material nature of the archive is not novel. However, that is not to completely dismiss the disruptive potential of artists and artworks that contribute to these debates both inside and outside the archival field. The language used in relation to commissioning artists to work with archives, that of reawakening and reanimating, is reminiscent of archival discourse on the ‘living archive’ (Hall, 2001; Ketelaar, 2009), in which an archive is inert until it is brought alive through use and opened up to possibilities. This terminology of living and waking, I would argue, also brings an expectation of action, of interaction, of effect and affect. Whether users or non-users of archives, the public expect artists in the archive to see things differently and to do something different, as indeed do we as archivists. It is this very

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assumption of difference and disruption that can function as an anticipation and expectation of affect in an encounter with art and archives. Artists are uniquely positioned to exploit and make visible the imaginary, and in doing so surface the relationship between the real and the imaginary. This is pertinent, given recent calls for the archival professional to acknowledge both affect and the imaginary (Cifor, 2016; Gilliland and Caswell, 2016). As Gilliland and Caswell argue, this will ‘necessitate an implemented as well as a theoretical openness to alternate constructions of the nature and authoritativeness of the record and explicit consideration of the nature and role of affect’ in a ‘conceptual move [that] opens up archival thinking to nondominant and pluralist epistemologies’ (2016, 71). Artists’ multiple and alternative readings and constructions of the archive and the affect of both its imaginary and its actualized records are one example of the potential of such an openness. In reflecting on artists’ engagement with archives, perhaps one of the key influences that the archival profession can take from artists’ practice is a reminder of the foregrounding of questions rather than answers. Artists can remind and encourage archivists to think differently.

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Index

ACA see Association of Canadian Archivists Anti-Apartheid Movement artists’ experiences with archives 220–1 Brixton Calling! project 220–1 archival descriptions, categorizing 55–6 archival documentation historical perspective 7 Leopold von Ranke 7 ‘archival imaginary’, artists’ experiences with archives 218 archival impulse, contemporary art 212–13 archival silence 63–77 addressing the gaps 73–5 black-box technology 67–70, 74 computational processes 67–8, 74 conceptual frames 75–7 defining 63, 64–6 deletion 70–3 deletionist art 71–2 Deletionist bookmarklet 71 digital humanities 76–7 digital technologies 63 electronic waste 69 erasure 70–3 Google data centre 68 Google searches 67 historians’ perspective 65, 70, 73–5 material factors 65–6 media archaeology 66–7 military facilities 69 science studies scholars’ perspective 65–6 Simon, Taryn 74–5 strategies 75–7 technologies 63, 65–70 types 64 archival turn 6 defining 3 historical perspective 7–8 turn and (re)turn 7–12 archives vs. collections 9 data modelling 50–6 defining 3 feminist 4–6 personal 4–6

selling 4–6 Archives Unleashed workshops 76–7 archiving different views 10–11 vs. recordkeeping 6 archivists 13–15 documentary memory 112–15 Giunta dei confini archives 112–15 impartiality 83 reasons for understanding scholarly archives 14–15 artist-in-residency model, Epstein Archive 213–16 artists’ experiences with archives 211–29 Anti-Apartheid Movement 220–21 ‘archival imaginary’ 218 Brixton Calling! project 219–5, 226, 227–8 community engagement 221–5, 228 contemporary art 212–13 critique 216–19 Epstein Archive 213–19, 226 humour 216–19 legacy mediation 221–3, 227–8 lessons from practice 225–8 LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender) artists 220 artwork, archive as 10 Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA), Code of Ethics 156–7

BCA see Bureau of Canadian Archivists Bearman, David, data modelling 47, 57–8 black-box technology, archival silence 67–70, 74 Bopp, Franz, methodologies 28–9 Brixton Calling! project Anti-Apartheid Movement 220–1 artists’ experiences with archives 219–25, 226, 227–8 community engagement 221–5 legacy mediation 227–8 LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender) artists 220 Brown, Vincent, computational processes 74 Bruscky, Paul 5

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Bureau of Canadian Archivists (BCA), data modelling 46

Canadian indigenous peoples see Indigenous peoples, Canada case study see Giunta dei confini archives; Indigenous peoples, Canada Caswell, Michelle, deletionist art 72–3 Codes of Ethics Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) 156–7 International Council on Archives (ICA) 156 Western archival model 156–7 collections, vs. archives 9 commonalities, archiving 9–10 ‘communities of memory’, archives as 16 community engagement artists’ experiences with archives 221–5, 228 Brixton Calling! project 221–5 computational processes archival silence 67–8, 74 Brown, Vincent 74 conceptual frames, archival silence 75–7 constructs archives 10–12 records 11–12 contemporary art archival impulse 212–13 artists’ experiences with archives 212–13 photography 212–13 context, importance 22 Cook, Michael 51–3, 55 Craze, Joshua, deletionist art 72 Cuvier, Georges, methodologies 22, 25–8, 33, 34–5, 37

Darwinian model 35–6 data modelling 41–59 archival content and encoding/structure standard 48, 49 archives 50–6 basic model 44, 45 Bearman, David 47, 57–8 Bureau of Canadian Archivists (BCA) 46 Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) 45–46, 50 defining 43–4 Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) 48, 50, 51, 52 historical perspective 42 International Council on Archives’ Experts Group on Archival Description (ICA-EGAD) 41, 56–7 Manual of Archival Description (MAD) 47

model of the levels of arrangement of a fonds 48, 49 origins 44–50 schemata 44 Society of American Archivists (SAA) 46, 47 terminology 43–4 theories 42–3 uniformity vs. diversity 42 decolonization of archives 147 decolonization types, Poland, community archiving 205 deconstructionism 9 deletion, archival silence 70–3 deletionist art archival silence 71–2 Caswell, Michelle 72–3 Craze, Joshua 72 Foer, Jonathan Safran 72 Holzer, Jenny 72 Deletionist bookmarklet, archival silence 71 different views, archiving 10–11 digital humanities archival silence 76–7 Archives Unleashed workshops 76–7 documentary memory, Giunta dei confini archives 112–15 domestic decolonization, Poland, community archiving 205 Dutch East Indies government records 127– 45 Chatelin, L. N. H. A. 134–6 Dagblad van Nederlandsch Indië 136–7 enforcement of the royal decree 139–40 governmental dilemma 138–9 implications of the royal decree 132–4, 140–2 newspaper reaction to the royal decree 130–2 royal decree 128–34, 140–2 Sumatra Courant 134–6 transparency 128

electronic waste, archival silence 69 Epstein Archive artist-in-residency model 213–16 artists’ experiences with archives 213–19, 226 erasure, archival silence 70–3 ethics Codes of Ethics 156–7 ethical space 164–5 need for new approaches 163–5 Experts Group on Archival Description (EGAD), data modelling 41, 56–7

feminist archives 4–6 Foer, Jonathan Safran, deletionist art 72

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INDEX FRAD see Functional Requirements for Authority Data FRBR see Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records FRSAD see Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) 49 Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), data modelling 48, 50, 51, 52 Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD) 49 Giunta dei confini archives 107–24 archival duties 109–10 archives, early modern 107–9 archivists 112–15 chancellor’s role 111–12 changing needs 120–4 changing uses 120–4 composition 110–11 cultural use 118–21 documentary memory 112–15 indexes 113, 114, 116, 117–18 new method of arrangement 115–16 physical vs. logical ordering 115–18 reorganization 111–13 self-documentation memory 113–15 series 110–11 territorial control in early modern Italy 107–9 virtual arrangement 116–18 Google data centre, archival silence 68 Google searches archival silence 67 technologies 67 government records, state’s ownership and control see Dutch East Indies government records

historians’ perspective, archival silence 65, 70, 73–5 historical perspective archival documentation 7 archival turn 7–8 Holzer, Jenny, deletionist art 72

ICA see International Council on Archives ICA-EGAD see International Council on Archives’ Experts Group on Archival Description ideological decolonization, Poland, community archiving 205 Indigenous peoples, Canada 147–68 archival ethics 157–8 case study 153–66 Columbia Coast Mission (CCM) 153–4

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denial of request 155–6 feast system 150–1 Indigenous rights 157–8 knowledge systems disruption 149–53 land dispossession 151–3 photographs, archiving 154–63 potlatch 150–1 relationships 165–6 residential schools system 151 statistics 147–9 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 149, 150 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) 158–60 Western archival model and issues 156–7 International Council on Archives’ Experts Group on Archival Description (ICAEGAD), data modelling 41, 56–7 International Council on Archives (ICA) archival content and encoding/structure standard 48, 49 Code of Ethics 156 defining records 12 model of the levels of arrangement of a fonds 48, 49 international decolonization, Poland, community archiving 205

legacy mediation artists’ experiences with archives 221–3, 227–8 Brixton Calling! project 227–8 LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender) artists artists’ experiences with archives 220 Brixton Calling! project 220

MAD see Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives Malawi, recordkeeping/archiving 173–91 British administration 178–85 British Civil Service filing systems 179 colonial period and recordkeeping 178–85 departmental recordkeeping 179–81 District Commissioners (DCs) 182–4 District Notebooks 177–8 government atrocities 189–90 justice, pre-colonial 176 Malawi Public Service Regulations (MPSR) 185–6 National Archives 186–9 National Compensation Tribunal (NCT) 189–90 Native Authorities 184–5 Nyasaland Protectorate General Orders 185–6 orally transmitted ‘recordkeeping’ 174–8

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ENGaGING wITH REcORDs aND aRcHIVEs

post-colonial democratic era and the archive 189–90 post-colonial one-party state and recordkeeping 185–9 pre-colonial administration and ‘record’ keeping 174–8 Provincial Commissioners (PCs) 181–2 recordkeeping in the districts 182–4 recordkeeping in the provinces 181–2 Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives 21, 23–4 Manual of Archival Description (MAD), data modelling 47 material factors, archival silence 65–6 meanings, records 12 media archaeology, archival silence 66–7 Melville, Herman 17 metaphors, uses 22–7 military facilities, archival silence 69

Native American Archives Roundtable 161 native Americans Native American Archives Roundtable 161 Protocols for Native American Archival Materials 160–3, 165–6 ownership and control of government records see Dutch East Indies government records

personal archives 4–6 photography archival impulse 212–13 archiving 8, 154–63 Poland, community archiving 195–206 20th-century history 196–8 anti-communist opposition archives 197–8 archival activism 201–3 community archiving 195–206 decolonization types 205 domestic decolonization 205 General Elżbieta Zawacka Foundation 200 ideological decolonization 205 international decolonization 205 KARTA Centre Foundation 198–9 ‘memorialism’ 203–4 Nora, Pierre 203–5 Polish War Archive 201–3 World War 2 archives 197 Power, Eileen 89–90

Protocols for Native American Archival Materials 160–3, 165–6

recordkeeping, vs. archiving 6 records defining 12 meanings 12 Romantic Pensionnaires, methodologies 31

SAA see Society of American Archivists Salem witch trials 11, 16 Schlegel, Friedrich, methodologies 28 Schleicher, August, methodologies 28–30 science studies scholars’ perspective, archival silence 65–6 selling archives 4–6 Semper, Gottfried, methodologies 30–1 Simon, Taryn, archival silence 74–5 skeleton metaphor 23–7 ‘slavery’s archive’ 7–8, 11 Society of American Archivists (SAA) Core Values 156 data modelling 46, 47 Native American Archives Roundtable 161 strategies, archival silence 75–7

technologies archival silence 63, 65–70 black-box technology 67–70 computational processes 67–8 Google searches 67 Theimer, Kate, archival silence 64 transparency Dutch East Indies government records 128 history 128 turn and (re)turn, archival turn 7–12

United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) 158–60

Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel, methodologies 31–4 von Ranke, Leopold, archival documentation 7

Weber, Lisa 50–1, 53–5 Western archival model and issues 156–7 women archivists Stokes, Ethel 89, 91–2, 96–9 Wake, Joan 89, 91–6 womens’ voices in the public sphere 84–6

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